Aden: A commercial ship docked in Aden on Friday, the first to reach the former southern capital since Yemen’s devastating war came to the port city in March.
The Venus, operated by United Arab Shipping Co, carried a cargo of 350 containers of products ordered by businesses in Aden, said port deputy director Aref Al Shaabi.
“This signals the return of life to the port of Aden and this will benefit the city and southern provinces,” Al Shaabi said.
Shaabi said other ships were expected in Aden, the country’s main port and capital of the former South Yemen, in coming days.
Since pro-government forces recaptured the city from Shiite Al Houthi rebels last month, several planes carrying humanitarian aid have landed at Aden’s repaired international airport, which had been the scene of heavy clashes.
And several passenger flights have also arrived, allowing some residents to return home after having fled the violence.
Al Houthi rebels and troops loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh attacked and seized Aden in March after taking over the capital unopposed last year.
Their advance south prompted President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi to flee to Riyadh and sparked a Saudi-led aerial bombing campaign on rebel targets across the country.
Bolstered by heavy weaponry and Gulf troops as well as Yemeni fighters trained in Saudi Arabia, loyalists have retaken Aden and four other southern provinces.
Meanwhile, medical officials say heavy fighting in Yemen’s southern city of Taiz has killed 48 civilians and wounded over 50 others.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorised to brief reporters, said that the first 23 civilians were killed by rebel shelling, which provoked Saudi airstrikes late Thursday, killing the rest and demolishing five houses. Of those killed, at least 10 were children, they added.
Pro-Hadi forces have turned their sights on battling rebels for control of Yemen’s third city, Taez, seen as the gateway to the capital.
Yemen’s war has killed nearly 4,500 people, many of them civilians, according to the United Nations.
Some 80 percent of Yemen’s population of 26 million are in desperate need of aid, and over a million have been driven from their homes in the nearly five-month war.
Amid the conflict in a country whose government has been exiled, an apparent US drone strike Friday killed three suspected Al Qaida militants in Marib, east of Sana’a, tribal sources said.
The three were in a vehicle struck at dawn by a missile in the oil province’s desert region of Harib, the sources said.
Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula has taken advantage of Yemen’s chaos to seize the southern port city of Mukalla, capital of the vast Hadramawt province.
