It was a little after 1PM on Friday, February 28th, and Samantha Lujano was about to board her flight from Dubai to Colombo, Sri Lanka, when the drone attacks began.
She had already received her boarding pass and gone through customs. Her flight was at the gate and her bags were loaded. She was simply waiting for the gate agents to open the flight for boarding. So she opened TikTok and started scrolling.
But instead of relieving her boredom, the algorithm fed her anxiety. It showed her dozens of videos of explosions that purported to be from around the Persian Gulf — including a few in Dubai itself. She knew better than to believe everything she saw on social media, and had heard nothing from official sources yet. For now, she kept calm.
Then her friends back home started texting her: “Did you see what happened? They just closed the airspace.”
She told them not to worry. After all, she was on the ground in Dubai and nothing seemed to be wrong. Then, in an instant, every single flight status on the airport’s departures monitor changed to blinking red.
“Canceled, canceled, canceled,” she recalled. “Everything was canceled.”
Dubai and the whole region had become a war zone. In response to a joint US and Israeli strike that morning, Iran had launched missiles and drones at targets across the Middle East, including Dubai. Most were intercepted by local defense systems. Even so, debris from intercepted drones caused damage across Dubai and injured four people.
By early afternoon, civilian airspace over the entire region was closed and more than 3,400 flights were canceled.
Lujano and many of her fellow passengers were now stuck. They no longer had valid visas to return to the UAE. They had no accommodations lined up. They had no choice but to wait in the departures area until someone in authority came up with a solution. And all the while, missiles and drones rained down overhead.
“We were really stranded,” she said.
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