Colorado woman stranded in Middle East amid war on Iran

Sirens blared out from the phones of dozens of travelers gathered by the Qatar airport gate in near unison on Saturday, a national emergency alert warning people to shelter in place.

Cory Katuna of Longmont was only supposed to be in Doha, Qatar, for three hours on Saturday morning — a mid-flight layover on her way from India to Italy. Everything went smoothly until the Qatar Airlines pilot turned the Italy-bound plane around on the tarmac, leaving passengers with more questions than answers, she said in a phone interview Thursday.

The group of travelers had settled in for the indeterminate delay at the gate back inside Hamad International Airport in Doha when the emergency alert came in, Katuna said.

“I think mine went off first,” Katuna said. “That’s what it felt like, you know, my phone starts making this crazy sound, everybody’s looking over at me and then everybody else’s starts going off. It was just this surge of adrenaline.”

Being unable to understand the alert, which appeared to be written in Arabic, only added to her sudden panic.

The translated alert warned people to take shelter, but offered no specifics about the danger, Katuna said. When she looked outside, she spotted trails of smoke in the air that other passengers claimed were from intercepted missiles.

A video posted Thursday by the Associated Press shows what appear to be additional missile interceptions over the capital on Thursday.

The entire airport was locked down over the weekend as Qatar’s airspace closed, she said. No flights were allowed in or out.

Katuna wandered around the airport for hours before grabbing dinner and setting up in an overnight sleeping pod. Her rest came to an abrupt end when the airport was evacuated just before 2 a.m. and travelers were sent away with hotel vouchers.

But the hotel didn’t have enough rooms and turned most people away, she said. Staff directed travelers to another nearby hotel with limited space that would honor the voucher, and she raced with another American to grab a rideshare, the car speeding by dozens of people running down the street toward the hope of available rooms.

“We didn’t know to what degree this was an emergency,” Katuna said. “Like, how bad is it? … Are our lives actually at risk? It was definitely disconcerting.”

Katuna has stayed at that hotel for five nights now and said she has yet to get either her baggage or answers from the U.S. government on how they’re expected to leave when flights are grounded, or if any assistance will be offered. She said she’s heard seven or eight explosions Thursday.

The U.S. told American citizens to leave more than a dozen countries in the region on Tuesday. The countries include Iran and Israel, as well as Qatar, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, the Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

But when Katuna called the hotline for citizens in need of help getting home, she was met with a message advising against relying on the U.S. government to evacuate.