Salem Ali Qatan

The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for biographies. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources: "Salem Ali Qatan" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Major General Salem Ali Qatan (Arabic: سالم علي قطن; 1952 – 18 June 2012) was a Yemeni military officer and member of the Al-Awaliq tribe.^[1] He was born in Yashbem in As Said District, Shabwah Governorate.^[1] He was married, and joined the military in 1970.^[1] As the chief military commander in south Yemen, Qatan had led a month-long offensive against terrorist organization al-Qaeda, leading to its withdrawal from several towns and villages in the Abyan and Shabwa provinces of Yemen which it had controlled since 2011. Ali Qatan was appointed in March 2012, succeeding Major General Mahdi Maqouleh^[2] just days after the newly elected President of Yemen, Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi took office and pledged to destroy al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula once and for all.