Egypt's past Yemen campaign recalled as Sisi offers to defend Saudi Arabia

Egypt's president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has declared his country ready to intervene militarily to defend Saudi Arabia against the Houthis, prompting a look back at an earlier Egyptian campaign in Yemen. During the 1960s, Egyptian troops fought in the country against royalist forces that Riyadh supported.

The retrospective does not draw explicit conclusions about how the earlier intervention ended or what lessons it might hold. It also gives no detail on the scale or timing of any deployment Sisi has in mind. The comparison rests on the two episodes sharing a Saudi dimension and Egyptian troops on Yemeni soil.