Source: Hala (Yemen) · EP 66
Subject: A short window in the summer of 2015, and a self-coordinated evacuation
Hala is from Aden, in southern Yemen. She had moved to Sana'a, the capital, for university. She was there in 2014 and 2015 as the political collapse accelerated into open war: the Houthi takeover of the capital in September 2014, the Saudi-led intervention beginning in March 2015, the bombing campaigns, the closure of Sana'a International Airport.
Civilian movement out of Yemen had been severely restricted by mid-2015. The airport had been damaged in airstrikes. Most international carriers had suspended operations. Yemenis seeking to leave were dependent on irregular openings, on overland routes through territories controlled by armed factions, or on family or institutional connections capable of arranging extraction.
Hala had none of those.
In the summer of 2015 the airport opened briefly. The opening was narrow and unannounced in the way Yemeni civilians had come to expect — a window of days during which a small number of flights were authorised to operate, before the situation closed again.
She used the window.
There was no family member coordinating the evacuation. No embassy. No institutional channel. She organised her own departure: identifying the flight, securing the seat, arranging the documents, negotiating the road to the airport, getting on board, getting off the ground.
Each of those steps was, by 2015 standards in Sana'a, a discrete operational problem. The road to the airport was contested. The flight allocations were unstable. The documents required physical signatures from offices that were not always staffing. Any one of the steps could fail and reset the entire process to the beginning.
She got out before the window closed.
The MEPI scholarship — the U.S. State Department's Middle East Partnership Initiative — took her to the Lebanese American University in Beirut. Her LAU roommate was Libyan. The roommate's stories of post-2011 Libya produced a recognition Hala had not expected: the structural shape of a country fractured by armed conflict, a population dispersed, a passport that becomes a liability, a generation educated for a state that no longer functions — was shared.
"The Libyan story is my story."
From Beirut she has moved across Doha, Denmark, Hamburg and Amsterdam — a sequence of academic placements on an Erasmus journalism programme, each ending on a fixed date.
The Yemeni passport sits underneath all of it. Hala raised the standing of the document directly: holding a Yemeni passport is one of the ten worst in the world by visa access. Every onward visa is a long, expensive process. Every transit is conditional. Every placement that ends becomes a new question of where, geographically, the next placement can be arranged.
The Sana'a airport opening, in this sense, was not a one-time act. It was the first instance of a pattern that has repeated across her movement since: small windows, used decisively, while they remain open.
The story is reported without dramatic colour. Hala did not narrate the airport as a climax. She reported it as one of several decisions that produced the present geography of her life.
That treatment carries a particular weight. The 2015 evacuation of Sana'a, by people without the institutional support that foreign nationals or NGO staff received, is one of the smallest-scale and least-narrated aspects of the early Yemen war. The airport openings happened. People used them. The fact that a graduate student coordinated her own exit through one of them — without intermediaries, on a personal timeline — is the kind of detail that aggregate reporting on the conflict does not capture.
The survival guilt she described in the episode is downstream of this. She is alive, educated, and moving. Many of the people she left behind are not. The guilt is not a public confession but a continuing weight that accompanies the continuation.