''They didn't tell you what was happening in Yemen, no one was even interested in covering the news. The only way to really know what was happening was through social media and I was seeing the pictures on social media when I was hearing the airstrikes in Yemen. When I was hearing ''Allahu akbar'' and people were shouting in the streets … that's it, I felt this is insane.''

The account of Samawi's audacious international rescue is outlined in his memoir The Fox Hunt, released this month in the US, Britain and Australia. The book has been picked up for film adaption by Fox 2000, with La La Land producer Marc Platt on board alongside Oscar-winner Josh Singer (Spotlight) as the screenwriter.

Samawi's odyssey began many years before with another book, the Bible, offered to him by a Canadian English-language teacher, in exchange for Samawi's gift of the Koran. He read the Christian holy text to find mistakes and prove Islam was the one true path. ''I wanted to find the 'a-ha!', that 'my book is much better than this book', but it opened my eyes to how similar the Bible is to the Koran.''

The son of doctors, Samawi had been raised a devout Muslim. When he was not yet a year old, a stroke withered his right arm, leg, hand and foot. Initially, his parents put their faith in medical science but without a miracle, they doubled down on prayer.

While telling his mother he wanted to save his friend's soul, Samawi took his many questions about the faiths to Facebook. A user pointed him to a Facebook group for Jews and Arabs working towards peace. It was the time of the Arab Spring.

As Samawi's mind expanded in his conversations on Facebook and Twitter, he took a job at an NGO, travelling to Bosnia for an interfaith leadership conference.

Meanwhile Shiite Houthi rebels stormed his home town and took control of the city and in January 2015 placed Yemeni president Abed Rabbu Mansour Hadi under house arrest. On January 22, 2015, the day Hadi announced his resignation, Samawi received his first anonymous death threat, accusing him of recruiting for the Israeli spy agency Mossad.

Samawi went to a peace-building and leadership conference in Jordan and returned to his home town with fighters in the street. Hadi escaped house arrest and fled to Aden in the country's south. On March 16 Samawi took a job with Oxfam in the new ''capital'', only to find that his light skin and northern features made him a marked man for militants.

Houthi rebels mobilise to fight pro-government forces in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, in 2017.

Photo: AP

Three days later Houthis stormed Aden International Airport, Hadi fled to Saudi Arabia and Samawi took refuge in his bathroom and sent messages to his Facebook friends. Daniel Pincus, a medical engineer, was at a Jewish wedding in Brooklyn and immediately responded. Megan Hallahan in Tel Aviv relayed Samawi's urgent email to Natasha Westheimer, a water scientist also working in Israel, and to Justin Hefter, a tech entrepreneur skiing in Utah. Both had met the Yemeni briefly in Jordan.

''The biggest hope I had was if someone brought food for me,'' Samawi recalls. ''Or if someone can tell me, 'Come stay in this place with us'. I was calling friends, by the way, in Aden that could help out, but everyone was trying to escape themselves. No one had the time to come and actually help me. You can imagine there was a war and there are air strikes. I was really feeling alone, I was really feeling that this was the end of my life.''

Melbourne-born Westheimer remembers Samawi had presented a social enterprise he dreamed of starting – a recipe builder application based on what the user finds in their pantry – perfect, he had said, for those with limited access to food supplies. ''He was driven, passionate, and humble,'' she adds.

As someone who worked in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories for a couple of years, Westheimer was also aware of the danger Samawi faced. She reached out to conference participants and contacts she had made during an internship with the US State Department. These proved invaluable during Samawi's eventual evacuation.

The last time Samawi had seen Pincus he was spinning on his head, breakdancing at the same conference where he had met Westheimer.

Pincus spoke with a retired US military operative who offered to evacuate Samawi from Yemen by air for $US50,000, but when the Saudis declared a no-fly zone, the Facebook friends turned to the embassies that were evacuating their citizens. India was sending a boat in three to four days – could they work their contacts to get him on board?

For each of Samawi's rescuers it was a moment of deep self-reflection. Pincus' paternal grandparents had escaped the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.

Westheimer's grandmother had been born in a concentration camp in southern France but had never shared her story. With her grandfather, Westheimer had retraced her familys footsteps to find a diary that her grandmothers father had sold following their liberation.

''From my great-grandfathers diary, it was clear that he believed nobody should be persecuted for what they believed in, and that everyone deserved the right to live free from oppression and with the freedom that my family now had,'' Westheimer says. ''So this belief became a part of me, and drove me to respond to Mohammeds request.''

A water truck provides limited water supplies to residents in the Amran governorate in Yemen in March.

Photo: AAP

Samawi seriously considered suicide three times during his escape. Death by his own hand was preferable to torture by al-Qaeda fighters. As missiles flew so did emails, texts and calls between Washington DC, the US Congress, and the Indian embassy in Yemen. Westheimer was always online, keeping his spirits up.

Standing shivering dockside in the dying light on April 4 waiting for the return of a fishing vessel to collect the last Yemeni evacuees was one of the longest moments of Samawi's life.

''Of course, its very emotional to hear someone on the phone, scared for their lives – especially knowing that this was happening in the context of a violent civil war,'' Westheimer says. ''Yet across 10 time zones, at least four of us were working around the clock to make progress in the evacuation effort – we barely had time to stop and be nervous.''

The energy sustained Samawi: ''They were with me all the time in some way, every time I was sending them message, less than a minute they'd respond to me. I'd be thinking 'Are they sleeping?' I didn't give up because I know they didn't give up on me.''

Samawi now lives in Miami, Florida, studying interfaith relations. He remains a practising Muslim. He reunited with his four online friends only two weeks ago, at the launch of his book.

''It was kind of strange but also emotional, I speak with them almost every day,'' Samawi says. ''We have always been in communication but never in one room together. I don't have family here, but this is my family too.''

The aftermath of a bombing that destroyed three factories in Sanaa, Yemen, in 2016.

Photo: The New York Times

Only after the team received confirmation that their friend had boarded the ship to Djibouti, Ethiopia, did they stop, in shock, and think about what just happened.

''We could barely believe it,'' Westheimer says. ''And in the background of it all, I knew that Mohammed was just one of the millions trapped in the middle of Yemen's war. This all happened at a time where we started seeing some of the highest numbers of refugees and asylum seekers across the world and an increasing number of countries that started closing their borders. In 2017, there were 65.6 million displaced peoples in the world – thats 13 times the population of Sydney.''

While worried about reliving the trauma, Samawi wanted to tell his story for his countrymen, and family, still stuck in a war zone. ''If you think I have a great story, wait for the 22 million who can't tell their story because they are stuck in a war zone and there is no airport even, so they can't leave the country,'' he says. ''I feel I have the responsibility to speak about what's happening in Yemen. Every day I hear the horrible news and how many have been killed. I feel as though I want to help Yemenis. I lost two of my friends.

''What people don't understand is I'm still struggling, I still see a therapist. Every day I wake up [to] my phone alarm, every day Yemenis are waking up to an air strike, that's what is happening, so I really believe God brought me out for a reason. I hope I can make a difference and people focus on what's happening in Yemen, that's my goal.''

Comments disabled

Linda Morris

Linda Morris is an arts and books writer for The Sydney Morning Herald.

Morning & Afternoon Newsletter

Delivered Mon–Fri.