Bagenalstown resident in Qatar: "The skies are booming more than ever"

SUSAN Reddy, 51, originally from Bagenalstown, has lived in Qatar for the best part of nine years. She has been following the shelter in place orders that the Qatari Ministry of the Interior have had in place since Saturday 28 February, when Iran launched its first missiles at Qatar.

Up until today Susan said that she felt safe staying in her apartment in Doha, Qatar's capital city, where she lives with her partner, who is also Irish. 

However today, 3 March, Susan said that the, "skies are booming more than ever with missiles so I'm not sure whether we will have to go take shelter now". 

Until now Susan and her partner have not felt the need to go down and shelter in her apartment complex's underground carpark, as others in the region have been doing. But the current volume of missile activity is making her consider it. 

For Susan the past 24 hours have been fairly transformative in terms of how she feels about her safety in Doha. 

Qatar's airspace is currently closed and no commercial flights are able to leave the country. 

"Even if I wanted to go home, I can't. I don't like that" Susan said. 

Susan told The Nationalist that if she had been offered an evacuation flight by the Irish government yesterday she would have declined the offer, but events over the past day have meant that today she would accept it. The Irish government are yet to offer any evacuation flights, though it is understood that they are working on putting some in place. 

Susan said that she would accept the evacuation as firstly, "I don't know what the future holds. I don't know how much weaponry, how much of a defense capacity Qatar has, and how long it can go on for. Donald Trump is now saying that this could go on for more than four weeks. I don't know that this country will be able to protect us in four weeks. I would probably evacuate simply because I don't want to take that risk."

Another factor in Susan's decision to potentially evacuate would be the stress that being in Qatar is causing her loved ones back home. Though Susan described her mother as very independent and said that she has never held her back from exploring the world, she knows that the situation at present is causing extreme worry.

"I know from her texts that she is worried. She's constantly instructing me to stay safe. And you don't want to lay that at a parents' head," Susan said. 

The decision to evacuate would not be one that Susan and her partner would take lightly, "I have a job here. My partner has a job here. This is where we live. This is where our income comes from."

Susan works as a teacher in an English school in Doha. Though the Qatari government instructed schools to go to remote learning Susan is not currently able to access her school's remote learning software, as it is hosted on Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services data centres in the region, in Dubai and Bahrain, have both been damaged by Iranian missile strikes.

"We are trying to offer asynchronous learning to students. So that's quite telling," Susan said. 

Susan expressed frustration that Ireland does not have an embassy in Qatar.

"I don't like that we don't have an embassy here. Our closest embassy is in Abu Dhabi." Susan said.

However Susan said that she feels very lucky to live in Qatar.

"There's missiles in the sky all the time. Some are frighteningly close and they make the building reverberate and that's not pleasant, but they are being intercepted," Susan. "The level of interception makes us feel reassured. The Qatari Defence Forces are meeting the missiles in the sky. Thankfully, though there have been some injuries, there have been no fatalities in Qatar."