UAE team open Aden’s airport

Civilian death toll rises from Houthi rebel shelling

ADEN // Specialist UAE technicians with a mobile control tower have arrived in Aden to reopen the airport and clear the way for the arrival of urgently needed aid.

Yemen’s transport minister Badr Mubarak Ba-Salma said contractors would be brought in to work on the airport over the next two days, and called on international organisations to come to Aden and provide relief for the city’s embattled citizens.

The death toll from Sunday’s shelling by Houthi rebels of civilians in a northern suburb of the city rose to nearly 100 yeserday, with about 200 injured.

Eighty per cent of the victims were civilians, including many pregnant women, children and the elderly, said Hassan Boucenine of Medicins Sans Frontieres.

“Yesterday was the worst day in Aden since the conflict started in March,” he said, and he feared “attacks on civilians will continue”.

The shelling began after the rebels lost control of most of Tawahi, their last foothold in Aden. The district was under a security lockdown yesterday as anti-Houthi forces searched buildings looking for rebels, some of whom fled to the nearby mountains.

Fighters from the Southern Resistance, which wants the former state of South Yemen to break from the north after 25 years of unification, entered Tawahi at the tip of Aden’s peninsula late on Sunday after securing the Crater district.

They took control of the television and radio buildings and army and security bases after fierce fighting, the group’s spokesman Ali Al Ahmadi said.

Local fighters and Yemeni army units are also battling the Houthis around important military bases in Lahj province, to the north of Aden, and in Abyan province, along the Indian Ocean coast east of the city.

The coalition also struck the home of Mehdi Meqlawa, a prominent supporter of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, a Houthi ally, in a Sanaa suburb.

It also hit Houthi headquarters near the Souq Aziz market in the capital, killing one person. Also in Sanaa, ISIL militants said they were responsible for a car-bomb blast outside a mosque used by rebels. Five people were killed in the explosion.

Rebel shelling continued yesterday in Taez, Yemen’s third-largest city, killing eight residents, and ground fighting raged on in Mareb, with six anti-Houthi tribesmen and 10 Houthi fighters killed. The spokesman for the Yemeni government in exile, Rageh Badie, said the head of the Resistance Council, Nayef Al Bakri, had been appointed governor of Aden.

Mr Al Bakri was deputy to the former governor, Abdulaziz bin Habtoor, who fled the city this year.

Mr Al Bakri is joined by the exiled deputy minister of health and the transport and interior ministers, who travelled to Aden two days ago from Saudi Arabia.

Other exiled ministers will follow suit over the next few weeks, Mr Badie said.

Rebel shelling in Taez kills eight residents