Seven years after his family was forced out of Yemen due to the civil war there, Haroon Kamal completed his CBSE Class 10 exam with flying colours from a school at Koovalloor near Kothamangalam.
The son of Kamal Muhamed, a Kerala-based businessman-philanthropist and Leila Nasher Mohamed of Yemen, Haroon scored 97% marks in the exam from Irshadiyya Public School. Haroon’s family had to leave Yemen for Kerala in 2015 amid the war between Saudi Arabia and Yemeni rebels. He had been a student of Yemen Modern School in Sanna, which follows an American syllabus, when he left the country.
The evacuation took place at short notice from the Ministry of External Affairs, and Haroon could not obtain the transfer certificate from his school, which put a question mark over his schooling in Kerala. Moreover, he knew only Arabic and English. He was unable to join a new school without the necessary documents. His father then made a special request to the Indian authorities to help his son with a letter about the circumstances that forced his family to leave Yemen and he got it.
