Syrian refugee’s joy at admission to Georgetown University goes viral

Letitia Denham

It has been a long journey to that moment, when the 25-year-old received news of his admission while returning to Sweden after a public speaking engagement last week. In the early days of the Syrian uprising, Mr Alshogre was arrested for protesting seven times between 2011 and 2013.  As the country […]

It has been a long journey to that moment, when the 25-year-old received news of his admission while returning to Sweden after a public speaking engagement last week.

In the early days of the Syrian uprising, Mr Alshogre was arrested for protesting seven times between 2011 and 2013.  As the country descended into a brutal civil war, the teenager spent three  years in the dungeons of President Bashar Al Assad.

In prison he says he was subjected to daily torture and starvation, which killed his two cousins he was arrested alongside. During his detention, Mr AlShogre says his father and two brothers were killed in a massacre in his village by Syrian government forces. 

In a Damascus detention centre he was tasked with removing the bodies of dead prisoners and numbering their foreheads.

Mr AlShogre and his cousins were among the nearly 128,000 Syrians who disappeared after being arrested, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, which estimates that some 14,000 were killed under torture.

By the time his mother had raised enough money to pay a bribe for his release, Mr Alshogre says he weighed 34 kilograms, suffered from tuberculosis and was near death. 

Following his release, Mr AlShogre fled Syria, first for Turkey and then to Sweden, where he dedicated himself to his late father’s dreams for his education. 

“In Sweden I had to redo three years of high school, that was shocking to me to take me three years back in my life after prison had taken me back three years,” he recalls. 

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