Kingdom of Yemen

The Kingdom of Yemen, officially the Mutawakkilite Kingdom and known retrospectively as North Yemen, was the state of the north-west of modern Yemen from 1918 to 1970. It was bordered by Saudi Arabia to the north, the Aden Protectorate to the south and the Red Sea to the west, with its capital at Sanaa to 1948 and at Taiz thereafter. Three days after the Ottoman decision to leave Yemen in the Armistice of Mudros of 1918, Imam Yahya, the religious leader of the region, entered Sanaa and declared himself ruler. He then attacked Aden under the British, but was checked and turned to building his highland kingdom, taxing the coffee trade and keeping the tribes in hand. Yemen entered the United Nations on 30 September 1947. A republican coup in 1962 launched the North Yemen Civil War, and the royalist government held only the north from 1962 to 1970, when a peace deal largely dissolved it.