Plane joy for Aden residents

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 1 p.m. 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,” said Muneef Al-Zuhairi, a militia commander and deputy director of the airport.
Government 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.
Tribal and military sources said Saudi Arabia has sent new military equipment including tanks into Yemen to support loyalists fighting Houthis.
“Dozens of tanks, armored vehicles and personnel carriers, as well as hundreds of Yemeni soldiers trained in Saudi Arabia, arrived in Yemen” via the Wadia border post in the north of the country, a Yemeni military source said.
“These military reinforcements came from Saudi Arabia’s Sharourah region and are intended for the popular resistance and the national army,” another military source said.
Tribal sources said that the reinforcements were headed toward the provinces of Marib, east of Sanaa, and Shabwa, to the southeast, “to expel the Houthis and their allies” from these two provinces.