Aden: Yemeni ministers have arrived back in Aden from Saudi exile after the government announced the “liberation” of the country’s second city from the Iran-backed Al Houthi militia, the interior minister said on Saturday.
“We arrived last night,” Abdo Al Huzeifi said, adding that he was accompanied by Transport Minister Badr Basalma and several security officials.
Al Huzeifi did not say how the delegation reached Aden.
But Saudi-owned daily Asharq Al Awsat quoted a Saudi security official as saying that they had flown from Riyadh to Eritrea and then travelled on by boat.
The minister said that the Al Houthis had been pushed out of the city, except for “few besieged groups that are refusing to surrender”.
The Riyadh-based government said on Friday that its loyalists had ousted the rebels and renegade troops who had seized much of Aden in March, forcing President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi into exile.
“The government announces the liberation of the province of Aden,” Vice-President Khalid Bahah said on Facebook.
But witnesses said that some Al Houthi fighters remained in control of the city’s Al Tawahi district on Saturday and that heavy fighting was continuing there.
Southern militiamen of the Popular Resistance launched Operation Golden Arrow against the Al Houthis on Tuesday, boosted by reinforcements freshly trained and equipped in Saudi Arabia.
A Saudi-led coalition has also kept up the air campaign it launched in March.
At dawn on Saturday, coalition aircraft bombed a rebel reinforcement convoy east of Aden, killing 25 fighters, a military official said.
The toll could not be independently verified.
Aden was Hadi’s last refuge after he fled the capital Sana’a earlier this year as the rebels took over the government and launched an offensive in which they seized much of the country.
Swathes of the city have been reduced to rubble by the four months of ferocious fighting.
