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 But for many refugees returning to a city without regular water or
electricity and shattered by months of intense street fighting, the
joy of being home was tempered by grief at the sight of destruction
and uncertainty over the future.
"I can't believe it. I can't believe the damage," said Muheeb Ishaq
quietly, gazing in horror at the ruined terminal building and the
shredded remains of hangars.
His father, who was also on the flight, had to turn his face away
with grief before saying: "Look what they did! I have known all this
since I was born. It was a paradise."
Their flight from Jordan, one of the first by Yemen Airways to reach
Aden, was paid for by the country's exiled government, part of its
efforts to re-establish normality in the city after local fighters
it backs ousted the northern-based Shi'ite Houthi militia in July.
The fighters, with military help from Gulf countries who are
suspicious of the Houthis' ties to Iran, retook Aden's airport on
July 17, a turning point in the civil war after four months of
stalemate, and have since pushed further into southern Yemen.
 On Monday the government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who
fled Aden in March for Riyadh, said groups it supports, backed by
Gulf air strikes and arms, had retaken parts of Ibb province and
were advancing in Abyan province, near Aden.
The Ishaqs, a prosperous middle class family, left Aden on an Indian
navy ship for Djibouti on April 10 after tank shells and mortars
started to fall near their home, abandoning some luggage on the
quayside as sniper bullets sang overhead.
"Will there be electricity or water? I don't know," said Muheeb
Ishaq, 35, sitting next to his sleeping son Mahbub, four, a suitcase
and houseplant propped on the plane floor before him, while
one-year-old Offa sat fussing on his mother's lap.
The family, including Muheeb's parents, siblings and their families,
decided to return home despite such fears because of the hardships
they faced as impoverished refugees, first in Djibouti and then in
Jordan.
Natives of Aden, and quick to voice their love for the city and
pride in the happy, successful lives they had forged there before
the war, they said they were determined to rebuild.
SEPARATIST ANGER
Out of the window, mountains, clifftop villages and terraced farms
unfolded far below, but as the pilot announced the plane's impending
arrival in Aden, it was not Yemen's national flag that passengers
waved, but that of a southern separatist movement.
It showed how as the fighting continues and anger grows at the human
cost, the civil war is no longer simply about who will rule Yemen,
or to which regional power it will be allied, but over whether it
can remain a country at all.
"We were just students and workers. Normal people. We liked playing
soccer. But the Houthis came to kill. I fought just for Aden," said
Alqadr Tawfiq, 22, a mechanical engineering student returning on the
plane with his wife and infant son.
They left Aden by boat in early June after he was wounded following
two months of fighting in which many of his fellow students and
friends died, and which he described simply as "dirty days", showing
a finger-long bullet wound on his flank.
He now hopes to rejoin the fighters pushing back the Houthis from
Abyan, the last southern province in which they remain.
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"We will liberate the south. The Houthis can go back north," he
said.
That sentiment was shared by Mamoon Omar, 48, a British-Yemeni
former airline pilot born in Zinjibar in Abyan and now living in
Yorkshire, England. He returned to Yemen in February to help his
disabled son, daughter-in-law and baby granddaughter escape.
He was unable to get his son's wife or the child British visas,
however, and when the fighting in Aden grew too intense, they paid
$1,000 to be driven to the Omani border, through dozens of Houthi
checkpoints and using rare supplies of petrol.
"After what the Houthis did, there is no way Yemen can stay united,"
he said.
DISTRESS OVER RUINED CITY
Such anger at the Houthis was only intensified by the sight of
Aden's Khormaksar district as the plane descended, revealing entire
neighborhoods of ruined, shell-pocked houses, as if hit by an
earthquake.
Dozens of soldiers from the United Arab Emirates stood guarding the
runway as the refugees disembarked and walked, towards the ruined
terminal building past the shredded remains of hangars, gazing with
horror at the destruction around them.
In a small room at the far end of the terminal, with no electricity
and most of its ceiling missing, a man in striped shirt sat in a
windowless booth stamping refugees' passports with one hand and
speaking on a mobile phone with the other.
Above the baggage carousel, the remains of a portrait of Hadi
flapped from a broken frame, only his shoulders and chin visible,
the picture's cardboard backing and the tiled wall around it
peppered with bullet holes.
A huge gash in the roof showed where a missile had struck.
At the terminal door a woman from the plane folded herself into the
arms of a tall man and sobbed loudly, while her companions were
greeted by female relatives in a flurry of hugs and kissing.
But, nearby, the sound of furious hammering revealed where workers
in an adjacent area were starting to repair damaged parts of the
airport, a first step towards the reconstruction of a ruined city.
(Reporting By Angus McDowall, Editing by William Maclean and Peter
Graff)
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