According to the Asian Law Caucus, dozens of American citizens who may have been born in Yemen are being held in the war-torn country, stranded, and unable to return to the U.S. because the embassy there stripped them of their passports. Among those was 64-year-old San Francisco resident Mosed Shaye Omar who left Yemen for the U.S. in 1972 and has been a citizen here since 1978.

As Bay City News reports, Omar traveled to Yemen in 2012 in order to retrieve a young daughter, then 13, and bring her back to the U.S., where he has multiple children and grandchildren. After trying to get her a passport, he was called into the embassy where his own passport was confiscated. He then says after a lengthy delay he was tricked into a signing a confession that said he'd been issued a Yemeni passport in 1972 under a false name, and that his real name was Yasid Mohammed Ali Alghazali.

That was in December 2013. In February 2014 he was granted a one-way travel document that allowed him back to U.S., to return to his family in San Francisco. But now he's suing Secretary of State John Kerry and the State Department for the return of his passport, because he wants to return to Yemen in order to help his daughter escape.

"I want to help her get out of the war," Omar said to the Chronicle outside a federal courthouse Monday.

The lawsuit, brought on Omar's behalf by the Asian Law Caucus, alleges that there are dozens more like Omar on whom the State Department has turned their backs. Al Jazeera America and the Guardian have both reported on similar circumstances in which Yemeni-Americans were detained and interrogated, as Omar was, and whose passports were also confiscated at the U.S. embassy in Sana’a.

Meanwhile, because there is no longer a working airport in Sana'a, the embassy issues regular statements on their website about ships passing through that can take U.S. citizens to Djibouti and elsewhere. As of today there was an announcement that Saudi Arabia may have ended its airstrike campaign in the country.

Previously: SF Man Gets Out Of War-Torn Yemen, With Great Difficulty