Yemen. Information.
YEMEN (officially the Republic of Yemen) is a country located on the Arabian Peninsula in Southwest Asia. Area - 527 970 sq. km. Population - 20 727 063 (2005) Capital - Sanaa. is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the north, the Red Sea to the west, the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden to the south, and Oman to the east. Yemen is one of the oldest centers of civilization in the Near East. Islam came to Yemen around 630, during Muhammad's lifetime. At that time the Persian governor Badhan was ruling. Thereafter Yemen was ruled as part of Arab-Islamic caliphates, and Yemen became a province in the Islamic empire. The Fatimids of Egypt helped the Isma'ilis maintain dominance in the 11th century. Saladin (Salah ad-Din) annexed Yemen in 1173. The Rasulid dynasty (Turkish in origin) ruled Yemen, with Zabid as its capital, from about 1230 to the 15th century. In 1516, the Mamluks of Egypt annexed Yemen; but in the following year, the Mamluk governor surrendered to the Ottomans, and Turkish armies subsequently overran the country. They were challenged by the Zaidi Imam, Qasim the Great (r.1597–1620), and were expelled from the interior around 1630. From then until the 19th century, the Ottomans retained control only of isolated coastal areas, while the highlands generally were ruled by the Zaidi Imams. As the Zaidi Imamate collapsed in the 19th century due to internal division, the Ottomans moved south along the west coast of Arabia back into northern Yemen in the 1830s, and eventually even took San‘a’ making it the Yemeni district capital in 1872. The Ottomans were aided by the adoption of Crimean War modern weapons. British interests in the area which would later become South Yemen, began to grow when in 1832, British East India Company forces captured the port of Aden, to provide a coaling station for ships en route to India. The British interest in reducing pirate attacks on British merchants lead to their creating a protectorate over the town of Aden in 1839, and adding the surrounding lands over the following years.[25][26] The colony gained much political and strategic importance after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the increased traffic on the Red Sea route to India The Ottomans and the British eventually established a de facto border between north and south Yemen, which was formalized in a treaty in 1904. However the interior boundaries were never clearly established. However the presence of the Ottomans, and to a lesser extent the British, allowed the Zaydi Imamate to rebuild against a common enemy. Guerrilla warfare and banditry erupted into the rebellion of the Zaydi tribes in 1905. Starting in the latter decades of the 19th century and continuing into the 20th century, Britain signed agreements with local rulers of traditional polities that, together, became known as the Aden Protectorate. The area was divided into numerous sultanates, emirates, and sheikhdoms, and was divided for administrative purposes into the East Aden Protectorate and the West Aden Protectorate. The eastern protectorate consisted of the three Hadhramaut states (Qu'aiti State of Shihr and Mukalla, Kathiri State of Seiyun, Mahra State of Qishn and Socotra) with the remaining states comprising the west. North Yemen became independent of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. The British, who had set up a protectorate area around the southern port of Aden in the 19th century, withdrew in 1967 from what became South Yemen. Three years later, the southern government adopted a Marxist orientation. The massive exodus of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis from the south to the north contributed to two decades of hostility between the states. The two countries were formally unified as the Republic of Yemen in 1990. A southern secessionist movement in 1994 was quickly subdued. In 2000, Saudi Arabia and Yemen agreed to a delimitation of their border. Currency : Yemen Rial (YER)
