Yemen’s Mukalla airport reopens with aid flight after Qaeda exit

ADEN — The airport has reopened at the Yemeni coastal city of Mukalla which was recaptured by government and Emirati soldiers in April after a year-long occupation by Al-Qaeda, local officials said. The first flight in on Sunday was a plane carrying relief supplies from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the officials said. The UAE said the consignment was carrying 20 tons of medicines and medical accessories from the UAE Red Crescent. “The plane chartered by the Emirates Red Crescent is the first to land at Mukalla airport since it closed more than a year ago after Al-Qaeda entered the city,” airport director Anis Abdel Kader told AFP. He said work was under way to make the airport operational again, with UAE help, so it can be “used as quickly as possible for commercial flights.” The southeastern town’s Riyan airport halted regular services a year ago after Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), seen as one of the most powerful branches of the global militant group, took over the town and made it the center of a rich mini-state along the Arabian Sea coastline. Exploiting the chaos of a civil war between government loyalists and Houthi rebels, AQAP earned an estimated $2 million a day in revenue from port taxes and fuel smuggling in Mukalla, a city of about 500,000. Around 2,000 Yemeni and Emirati troops advanced into Mukalla in the last week of April, taking control of its maritime port and airport and meeting little resistance. The Pentagon acknowledged for the first time Friday it has deployed US troops to Yemen since the country’s collapse last year to bolster government and Arab coalition forces battling Al-Qaeda. Spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis said the US military has also stepped up air strikes against fighters with Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). A “very small number” of American military personnel has been working from a “fixed location” with Yemeni and Arab coalition forces — especially the Emiratis — in recent weeks around Mukalla, a port city seized by AQAP a year ago, Davis said. “This is of great interest to us. It does not serve our interests to have a terrorist organization in charge of a port city, and so we are assisting in that,” the spokesman added. — Agencies