Aden: A commercial flight touched down in the southern Yemeni city of Aden on Thursday for the first time since conflict shut the city’s airport more than four months ago, airport officials said.
“At around 1pm local time, a Yemenia Airways plane arrived, carrying 150 citizens who had fled the city by boat to Djibouti back home, in the first commercial flight to Aden in over four months,” Muneef Al Zuhairi, a militia commander and deputy director of the airport said.
Gulf Arab countries have backed with air strikes and weapons deliveries a northward advance by fighters from Southern Yemen fighters. They are trying to push back the Iranian-allied Al Houthi group, which took over the capital, Sana’a, in September.
Heavy fighting had rendered Aden’s airport and seaports mostly inaccessible since Al Houthis pushed into the city on March 26, triggering the Arab military intervention, an exodus of refugees and severe shortage of food, fuel and medicine.
However, the city was seized by fighters opposed to Al Houthis last month, and the country’s exiled government in Saudi Arabia says it will use it as a base to run the country.
Also on Thursday, a Red Cross plane landed in Aden carrying 30 southern fighters who had been detained on the battlefield and moved to Sana’a, Al Zuhairi said. They will be exchanged for seven Al Houthi military commanders held in Aden.
It was the first prisoner exchange involving an international organisation and may signal progress toward ending the conflict which has killed more than 4,000 people.
Anti-Al Houthi forces continued to make gains on Thursday, fully surrounding the provincial capital of Lahej province, Zinjibar, northeast of Aden and massing their forces before an expected push toward the central city of Taiz.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has sent new military equipment including tanks into Yemen to support loyalists fighting Al Houthis, tribal and military sources said on Thursday.
“Dozens of tanks, armoured vehicles and personnel carriers, as well as hundreds of Yemeni soldiers trained in Saudi Arabia, arrived in Yemen overnight” via the Wadia border post in the north of the country, a Yemeni military source said.
“These military reinforcements came from Saudi Arabia’s Sharura region and are intended for the popular resistance and the national army,” another military source said, referring to forces loyal to Yemeni President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi, currently in exile in Riyadh.
Since March 26, a Saudi-led military coalition has supported the loyalists with air strikes to stop the advance of Al Houthis, who last year took over the capital Sana’a and pressed south into second city Aden earlier this year.
Tribal sources said the reinforcements were headed towards the provinces of Marib, east of Sana’a, and Shabwa, to the southeast, “to expel Al Houthis and their allies” from these two provinces, where heavy fighting has been ongoing.
Pro-Hadi forces continue to gain ground in the south of the country after retaking Aden last month and seizing the country’s largest airbase of Al Anad to its north on Tuesday.
This turnaround in the fighting coincided with the appearance on the battleground of modern military equipment that, according to military sources, the Saudi-led coalition had provided to Hadi’s supporters.
A military source on Monday reported the presence of “hundreds of soldiers from Gulf countries” that were members of the coalition in Aden, where they landed with “dozens of tanks and armoured vehicles” to “secure the city”.
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