Basically the monarchy there was overthrown by a Soviet back military coup, kicking off a seven year war between the government and the exiled monarchy.
Below is an excerpt about that war, in Israel at War: and Her Enemies:
In the years prior to the Six Day War, Egypt had not been preparing for war with Yemen. Instead Nasser's army was embroiled in a pointless insurgency which sapped the nation's strength, wore down the army and forced it's focus away from fighting a modern war, and provided Egypt's enemies with a way to engage it. That distraction was the now forgotten North Yemen Insurgency.
In 1962 North Yemen was a backwater, an afterthought on a peninsula dominated by the Saudi kingdom and a Middle East swept up by the rising tide of Arab nationalism. The country numbered about four and a half million people divided into hundreds of tribes. The Zaydis in the north adhered to the Shia school of Islam while the Shafis in the south followed the Sunni sect. There were four urban areas, the capital of Sana, the port city of Hodeidah, Taiz, and Sadah, none numbering more than 60,000. Imam Mohamed Ahmed kept outside influences out of Yemen. The Maria Theresa thaler, first minted by the Habsburg Empire in 1780, was the nation’s official currency. The Imam ruled with an iron fist, singling out the Shafis in the south, whose loyalty he suspected, for harsh treatment. Imam Ahmed died on 19 September 1962, at which point his son, Mohamed al-Badr became imam.
On 26 September Mohamed al-Badr's government was overthrown by a cabal of army officers led by General Abdullah Sallal, a former commander of the Prince’s Guard and the military academy, and a believer in Nasser’s pan-Arabism who saw Yemen as a backward nation and hoped to bring it into the modern world. Army tanks advanced on the palace and fought a quick battle with royal guards there. Troops also seized the radio station, the armory and the telephone exchange. The city was under Sallal’s control by noon. The coup was welcomed by Nasser who saw it as an opportunity to expand his influence to the Arabian Peninsula. It was also sweet revenge against the North Yemeni monarchy which in the previous decade had withdrawn from Nasser’s United Arab Republic seeing its revolutionary policies as a threat to the Imam. Badr fled to the mountainous north where he enjoyed strong support amongst the Zaydi tribes. These were the nucleus of North Yemen’s reserve army, in theory 50,000 strong. Here the Imam could also receive help from the Saudi monarchy which had been closely allied with the Ahmed regime and feared Nasser would turn North Yemen into an Egyptian colony.
The Saudi fear was well placed, as in the beginning of October Nasser sent a commando company to aid republican forces, as they came to be called, in Sana. These were just the first arrivals, as by the end of the month 20,000 Egyptian troops were in the country. Egyptian forces were completely unprepared for the task which lay before them. Commanders possessed no maps of North Yemen, were totally ignorant of the country’s tribal/religious makeup, and were under the mistaken impression that the nation’s troubles were the result of outside influences, possibly Zionists.
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