[ 2 November 1903 ] Following an attack by the Kotaibis on a British military outpost at Sulaik in Aden (today part of Yemen), an expedition composed of 600 soldiers of the Royal Hampshire Regiment and the 23rd Bombay Rifles under the command of General Maitland set off in to the hills on 30th October…
7 September 1963 On 7 September 1963, there was a secret meeting in Aden’s Crescent Hotel, between Colonel David Stirling, who had founded the Special Air Service (SAS) in 1942, Peter de la Billiere, a junior intelligence officer, Tony Boyle, a junior RAF officer, and Ahmed al-Shami, the foreign minister of the former Yemeni royalist…
18 December 1965 On 18 December 1965, medical reports by the Aden Director of Health Services were submitted which corroborated allegations of torture made against the British run interrogation centre at Fort Morbut in Aden.1Â A representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was eventually authorised to visit the prison to investigate on…
10 December 1963 On 10 December 1963, Britain’s high commissioner, Kennedy Trevaskis, declared a state of emergency in Yemen in order to crush a nationalist insurgency against British rule. Within hours, the British army was rounding up dozens of trade union officials and members of Yemen’s People’s Socialist Party.1 The emergency laws gave Trevaskis and…
25 September 1965 On 25 September 1965, the British government suspended the constitution in its colony of Aden, officially known as the South Arabian Federation. All governing powers were placed in the hands of Sir Richard Turnbull, the high commissioner. The state legislature was dismissed and a dusk to dawn curfew imposed.1 A Downing Street…
12 September 1963 Lieutenant Colonel Johnny Cooper, of the Special Air Service, was part of a British covert military operation in North Yemen. The plan was to draw Egyptian forces stationed there into a war of attrition and thereby undermine the prestige and influence of Nasser’s Egypt, which since the Suez crisis of 1956 had…
13 July 1955 On 13 July 1955, Alan Lennox-Boyd, the Colonial Secretary, admitted in the House of Commons that R.A.F. aircraft had bombed five Yemeni villages in the western region of Aden merely because they had not payed fines. He added that such air raids would continue in future if any further fines were not…
6 July 1966 At about 2 am on 6 July 1966, Hashim Jawee, a 22 year old Yemeni civil servant, was woken to the sound of his door being kicked in. He was taken away by British soldiers to an interrogation centre at Fort Morbut. On arrival his senses would have been overwhelmed by the…
14 June 2018 On 14 June 2018, in a closed session of the UN security council, the United Kingdom joined the United States and France in making it clear it would veto any attempt to halt the military assault on the Yemeni port of Hodeidah, launched two days earlier by the United Arab Emirates and…
21 January 1964 On 21 January 1964, Robin Young, a British political officer in the newly created Federation of South Arabia, noted in his diary the latest rules of engagement for covert terror operations inside neighbouring North Yemen, as laid down by Sir Kennedy Trevaskis, the British High Commissioner. London was determined that Egyptian forces,…
