Yemen's oldest port ends the Houthi ruin.. Ships appear in "Mocha"
English - Saturday 31 July 2021 الساعة 08:06 pm
NewsYemen, Al Ain News:
The Yemeni port of Mocha received two commercial ships after its reopening, Friday, July 30, after it was sabotaged by the Houthi militia.
During the opening, the director of Mokha port, Abdul-Malik Al-Sharabi, said that the process of arriving other ships would proceed successively.
The port of Mocha was liberated in February 2017, as part of Operation Golden Spear of the Arab Alliance, after the Houthi militia took control of it and turned it into a port for smuggling weapons from Iran and smuggling the sea with mines, where it used it as a headquarters for its military activities and operations in the Red Sea.
The port of Mocha is one of the oldest ports in the Arabian Peninsula, with an area of 466 square meters. It is located on the Red Sea, 100 km west of Taiz and 75 km north of Bab al-Mandab. The port is Yemen's window to the Horn of Africa, through which the exchange of goods between the two sides is active.
The port of Mocha dates back to ancient times. It was mentioned in the ancient Himyarite inscriptions. It witnessed prosperity periods and was associated with the export of Yemeni coffee to the world. The most famous types of coffee were named after it "Mocha".
The port connects Yemen with Africa, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. It also links Europe, East Africa, South Asia and the Middle East. It is located near the Bab al-Mandab Strait about 75 kilometers and is characterized by its proximity to the international corridor at a distance of 6 kilometers.
The process of restarting the port comes with the support of the National Resistance on the West Coast, after it had been inactive since 2016, when the Houthi militia turned it into a military base.
The port was subjected to a process of destruction by the Houthi militia, as well as booby-trapping some of its berths, and the port's water channel was flooded with dilapidated car structures, while it stole all the technical equipment and supplies, and stripped the port of all its tools.
During the past three months, the port administration, in cooperation with the leadership of the National Resistance, worked to partially rehabilitate the port, allowing the reception of commercial ships with weights ranging from 1,000 tons to 2,500 tons, with a depth ranging from 3 to 5 meters.
The director of Mocha Directorate, Basem Al-Zariqi, considered the reopening of the port a qualitative leap in terms of enhancing the freedom of movement of goods through this important historical port, calling on importers to revive the commercial movement in the port by directing ships and unloading their cargo of goods through it.
The United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Yemen, David Gressly, said, while attending the opening process, that the port of Mocha was and still is of great importance to Yemenis, and that the scenes of ships arriving and unloading their cargo for the first time in years evokes an expressive feeling of happiness.
The UN official ruled out the transfer of food aid to the northern cities through the port of Mocha, before a session of discussions with the concerned parties at the United Nations.
It is expected that the import list will constitute all food and consumer goods, except for oil derivatives, due to the incompleteness of their technical equipment.
