It's been a harrowing last few months for Eman al-Obeidy. First she burst into a Tripoli hotel to inform foreign journalists that she'd been gang-raped by Muammar Qaddafi's troops. Then she escaped informal house arrest in Tripoli by fleeing to Tunisia and then Qatar, only to be forcibly deported back to rebel-held eastern Libya last week, potentially because she'd fallen out of favor with the Libyan opposition. Today, according to CNN, which has been tracking this story closely, al-Obeidy arrived at a refugee facility in Romania. The U.S. State Department is working closely with European and Libyan officials to resettle al-Obeidy as a refugee in another country (she's expressed an interest in living in the U.S.), but the process could take weeks.

The news comes on the same day that the Qatar-based newspaper The Peninsula disputed al-Obeidy's claim that she was beaten and deported by Qatari authorities. The paper, citing an unnamed source, reported that al-Obeidy left Qatar on a plane carrying relief supplies to the rebel stronghold of Benghazi because she had an expired visa.

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Uri Friedman