On Feb. 28, the U.S. and Israel launched joint airstrikes on Iran, killing civilians, officials and the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran retaliated with counter missile and drone strikes against neighboring countries, including Qatar.
In January, Allie Garvin, a 21 year old Texas A&M student who grew up in the Treasure Valley, traveled to Doha for a semester abroad as part of her Petroleum Engineering degree. When the conflict started, Qatar closed its airspace and Garvin found herself stranded amid escalating military tensions in the region.
Allie’s mother, Roberta Garvin, talked about her daughter’s experience scrambling to find a way out of the country, including a tentative option to fly out of Riyadh’s airport in Saudi Arabia, several hundred miles away.
On Sunday night Allie gave Boise State Public Radio an update about her status from a hotel room in the middle east, sharing her story.
This story was made to be heard. Click the ‘Listen’ button above to hear the full audio.
Transcript.:
ALLIE GARVIN: This is not something that I would have seen myself doing, like a couple months or a year ago is like doing homework while I'm listening to missile interceptions. And they kind of sounded like thunder, but like more compressed, like shorter. I knew they were being intercepted, but they had sounded a lot further off. And then they had started sounding a lot closer. And you could feel the window shake. So that freaked me out the first time I heard it and then I got used to that after a day or two.
I paid for a travel insurance, which was mandatory with my exchange program through my university. So the university was working with the insurance and I was working with the insurance, and then the insurance was working with the security evacuation company to get me out. So I know the State Department is helping people get out currently, but as of when the evacuation company got me out, the State Department had just started adding people to lists.
Finally getting to leave, I was super excited just because I had been working on it for a while. Leaving itself was definitely a first for me. I got picked up by like a black SUV security person. We didn't hear any, any missiles or anything while we were driving out but we drove across the border from Doha into Saudi, and then the border crossing took like an hour. Got back in the car, drove another four hours to Riyadh like there's camels on the side of the road, t here's these like rolling sand dunes. [Just] drove through the desert.
Riyadh, I haven't seen much of. We went right to the hotel and I’ve stayed there since.
I've been hearing about flights being turned around just because of airspace concerns. So I'm hoping that once I get on the plane, I can land in my destination and not back at the same airport.
Some of the most interesting conversations I had were in the last couple days. We'd all get dinner together because because people stuck in the dorms, t here's not really too much else to do. People would get dinner together, and you just get to hear about how different people are assessing the situation from their different backgrounds. It drew my attention to how as an American, I've been kind of like, “oh, I can go wherever I want, whenever I want.” And meeting people in Doha, just through the study abroad experience and through this, meeting other students from Ukraine or from Palestine or other places where they're like, “yeah, my passport is super weak. I can't go where I want to go.” They're used to their airspace in their home country being closed and having to meet family in other countries and things like that, and are very used to being told by borders that they can't do what they want. For me, that was kind of a first experience where I was like “you can't leave by the air if you want to, and you can't leave by the ocean if you want to. And getting out by land is going to be a challenge.”
Definitely, definitely I feel lucky to be able to leave.
