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.