What's the most logical way to complete this passage?

People in cars and on bikes whizzed by Moustafa Mohamad as he sat on a sidewalk in Washington one day not so long ago. Commuters poured out of the Dupont Circle Metro station and rushed by on their way to school or work. Tourists rumbled by on a double-decker bus. Mohamad hoped some of them paused to take notice of him. He hoped that somehow his presence on the sidewalk would help relatives and friends nearly 9,400 miles away, in his hometown -- the besieged Syrian city of Kobani. That city near the Turkish border has been the site of intense fighting for weeks between ISIS extremists and Kurdish forces backed by fighter jets and bombers from the United States and other countries.

He said he and the other students were on buses, riding home from school after final exams, when
ISIS fighters in pickups stopped them.