“On March 4-5, a total of 197 people with Armenian passports returned to Armenia from the UAE on two flights operated by FlyDubai airline,” the ministry spokeswoman, Ani Badalian, said, adding that 45 others will be flown to Yerevan later in the day.
In a separate social media post, Badalian said that in the last three days the Armenian Embassy in Abu Dhabi has helped to evacuate another 190 Armenians from the UAE to neighboring Oman. More than a hundred others were flown out of the Omani capital Muskat earlier this week on two flights carried out by the Armenian airline Fly One. The latter charged each of them over $1,200 for the trip home.
Thousands of regular flights to and from the Middle East have been cancelled since the start on Saturday of U.S. and Israeli air strikes against the Islamic Republic that provoked Iranian retaliation. The cancellations reportedly left 20,000 passengers stranded in the UAE alone. They include hundreds of Armenian nationals who arrived in the UAE as tourists or for connecting flights to or from third countries.
According to Badalian, 170 Armenians, among them 30 students, remained in the UAE as of Friday evening. The official said the Armenian mission there is maintaining contact with them “on an individual or group basis.”
Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan discussed the issue with his Emirati counterpart Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan in a phone call on Thursday. According to his press office, Mirzoyan thanked the Gulf state for its “assistance provided in addressing issues related to Armenian citizens stranded in the UAE.”
It was still not clear how many Armenians were still stuck in Qatar and Kuwait. Their combined number is believed to have been much smaller at the start of the war.
The flight cancellations also affected Armenian visiting India, Sri Lanka and Thailand on holiday. The Foreign Ministry in Yerevan said 104 of them have already returned home from India and Sri Lanka.
There was no word on the number of Armenian tourists remaining in Thailand. Meline Muradian, her husband and child flew to the country last week in a group of 15 tourists. Muradian said on Friday that their return flight through Dubai, scheduled for this weekend, was cancelled and they are now scrambling to find other “ways to get out.”
“One option is to stay here a bit longer,” Muradian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “Maybe our flight will be restored, which is probably not realistic.”
The young woman from Yerevan complained that airlines offering alternative routes to Armenia are setting exorbitant prices for their tickers. The group has therefore appealed to the Armenian Foreign Ministry for urgent financial aid, she said, adding that it has still not received a reply from Yerevan.
Mirzoyan dismissed such appeals as “a bit unfair” when he spoke in the Armenian parliament on Wednesday. He said that the stranded tourists should be able to afford return flights.
Arpi Beglarian, another Armenian stuck in Thailand, criticized the minister, saying that she and other tourists cannot “pay twice or thrice what we expected.”