Instead of getting married earlier this month, Summer Nasser was in the mountains of Yemen, a twisting, perilous five-hour drive from her fiance.
The American college student of Yemeni descent is hiding out in her family's ancestral village with her mother and four siblings, waiting for a break in bombing and rebel clashes before returning — either to their temporary home in Aden, or their real home, New York.
The shopkeeper holding on to her wedding dress called last week to say he had also fled the southern port city, as violence accelerated and the Saudi Arabia-led air raids against Houthi rebels showed no sign of relenting.
She couldn’t blame him, Nasser said, speaking by phone from the Yafa region.
“I did expect some type of security deterioration, but no one expected a 10-country bombardment,” she said.
As Saudi Arabia continues air raids against the rebels, Yemeni-American families who did not get out in time are weighing their options.
There aren’t many.
Through dozens of warnings over the years, the United States told Americans living in Yemen to have contingency plans for emergencies and, unlike Canada, Russia, India and Somalia, has not announced an official evacuation.
The U.S. closed its embassy in Sana'a in February. Airports are shut for commercial travel.
"We have to make a decision based on the security situation and what is feasible to do," State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said at a news conference in Washington. "And given the situation in Yemen, it's quite dangerous and unpredictable. Doing something like sending in military assets, even for an evacuation, could put U.S. citizen lives at greater risk."
She reiterated that there were no plans to evacuate Americans. A State Department message to citizens in the country on April 5 included by boat. It also indicated that a French cargo ship off the coast of Aden could accommodate a few hundred passengers, but "people will have to find their own way to get out to it."
Subsequent messages said U.S. citizens might be able to board flights organized by the International Organization for Migration or India.
The United States has evacuated Americans before, though often in situations that escalated without the ongoing warnings: the bombing of the Lebanese capital by Israel in 2006, and Egypt in 2011, when protests against then-President Hosni Mubarak turned deadly.
Yemen is a politically complicated country. It has been for decades, as tribal and regional allegiances within its borders collided. Even its borders have changed, with the unification of North and South Yemen in 1990.
Families in the U.S. and Yemen contacted by VOA agreed on what the difference is this time: Until now, they felt that Yemen’s problems were all Yemeni.
"There’s always been some kind of threat. The difference would be, it was always internal. … When it’s internal, we don’t consider that to be very dangerous,” said Nasser’s aunt, Sylvia Muchinsky, who is trying to raise awareness of U.S. citizens stranded in Yemen from her home in Brooklyn, New York, by .
“I can’t describe it. It’s almost like when you live in the ghetto and you see gang violence. You know it’s there; true, you can get hit in a drive-by … but it doesn’t really affect you in the day to day,” she said.
"Even during our civil war, people weren’t this afraid. People functioned. A foreign threat is so much more difficult to surmount than an internal threat," Muchinsky added.
Nasser, whose family moved to Yemen last year to save money for the older siblings' college fees, keeps in touch over mobile phone with other Americans stranded in Yemen. She estimates at least 300 people are in the same situation as her family.
Jamal al-Labani was one of them. At the end of March, he was killed by shrapnel from a mortar strike while returning from Friday prayers at a mosque in Aden, his family told U.S. media.
Three civil rights organizations in the United States launched the website to log cases. And last week, Arab-American civil rights groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. secretaries of state and defense on behalf of dozens of U.S. citizens stuck in Yemen.
“I don't see the State Department doing anything. It’s unfortunate. … The State Department has a duty to protect you,” said Abed Ayoub, legal and policy director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, one of the groups involved in the website’s creation.
Ayoub said those official alerts aren’t heeded because there are just too many.