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UCLA student Samer Araabi stands in the streets of Beirut, deserted in light of the conflict betw
Escaping from violence abroad
Samer Araabi flew home to the United States on Saturday after a summer studying abroad in Lebanon was cut short.
On Tuesday, the fourth-year business economics and political science student found himself on a bus to Syria searching for a way back to America.
In an interview last Saturday, Araabi said he was unsure when to leave Lebanon. But as the conflict intensified between Israel and Hezbollah, it became clear that Americans needed to leave Lebanon. Hezbollah is an Islamic resistance organization based out of Lebanon that opposes Israel’s right to exist and has carried out terrorism against the state.
Araabi is one of 33,000 foreigners who have evacuated Lebanon since Israel began its offensive and one of about 8,000 Americans who have left.
Araabi said U.S. authorities had been “vague” in contacting him, and last Monday he was told that an evacuation of Americans might be delayed.
The U.S. received sharp criticism early last week for delays in evacuating Americans out of Lebanon. Mass evacuations of Americans did not begin until Wednesday, while Europeans and Lebanese with foreign passports had left the country by the thousands during the preceding days.
“People didn’t really know where was safe anymore,” Araabi said. “You could tell there was definitely a mood of panic in Lebanon.”
Early last week, Araabi became frustrated with the slow and unclear evacuation process, and also heard that he would have to pay for his passage out of Lebanon, so he decided to take another route. He left on a bus with reporters on Tuesday, taking a ride set up by his cousin who was working for a news station.
Though the State Department initially planned to charge citizens for their passage on commercial vessels, the department said it dropped those plans after criticism from Congress.
Araabi was able to leave Lebanon earlier than most Americans caught in the country, but the trip was not direct.
“We originally were planning on going from Beirut to Damascus, but the road was bombed,” Araabi said.
The bus stopped and they took a northern route through Tripoli, Lebanon out through Homs, Syria, he said.
“That was a 12-hour bus ride, although a significant portion was spent at the border, which was mayhem,” he said. “Everything was such chaos.”
Araabi crossed into Syria along with thousands of others. He spent the next few days trying to get his flight home, scheduled for late summer, moved.
He finally got a flight into London and arrived in the U.S. on Saturday.
Through the bombings early last week and the trip out of Syria, Araabi never felt any threat to his personal safety, he said.
“As an American citizen at an American university, I was ... safe,” he said.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is set to arrive in Israel today, but both she and President Bush have rejected calls for an immediate cease-fire, saying it does not make sense until the terrorist threat from Hezbollah is addressed.
Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz said he would accept a temporary force lead by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization along the Lebanese border.
Other UCLA students have found themselves close to the conflict. UCLA’s Birthright program, a program through which the Israeli government pays for Jews to visit Israel, returned to the U.S. last week as well.
Second-year biology student Jasmin Schlunegger was on Birthright with about 15 other UCLA students.
“We were in (the Israeli city of) Tiberius and a ... missile ... hit about 900 feet from our hotel,” she said. “We went to the bomb shelter and stayed there for about three hours.”
The group left Tiberius for Tel Aviv and departed from Israel on schedule last Sunday.
With reports from Bruin wire services.
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