In Solidarity: The Other Side of Hope

Syria Programme

In Solidarity: The Other Side of Hope

These stories capture the essence of the collaborative partnerships that lie at the heart of Cara’s country programmes.

Cara was founded in May 1933 by leading UK-based academics, scientists and public figures of the day, as a rescue mission for academics being forced out of their posts by the Nazi regime on racial grounds. Its mission was defined as ‘the relief of suffering and the defence of learning and science’. From 1933 to 1939, over 1,500 academics at risk were helped to escape and rebuild their lives in the UK, USA and other countries where they made important contributions to their fields and cultural life. Sixteen were awarded Nobel Prizes.

90 years on, Cara’s work remains as important as ever. Recent and ongoing crises have led to a sharp increase in applications to the Cara Fellowship Programme, rising from 160 in 2020/21 to 1,105 in 2021/22, in addition to those being supported through Cara’s country programmes. These last, run in parallel with the Fellowship Programme, are triggered by evidence of targeted attacks on a country’s higher education sector or its academics as a group. Over the past two decades, Cara has instigated country programmes for Iraq (2006-12), Zimbabwe (2009-12) and Syria (2016-ongoing), supporting those who have been forced into exile in neighbouring countries, or who continue to work in difficult contexts to ensure continued access to higher education, despite the risks.

’The ‘Cara Network’, 135 UK universities and research institutes, plays a vital role in supporting both programmes, providing temporary sanctuary in the form of doctoral and post-doctoral placements, as well as in-kind and financial support. Individual support is equally vital, with over 500 university experts currently involved as volunteers in the Syria Programme in a variety of developmental and collaborative partnerships.

The Cara Council oversees Cara’s work informed by the Finance & General Purposes Committee (F&GPC) its executive body. Country Programme Steering Committees, made up of F&GPC members, are formed at the launch of a new country programme. Responsibility for the day-to-day running of Cara lies with the Cara CEO, Stephen Wordsworth.

PEOPLE OF THE EARTH

Dr Shaher Abdullateef

Based between Turkey, Germany and northwest Syria, Dr Shaher Abdullateef is an independent researcher, agronomist and environmental activist who advocates for food security and development in Syria, where millions of war-weary households grow food for consumption, especially in the northwestern rural areas where he is from. Yet, he explains, they are acutely food insecure, relying on food imports and NGO handouts just to survive inflationary increases in food prices that are 800% higher since the Syrian conflict began in 2011.

He is preoccupied by the challenges of an agricultural sector that has lost billions in productivity in the last decade. The human cost is unaccountable. Larger farmers, who gave Syria its reputation as the “breadbasket” of the Middle East, were deprived of their seeds, supply chains, infrastructure and government subsidies, and faced ruin. The basic agricultural and livestock extension system, which once enabled small rural family farms in villages to adjust to low rainfall, water and fuel shortages, or upsets in the market, collapsed across the country and in the northwest in particular, an area outside of government control, where people were abandoned to their own devices. Families were uprooted from their ancestral landscapes and

severed from their traditional environments, forced to flee northwards or outwards, and the country was drained of its teachers, farmers, academics - it’s life. But Syria is far from barren. People will return one day. Like plants and new strains, regrowing and rebalancing ecosystems. Abdullateef writes and speaks extensively about the role that higher education can play in rebuilding Syria. As a Cara Syria Programmefacilitated consultant, he has researched how Syrian academics, agricultural engineers and scientists have had to reorient lives and ambitions, adapting these to their changed landscapes. He is a specialist in many agricultural areas, but perhaps his oldest passion is hydroponics and the art of soilless cultivation, which he studied for his doctorate at the University of Berlin. At the time, hydroponics seemed a revolutionary science; a brand-new field in Syria, while in the West, private industry jealously guarded its potential and the military experimented with it for space travel and disaster scenarios. Now Abdullateef teaches it quite freely, along with other horticultural subjects, online to young agricultural students and farmers in N.W Syria and Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as for high technology application such as in Qatar. Hydroponic cultivation was always going to be a lucrative industry, and he is hoping it will help to raise incomes, as well as proving a useful technique in the hands of the people who are food insecure from war, environmental degradation and disease: “It’s a solution to produce enough foods and enhance food security in the world, but I hope that as people of the earth we don’t only produce our food using hydroponics or soilless cultivation systems.” For him, restoring food security in a vulnerable region, populated by people who weathered the storm of war, faced water shortages,

Shaher Abdullateef

Dr

“It’s a solution to produce enough foods and enhance food security in the world, but I hope that as people of the earth we don’t only produce our food using hydroponics or soilless cultivation systems.”

heatwaves in summer, disease, and now earthquakes, has become a moral imperative. “To think about rebuilding agricultural livelihoods into the long-term future is an act of extreme devotion.”

Abdullateef explains that the government’s priority before the war was to achieve food security at the expense of the people. It was a sector skewed towards large monocultural farms functioning within a fertiliserand pesticide-intensive system, where small farmers handed over wheat to the government at fixed prices, who provided only basic extension services. Production, including prices, was controlled, top-heavy and centralised, so that the political chaos of the war left farmers without representation or support. “They have had to organise themselves, to work independently without government support or control. Everything now depends on humanitarian aid projects that provide fertiliser and seeds, making things worse. Recently, NGOs tried to support them [farmers] by purchasing their products, but that isn’t sustainable.”

Priorities now must be to make sense of a changed world, a decade of lost farming techniques, technologies, and research. New approaches to agricultural production should include the introduction of improved crop varieties and more efficient water management to reawaken the possibilities of the land, but most importantly to restore confidence in the people who work the land and who have lost so much. It takes research to figure this out. As Abdullateef explains: “I should be there, but I can’t be. I can, however, carry out research and generate and share much needed knowledge on agricultural practices. This is what we think about. How can we, as academics both outside and inside Syria, contribute?”

Since 2018, a number of Cara Syria Programme-supported and spawned initiatives have evaluated livestock chains, food security, agricultural livelihoods and the environmental impact of the war in northwest Syria. Collaborations with researchers from Kent, Cambridge, Sussex, Aberdeen and Edinburgh Universities, as well as from Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. As Abdullateef says: “Through Cara, I found myself working with an interdisciplinary research team. We focused on food production, food security, farmers and agricultural workers, and health issues within these topics - a ‘one health’ approach.

“I

I can’t be. I can, however, carry out research and generate and share much needed knowledge on agricultural practices. This is what we think about. How can we, as academics both outside and inside Syria, contribute?”

When I heard about the Cara Syria Programme, it was for me, and I think for all my Syrian colleagues who had lost their university roles, a lifeline that re-empowered us. I came from a German University, so academic development wasn’t my main need, but Cara facilitated my connected to other academics and the ability to build a network, the result of which you now see in my world. It was very important to be reconnected with colleagues.”

He has been principal investigator on several of the projects including an agricultural e-learning collaboration with Dr Tom Parkinson, University of Kent, who he now counts as a friend and with whom he had coauthored three academic papers. Cara also introduced him to colleagues at the University of Sussex looking to collaborate on an innovative study Agricultural Voices Syria, initially using podcasts and later videos to transfer agricultural knowledge to Syrian farmers in NW Syria, building up a following of thousands. Through Cara, Abdullateef was also connected to the One Health FIELD network, and an AHRC-funded initiative led by Prof. Lisa Boden from the University of Edinburgh SyrianFoodFutures (SFF), another Cara Syria Programme initiated and facilitated collaboration involving Syrian, Turkish and UK researchers from Edinburgh, Kent and Aberdeen, focusing on food security through interdisciplinary, gendered, historic, religious, and folkloric perspectives including music. The Syrian Humming Project, an online soundscape of hums and songs sung by people across NW Syria, capturing the emotional and psychological memories of shared food in the context of family and celebration. Two connected humanities projects engaged

Dr Shaher Abdullateef

should be there, but

people who were not from the agricultural world, but who provided an archive of rarely shared memories linked to food. The project also spawned a graphic novel, May God Bless the Hand that Works, by Mackenzie Klema and Dr Ann-Christin Zuntz also from the University of Edinburgh, drawing on the stories of 80 Syrian agricultural workers in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and NW Syria between November 2020 and January 2021, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

When he talks about his family home in northwest Syria, in the agriculturally fertile governorate of Idlib, where his passion for horticultural sciences originated, he visibly brightens. His parents were farmers: “Before I was a researcher, I was a farmer. My father produced different crops. We had olive trees, grapes, vegetables, tomatoes, and eggplants. Where I’m from, people also produce lentils, wheat and chickpeas.” Although it was hard to labour on the farm while pursuing his studies at the University of Aleppo, he graduated with a first-class degree in Agricultural Engineering in 2003 gaining the “Best Student” prize in his academic year. He was awarded a distinction for his PG diploma in horticulture on the propagation of potato shoots using tissue culture, and won a PhD scholarship to study advanced Biotechnology, including a focus on soilless cultivation systems in Germany. In 2004, he was offered a teaching post at Aleppo University but was still studying in Germany with his young family. “It is not easy to pursue education when you come from a traditional farming family, but I worked very hard to get a scholarship to be able to complete my doctoral degree. When the war came, it was a big shock to me to find that all these things were suddenly lost. The topics I studied were not suited to Germany but to the Middle East.”

He was very homesick and, as soon as he received his doctorate, moved to the southern border of Turkey to be as near his homeland as he could safely get. His wife and children remained in Germany, hoping the war would soon end. “Next year? Each year we said, OK, we hope this is the last year. I didn’t imagine that the conflict would last so long.” The last time he saw his village, or his family since the outbreak of war, was in 2015. His brother, a teacher in a rural school, had been arrested

“Every day, he biked to school to teach the children and then return home. When they arrested him, the regime was sending a message to other teachers to leave the area and the school.”

and detained. He wasn’t involved in any military action, nor did he demonstrate: “Every day, he biked to school to teach the children and then return home. When they arrested him, the regime was sending a message to other teachers to leave the area and the school.” His parents left their village in Aleppo Governorate in 2019, the last significant battle of the conflict, and fled to the northwest.

Since 2022, he has been teaching and supervising online graduate projects for MSc students at Al-Zaytoonah University, in Azaz, Syria; working with a German NGO on a water management project; and managing various projects. He founded the now incorporated NGO, Syrian Academic Expertise for Agriculture and Food Security (SAE-AFS) bringing together a team of brilliant agricultural experts, working in exile and in NW Syria. They aspire to build a physical centre to provide research, technical and practical solutions, and information, where instructors can engage with farmers in person, rather than online, because that will enhance their learning. Along the way, he envisions teaching more hydroponics and other forms of green biotechnology to disseminate these skills. Until then, he believes he has found the right networks and affiliations, like-minded people who, like him, are defined by their creativity, freedom and commitment to social justice.

ALEPPIAN MOON

Dr Hala Mulki

In late 2019, amidst the Lebanese uprising, several female journalists covering the news were subjected to toxic online abuse. Dr Hala Mulki, a data scientist, who uses sentiment analysis, a natural language processing research field focused on analysing people’s opinions, explored the Arab Twittersphere to find views about the revolution.

She found extreme misogyny being perpetuated, yet it was not flagged by Twitter. “What I found sad is when it comes to low-resource languages, like Arabic, Twitter cannot always recognise the toxic content because it can’t understand colloquial Arabic, so misogyny is still there and misogynists can tweet against women without facing any consequences,” Mulki argues that if all the linguistic variations used to target women or minorities had been recognised by Twitter AI tools, for example, a policy that instantly recognises such abusive content would have been developed. “I can only talk about my domain.” She says, referring to Arabic speakers. “I expect that with English Twitter, some regulation can be successful.”

Mulki uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence to develop a machine learning-based model that understands Arabic dialects. She trains her model, feeding it thousands of linguistic inflexions

and dialects from across the Arab world. Sometimes there are foreign words in the dialect; sometimes, Arabic words are written in Latin letters, a form of transliteration that has come to be known as Arabizi.

Arabic sentiment analysis, the sifting, categorising and analysing of opinions research, is still in its infancy. Current language models that rely on official Arabic or Modern Standard Arabic don’t consider that people’s expressions in Arab social and political contexts are often colloquial and that most Arabic social media commentary is made using local dialects:

“I am Syrian but cannot understand Moroccan Arabic, which has different dialects flavoured with Spanish and Tamazight, amongst others. One word which might mean something in the Syrian dialect is the opposite in the Moroccan dialect. So, designing a universal model that can understand the opinion embedded in those dialects would be very beneficial for social-political studies.” Originally from Aleppo, Mulki currently lives in Ankara, Turkey, with her elderly parents, working for ORSAM, a think tank with its finger on the pulse of the most challenging political events in the Middle East.

Her work on dialects already contributes hugely to their analysis and reports. In addition, she can mine the Arab social media world for opinions about important issues such as elections and disinformation in different countries. Her work also has academic application in the political and social science field. “Computer engineering is without a soul”, she says, “but once you pair it with scientific and humanitarian research, it can result in novel ideas.” Her last research was a collaboration with Syrian colleagues supported by their Cara mentor, Dr Maria Kyriakidou, a

“What I found sad is when it comes to low-resource languages, like Arabic, Twitter cannot always recognise the toxic content because it can’t understand colloquial Arabic, so misogyny is still there and misogynists can tweet against women without facing any consequences,”

Senior Lecturer at the Cardiff University School of Journalism, Media and Culture. Over eight months in 2021, they collected more than 100,000 tweets from Turkish Twitter, of which 30,000 subjective tweets were analysed to explore the contentious debates about Syrians. Their conclusions were insightful: discriminatory views, mistrustful attitudes, hurtful opinions, and sometimes rampant toxicity circulated and retweeted by bots from as far away as Asia.

Mulki’s love affair with linguistics is rooted in her childhood in Syria. From age three, she started to learn English, but her mother’s library ignited her passion for Arabic in particular. Her mother taught Arabic, and her book collection inspired a love of the creative format of language in poetry. Mulki began to memorise and recite it: “The Arabic language is rich and fascinating,” she says. She studied computational linguistics as a subfield of computer engineering during her PhD, gradually becoming more interested in language processing and how it could shed light on the region’s cultures.

Mulki graduated from the University of Aleppo and lectured in computer engineering for eight years before the demonstrations broke out: “The students were the main protesters and, one day, I found myself giving a lecture to just three students out of 300 because all of them were out there protesting against the regime. “By 2012, all my siblings had already left.” She says, “I left suddenly with my mum and dad. It was not a hard decision. We went to Alexandria in Egypt, where my brother had a lot of friends who could help us.”

The family stayed in Egypt for a year; where Mulki tried to register to do her PhD at Alexandria University, but her application was denied for over nine months for unknown reasons. Finally, she won a scholarship to Selçuk University in Turkey to continue her doctoral work in computer engineering: “So we made another decision and came to Turkey in 2013. Here I am. I found a job. It is not academic, but I joined the ORSAM Center for Middle East Studies, where I discovered the importance of my research.”

At ORSAM, she has worked on the Tunisian elections, analysed disinformation in conflicts between Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia;

“The students were the main protesters and, one day, I found myself giving a lecture to just three students out of 300 because all of them were out there protesting against the regime.”

conspiracy theories during the pandemic in Kuwait. She gives talks to undergraduate students on disinformation and hate speech in social media, but it is her research straddling the social sciences that will be revolutionary in the socio-politico domain.

She first encountered Cara in 2013 when she was in Egypt. “A friend of mine warned me, ‘Don’t join Cara because it is a fake organisation. You cannot rely on them.’ She laughs now. A colleague of hers at ORSAM told her again about Cara. “’Cara is real? I asked, and he told me, it is!” She emailed Cara, convincing them that she was an academic, and met the research criteria despite working in a think tank rather than a university. She wrote a proposal explaining the implications of her work and how she needed to continue it. After a few months, she was accepted and became a Cara fellow. “After that, we wrote an academic journal paper, and now I am applying to international journals. It is my first time dealing with journals outside the computer science domain, and I am excited by this experience. I will start a remote Cara research incubation visit (RIV) with my mentor from Cardiff University, where I will work on misogyny during the 2022 World Cup, comparing traditional and social media. It is my first time dealing with traditional media, and this will result in novel research. Thankfully, due to the inability to leave my parents behind, Cara agreed that my RIV could be carried out remotely, during which I will be able to participate in online seminars and courses and learn how to write for the social sciences.”

ALEPPIAN MOON Dr Hala Mulki

HELIOTROPE

Dr Maria Kyriakidou

It is a testament to her feelings for Cara that Greek media scholar, Dr Maria Kyriakidou agrees to a conversation about her work amidst a busy afternoon, which includes catching a flight to Andalusia. An array of fascinating subjects emerge in the brief encounter. She talks about the recent pandemic and work spent analysing the different and competing lockdown rules, the reporting from the ICUs, the nightly fact-checking and conspiratorial fantasies, and the genuine political and socioeconomic upheaval which swept the world.

“We felt everything from then on would be about covid,” Kyriakidou recalls. “It was such a big moment for media coverage for public service broadcasting and for misinformation; everyone was watching the BBC and was also on social media. Part of our research was how people and different communities understood misinformation. People didn’t know what to believe. It was a very frightening time, but in the end, even researchers got a bit bored with it.”

Restless, perhaps, because, in the past 20 years, Kyriakidou’s work constantly swivels to capture the revolutions in communication, tracking how the media communicates or obfuscates stories, and how we as its audience, navigate mediated encounters with one another; how we

build honest relationships and discern meaning from accounts of the human condition in a globalized, interconnected world disoriented by catastrophic social and natural upheaval.

She describes herself as a migrant academic who grew up in northern Greece close to the border of Turkey and Bulgaria. She did her undergraduate work in Athens, and when she finished her studies, discovered she didn’t have a plan. “I couldn’t imagine myself doing normal work.  I thought I would apply for a scholarship and one thing led to another and I ended up being an academic. It was just random.” She got a scholarship to do her postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics and upon its completion ended up finding ground in the UK, making her life here, first getting a job at the University of East Anglia, then settling into her current appointment at Cardiff, a famous port town with a long history of successive waves of global seafaring migrants, where she feels embraced as an academic.

Seated in her sunny flat, in a city she thinks of as home, she feels she has been afforded the space to work on issues that bring her genuine satisfaction. “I like being an academic; the job suits me. You meet interesting people. As a woman and as a migrant in British academia, I have never been judged. I spoke, made my mistakes in English and nobody cared. My colleagues don’t care. My students don’t care. It’s an open space. As a woman, I never felt that I was victimised, at least not in my field!”

Cardiff University, which has “university of sanctuary status”, has a longstanding relationship with Cara, but Kyriakidou found out about working with Cara through one of her colleagues involved in a project with a Syrian academic. Now, at the mention of Hala Mulki, she smiles broadly, shakes her head in admiration, and says simply, “She is fire! She is brilliant.” and about her first time working with Cara, she says, it is “one of the best decisions I have ever made.”

It was a project on disinformation that brought Maria Kyriakidou and Dr Hala Mulki, a Syrian data scientist living in Turkey, together on her first Cara-sponsored research project. They began working during the pandemic, over Zoom, analysing over 30 thousand tweets from Turkish

Dr Maria Kyriakidou

Twitter about Syrians. The amount of vitriol against refugees was eye opening. Disinformation, she concedes, has long been around in politics, but post-Trump and Brexit, its growth has coincided with the rise of digital media and the use of such media by politicians, who have become more savvy in using social media, and who bypass journalists, tweeting their opinions directly. “We never thought disinformation would affect politics with a capital P and now it has, but we are also exaggerating our fears. We shouldn’t be so afraid of digital media because I don’t think the public is so easily duped. And at the same time, we worry so much about politicians lying to us, and yet we still allow disinformation about refugees to go unchallenged. We only focus on specific types of disinformation and not others, and in that respect, I thought the work that Hala and the team did was interesting because they showed how disinformation against refugees also links to cultural politics and parliamentary politics. She had all the data.” Kyriakidou explains that their experience delving into social media together using AI was a novel and data-driven experience: “She is an interesting case of a computer engineer, who has the willingness and the brain to move towards social science and combine both.  Her work, her interests, her focus really fits in with social sciences and the humanities, but her empirical and research skills are engineering and data science. She is a kind of a unicorn. These are the academics that we are really looking for.”

Kyriakidou had not expected to encounter such resonance on her first Cara mentoring project. She had been prepared to offer her expertise in publishing academic papers. Everyone in academia knows there are power asymmetries, that one has to deal with. Conforming to western academic rules, particularly longstanding European rules around publishing, is one such asymmetry. But publishing is only one way to collaborate. Syrian academics face many barriers: “They want to lecture, do research. So many who have found work in academia face prejudice and sometimes they do more work than their counterparts. Some of them are forced to leave academia and to get another job that will help them financially. In general, there is no visibility outside Syria or Turkey and that is why I think Cara is so important. You go to conferences on

“In general, there is no visibility outside Syria or Turkey and that is why I think Cara is so important. You go to conferences on the media, and you see Scandinavians, Americans, Europeans, mainly Western Europeans, no Syrians. It is not only their visibility in the broader academic world, but it is also very important to make their work known outside Syria through publishing.”

the media, and you see Scandinavians, Americans, Europeans, mainly Western Europeans, no Syrians. It is not only their visibility in the broader academic world, but it is also very important to make their work known outside Syria through publishing. Of course, if you ask an academic, most of them would like to go back and work in Syria, but for most it is impossible. For some it is survival. These are fully equipped academics like anybody else, but they have been just so unlucky.”

Kyriakidou initially thought of herself as useful, but now she thinks of Mulki, who will soon take up a remote Cara-related research fellowship at Cardiff University as a fellow travelling academic and wants to see her and others flourish. Beyond their shared interests in global affairs and identities, both are fiercely bright, deep thinkers and feminists, both think about the importance of information and its uses and misuses and are driven by a moral imperative to speak and write about the media.

Kyriakidou’s body of work contributes to a body of literature on the mediation of “distant suffering” in media representation–how we relate to the human suffering we watch on the screen, whether it is something distant or close by and how disempowering or informative it is for the ordinary citizen. Her publications cover the refugee crisis in Greece and crises such as the Indonesian Tsunami in 2004, and Hurricane Katrina and the Kashmir earthquake in 2005. “A lot of the literature says audiences cannot feel empathy or have compassion fatigue and therefore, cannot

HELIOTROPE Dr Maria Kyriakidou

relate. I think people do relate but they feel powerless, not only because this is far away but, as citizens, they feel that their decisions have no impact upon their own lives, let alone other peoples’. This powerlessness means sometimes people choose to switch off or become susceptible to easy and totalising narratives. “It’s the government that needs to do things and it’s the more powerful who need to change. Policies need to change a crisis that is much bigger than simply giving money to alleviate its symptoms.”

She thinks that a lot of responsibility lies with the media. “We saw that with the comparison with Syrian refugees and Ukrainian refugees. The media told us that this sad and horrific disaster is happening to people like us. Syrians are also people like us, but their story was presented as one of those things that happen during violent conflict in those faraway places, in those countries. So, the media constructs Syrians as others and Ukrainians as people like us. And we did see this as the way the public reacted in the way they opened their homes.”

The experience of working with Cara is one way to challenge powerlessness and to rediscover solidarity. “We watch and read news and we tend to think of suffering as something that happens to other people, to victims who live in bad buildings, who live in poor areas, who are victims of war and disaster of conflict and violence, so to meet academics who are just like us, highly educated, but who have gone through so much, was eye opening. We finally met last March [2022] at a Cara meeting in Istanbul. There was a snowstorm, but we loved it so much. I really loved it. It was so great, hearing people’s stories and understanding their experiences.”

SYRIA IS BEAUTIFUL

Professor Miassar Alhasan

When the earthquake happened, Professor Miassar Alhasan and his family were fast asleep in their home in Gaziantep, Turkey. They threw themselves on their daughter to protect her, then rushed out into the cold. He returned to retrieve some documents, and then they jumped into his car, driving until their petrol ran out. The petrol stations were closed, so they walked to where they saw other people gathering and sleeping and stayed there for a few days while the violent aftershocks continued.

“It’s the government that needs to do things and it’s the more powerful who need to change. Policies need to change a crisis that is much bigger than simply giving money to alleviate its symptoms.”

Alhasan made frantic phone calls to Al-Sham University, across the border in Azaz, northwest Syria where he works as rector, to see if his colleagues and students were safe. He was given different reports: people he knew had been rushed to hospital, an exam was stopped, colleagues were in shock, local NGOs were helping to pull people from under the rubble, and tents and water were being negotiated. Staff had offered some financial assistance to students, but the situation was too overwhelming and sudden. The students had lost relatives and returned to their villages and camps to look for their families. He was told that the regime had exploited the delivery of humanitarian aid and tried to take control. They shelled the towns most affected by the earthquake. The UN watched Syrians die for several days without offering any help. “They had to obtain permission

Professor Miassar Alhasan

from the criminal regime to rescue people from under the rubble. It was a very painful thing for us. Cara has played a very supportive role in this crisis. A few hours later, Cara called us after the earthquake to check on our safety. Kate (Robertson) called me while I was under the snow with our family. We were searching for a safe place. It was very emotional; all my colleagues agree. After that, Cara organised a fund to support affected academics, and our UK colleagues also contacted us to support us, asking who was still alive and who had died.”

In the face of disaster, it is natural to be fatalistic, but Alhasan’s students inspired him to imagine the future differently. They acted on the belief that people needed information. His civil engineering students went out into the local community and helped in the best way possible. For example, the river to the West had overflowed and was contaminated with sewage. “Some of those students travelled on an unsecured road (and I was in contact with them the whole time) to test the water. They went and informed the local people not to drink it”.

Other students examined the damage to buildings and offered to assist with securing houses and buildings via a community WhatsApp group for local information, “I knew it was dangerous and very unstable. I coordinated with them and several engineers,” Alhasan says. “They did the general surveys for all the buildings, helped some families to return to their homes and persuaded others to leave.”

Overnight, the students became the go-to source of information for the local community. The students explained the dangers of the aftershocks, the public health risks, and the dangers of spending long nights and days in the freezing cold. “Now they have moved to Afrin to continue their work there” he explains. “I used to run an NGO in Gaziantep and knew many people who could help; I wrote to a charity called Mercy without Limits, that agreed to support the students to continue their survey and help them rebuild people’s homes.”

A few days later, Alhasan penned an article for university world news appealing to the global higher education sector for help. He, in turn, explained to his family that he had to return to Al-Sham to assist. It was still standing with mostly new concrete buildings, and so had

“I love my country; I love my people. I think Syria is one of the most beautiful places in the world. They have been killing us for over fifty years. It is very difficult for a Syrian. We want to feel ourselves in the world.”

sustained minimal damage. Necessary lab equipment, however, had been destroyed: “It is not easy to buy more. Most of it was given to us by Cara, by NGOs. It is not easy. We established this institution with great difficulties, and you can’t imagine that in 65 seconds, you can lose everything. After two weeks, we resumed the second semester online, but most of our students don’t have laptops, so online is not an option, and we must continue in person.”

When the war broke out in 2011, Alhasan was teaching at the Assad Academy for Military Engineering in Aleppo. For 15 years, he taught engineering communications covering computers and data operating systems, modern and advanced control systems, advanced control lines, optical coordinators and intelligent control systems. He did his PhD in Penza, Russia, where he lived for five years. He liked Russia. Friends the family made there visited him in Syria. He returned to Syria, expecting to work as a professor at the Assad Academy for an unforeseeable period.

But the war transformed everyone’s life. Alhasan opposed the Assad regime and had no intention of taking up arms against the people. “I love my country; I love my people. I think Syria is one of the most beautiful places in the world. They have been killing us for over fifty years. It is very difficult for a Syrian. We want to feel ourselves in the world.”

Alhasan will never forget the Hama Uprising, or Massacre, as it is sometimes called. He was born and grew up in Hama, a pretty city on the banks of the Orontes River in west-central Syria. In 1982, the Syrian Arab Army besieged Hama for 27 days to quell an uprising by the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, whose discontent against al-Assad’s government stretched back to the 1970s. The massacre was so severe that people

“Many of my students stayed with me and followed me, and we established an NGO and built the first solar lamps in Syria in 2014. My young students wanted to do something. They didn’t want to give up to sadness. We had no electricity, so we made it from solar panels and a little battery. We first set them up in the dark streets of Aleppo, which the opposition forces held at that time. We also made a solar panel controller to track the movement of the sun. I got some suggestions and support from other engineers.”

were forbidden to talk about it. “At that time, there was no internet, no journalists.” But Alhasan recalls, “I was about 12 years old, and I remember people who were killed.”

He and his family moved west from Aleppo to Idlib, which was considered rebel territory at the time. “Many of my students stayed with me and followed me, and we established an NGO and built the first solar lamps in Syria in 2014. My young students wanted to do something. They didn’t want to give up to sadness. We had no electricity, so we made it from solar panels and a little battery. We first set them up in the dark streets of Aleppo, which the opposition forces held at that time. We also made a solar panel controller to track the movement of the sun. I got some suggestions and support from other engineers.”

Throughout the war, they used their engineering skills to help people.”I asked an NGO to send me wheelchairs, but they said it would be too expensive, so that I made contacts in Turkey and China. We bought two containers of second hand and damaged wheelchairs, motorised and repaired them. After that, I ordered a container of laptops, but none of them worked. We fixed them, using pieces from one to repair another

and from 700 broken laptops, we made about 473 and distributed them virtually free to students.”

From Idlib, he relocated to Gaziantep, Turkey, where he now lives, crossing the border to Al-Sham to teach a range of programmes: control engineering, control theory and automation, and sustainable energy systems. He feels rewarded when he can teach students how to stand on their own and be self-sufficient. Did he have a teacher who inspired him? It was a primary school teacher who taught his students how to love and planted in his students the idea of investing in one another.

Alhasan pauses. “You know, most of our students live in camps, and so that the campus, which is really poor compared to a national university, means a lot to them. They come to the campus and take photographs under the trees and in classrooms.”

In some sense, he explains, people want to return to their villages, to their towns, to be reunited with one another across regions and ideological lines. Living through one emergency after another, a war and an earthquake, makes it hard for him to trust in the future, but Syria’s beauty makes it hard for him to look away.

SYRIA IS BEAUTIFUL Professor Miassar Alhasan

SPARK OF THE SOIL

Dr Jonathan Bridge

In war, military strategy and tactics often ignore the impact fighting has on people or their land. Too often, no one is held accountable for the lingering effects of collapsing buildings, exploding bombs, and polluting contaminants – the toxic heavy metals transported through the food chain into nervous systems, organophosphorus nerve agents, dioxins, radionuclides, or deliberately introduced poisons that seep into soil and water, staying in the ecosystem for an indefinite period.

The war in Syria has been a colossal disaster and, in the northwest, a place of extreme humanitarian crises and a historically agricultural region, the soil had not been surveyed since 2011, even after a decade of war. In 2021, Professor Miassar Alhasan, Vice Rector of Al Sham University in NW Syria and a group of Syrian colleagues, all Cara Syria Programme participants, submitted a research proposal to Cara to conduct a regional soil survey. Dr Jonathan Bridge, an environmental geoscientist at Sheffield Hallam University, was invited by the Syria Programme to take on the role of team mentor. Now, in 2023, in the aftermath of the earthquakes, summer fires, new attacks and an ongoing cholera epidemic, the state of soil in this region is inevitably pushed to the bottom of the agenda: “People often talk about soil being a hidden casualty of war because it is

very easy to dismiss! I think everyone takes soil for granted wherever you are in the world.” Bridge says. “But it’s so fundamental to food security and human health, especially to people who are living hand to mouth and living in very close proximity to the soil in camps and tents and informal settlements, as they are in NW Syria”.

Although this was Bridge’s first time working as a research project mentor with Cara, his involvement with Cara stretches back some years. When working at the University of Liverpool, he hosted Syrian Cara Fellow Dr Ziad Abdeldayem, now working at Liverpool John Moores University. Almost ten years on, the soil project was an opportunity for them to work together as co-mentors on this critical environmental issue of concern to them both. “I’m very moved by the work people do and by the collaboration and friendships that have developed through Cara,” Bridge explained. “It is an extraordinary organisation, and the more I find out about it, and the more I talk to people working in it, the more impressed I am and the greater its importance seems to me. It’s a privilege to witness just a small part of the Cara Syria Programme and to support the academics as they work. They give so much to their homeland.”

The project sparked his passion because it encapsulated several aspects of his own research career: “I began looking at small-scale soils and nanoparticles, then at soil weathering, at environmental radioactivity and then catchment flood management.” The soils team was awarded a grant and, between them and their mentors, pooled resources and equipment from five different institutions in Syria, Turkey, and the UK.

Originally from East Kent, Bridge studied planetary science at University College London before progressing to a masters in environmental science and then moving to Sheffield and a PhD in environmental engineering as part of the University of Sheffield Groundwater Protection and Restoration Group. At Sheffield, Bridge was inspired by his supervisor Professor Steve Banwart, now Director of the Global Food and Environment Institute at Leeds, to study contaminants and colloids in soils: “He switched me on to just how important soil is in terms of underpinning global food supply and global biodiversity, and how at risk it is under agricultural intensification, climate change and erosion. I guess

Dr Jonathan Bridge

that was the spark. My other supervisor was Professor Louise Heathwaite, now at University of Lancaster. Her focus is large-scale, thinking about water and contaminant movement through landscapes and watersheds, and that’s the scale I’ve been working on more recently. They were very inspirational researchers, and looking back over my own career I can see I’ve charted a middle road.”

Work on the Cara Syria Programme-funded soil project began in 2021. The team pieced together studies using different methodologies from different surveys, one in Croatia, in the aftermath of the Yugoslav conflict in the 1990s and ones from Iran and Iraq, aligning their sampling and analysis methodology to that used by a major European Union topsoil survey carried out in the last decade. Due to security restrictions, the Syrian team was unable to sample as freely as they would have liked, working around several constraints to access sampling sites across the region. The enthusiasm and contribution of students at Al Sham University, in northwest Syria, was essential to the success of the project, as they were able to access locations in their hometowns and regions using their local knowledge and networks. Between July and September 2021, the students collected soil samples, characterising the sample sites: agricultural areas, backyards, allotments and roadside areas, all in the vicinity of 21 small towns in northwest Syria. Initially, the samples were sent to university labs in Turkey but needed

further study to understand the calibrations and quality control data. “At that point, Kate Robertson at Cara introduced us to Professor Duncan Pirrie, a geochemist at the University of South Wales.” Bridge explains. “Duncan was able to support reanalysis of the samples in the UK. With his help, Cara shipped the soil samples over to the UK for analysis at USW and the James Hutton Institute in Scotland, collaborating with Prof Lorna Dawson”. These data revealed a nuanced but important story about the state of soil in northwest Syria after a decade of conflict.

The ‘good’ news was that total concentrations of potentially toxic elements, often known as heavy metals, were broadly consistent with the pre-war data from topsoil analysis in the northwestern governorate of Aleppo, and with recent data from comparable regions in Turkey. The samples were not as polluted as in heavily industrialised regions in Syria, for example around Homs, or even industrial and urban soils from the UK or across Europe. However, nickel and chromium concentrations were alarmingly high, higher than typical European guideline thresholds, in mainly agricultural areas throughout the region. In a more localised area around Sarmada in Idlib province to the west of Aleppo, where some of the most intense direct and indirect impacts of conflict have been felt, cadmium, cobalt, and arsenic exceeded EU thresholds for safety and were three times higher than in nearby agrarian regions in southern Turkey. War has multiple indirect impacts - forced migration, informal settlements, unregulated industry, and a massive collapse of physical and regulatory infrastructure for environmental protection. In northwest Syria there has been a complete breakdown of the sewage infrastructure, and heavy metals or potentially toxic elements suspended in untreated water and dissolving into the soil have been discharged into rivers. That water is then pumped and applied to irrigate crops: “We believe that heavy metals contained within that wastewater, alongside things like cholera and other microbial pathogens, can accumulate in the soils, and the consequence of that over a decade of war is what we think we’re seeing. Previously good-quality agricultural soils are being progressively contaminated and degraded at the same time as the pathways of exposure for contaminants to reach people via soil are changing and becoming potentially more

Dr Jonathan Bridge

“People often talk about soil being a hidden casualty of war because it is very easy to dismiss! I think everyone takes soil for granted wherever you are in the world. But it’s so fundamental to food security and human health, especially to people who are living hand to mouth and living in very close proximity to the soil in camps and tents and informal settlements, as they are in NW Syria”

hazardous.” The team of researchers would like agricultural NGOs, who support farmers in the region, to include this on their agendas, and ideally, Bridge says, there needs to be further research so that people can understand the risks and develop safer ways of managing and eventually remediating the soil.

Since 2017, Bridge has taught environmental sciences at Sheffield Hallam. His current research on natural flood management interventions and catchment hydrology sees him at home in the Eastern Pennines, but he cherishes the international collegial relationships that have enabled collaborations abroad and in particular the impact made by Cara: “Academics talk an awful lot about having a ‘global academic community’, but a lot of inequality exists between the mostly rich Western institutions and the rest of the world. When we talk about mobility and the ability to work with scientists or researchers from anywhere across the world, that’s often wealthy researchers from high income countries travelling and applying their science or working on their own agenda. Cara is extraordinary in that it gives real meaning to the idea of an equitable academic community that works to provide academics who are in extremis a way to safety and the continuation of their academic work. That has to be fundamental to a civilised global academy – otherwise, what are we here for?”

RETURN FLOW

Dr Kifah Mohamad Hsayan

Dr Kifah Mohamad Hsayan is a civil engineer who studied water engineering. She likes water and has gone where she needs to go to fulfil her purpose. Having lived through war and conflict in Syria, it is good to hear that she and her family are settled in Pamukkale, in the Denizli Province of southwestern Turkey, a town famed for its healing thermal spring waters. Still, she has experienced a certain restlessness and loss of purpose there, purpose that is slowly being restored by the gradual return to her career.

“Cara is extraordinary in that it gives real meaning to the idea of an equitable academic community that works to provide academics who are in extremis a way to safety and the continuation of their academic work. That has to be fundamental to a civilised global academy - otherwise, what are we here for?”

Growing up in Damascus, Hsayan giggles quietly; she almost went into medicine. There was an opportunity to learn dentistry in Homs, but her father forbade any of his children to study outside of Damascus. “So, I went to study civil engineering. I liked it! Nobody knows the way you will go in the future. So, you find yourself in unexpected places. I liked it when I entered civil engineering, so I continued and got my BA, Master’s, and PhD.”

She can tell you about any of the great watersheds of the Middle East and North African region - the Nile River, the Jordan Basin, and its flow into the Dead Sea, or the Tigris-Euphrates of her native Syria and the Turkish region, which journeys through Iraq into the Arabian Gulf.

Dr Kifah Mohamad Hsayan

“My research looked at how some Arab countries could manage their water more effectively. For example, growing crops that require lots of water in areas rich in water, which can be exported to areas with limited water resources. This will allow these areas to focus their limited water resources on less-water-oriented outputs, for instance within the industrial sector.”

She can tell you where water is political, when it is mismanaged due to lack of awareness on the part of those who exploit it, or when it is used as an infinite resource where it is finite. Some countries, most critically Libya where the ‘Great Man-Made River’ is being fed by the world’s largest fossil Nubian sandstone aquifer system, are using non-renewable waters and depleting irreplaceable groundwater reserves. She has studied traditional surface groundwater resources such as wells and oases, traditional irrigation, reservoirs and aquifers, and moved beyond traditional engineering to study virtual water. In fact, Hsayan was the first person in the Arab world to conduct studies and write her PhD thesis on virtual water, a revolutionary calculation method pioneered by Professor John Anthony Allan, which has changed the nature of trade policy and research, especially in water-scarce areas. “My research looked at how some Arab countries could manage their water more effectively. For example, growing crops that require lots of water in areas rich in water, which can be exported to areas with limited water resources. This will allow these areas to focus their limited water resources on lesswater-oriented outputs, for instance within the industrial sector.”

The relatively new field of calculating the amount of embedded water used at every step along the production chain is intangible and difficult to understand but will help to maximise the efficient use of renewable and transportable water resources. Her PhD supervisor at Cairo University,

where she studied, suggested this area of study to her saying that understanding of the concept would grow over time. Hsayan completed her PhD in 2008, the same year Professor Allan won the Stockholm Water Prize for his work on virtual water.

Behind her desk in her makeshift balcony office is a window. It is raining outside. She explains what has happened in the seven years since she left Syria, first for Lebanon and then Turkey. Having to start your life again can be all-consuming. Adapting to the pressures of a new environment can uproot and isolate you from your past. Pamukkale has been safe for the family. Her husband taught at the local university but now teaches at Denizli Dini Yüksek İhtisas Merkezi. Her three children, aged 15, 13 and 10, have scant memories of Syria, if any. Hsayan has struggled not to think about loved ones left behind or her lifeencompassing academic work, which was put on hold. “It is a break,” she says, “but I don’t feel it as a rest. I feel that I am under a lot of stress, missing my work a lot. I am very grateful to Cara because it returned me to the academic environment again. I know many Syrian academics from Cara, and this opened opportunities for them to return again to an academic environment.”

The last time Hsayan was in an academic environment was in 2016, when she taught at the University of Damascus. “Both my husband and I were working there. I was teaching in the Engineering department, and he was teaching in the History department, but after the outbreak of the war, the dynamics of the department changed a lot. Students started to harass their lecturers and threatened them. I was not personally subjected to it, but I saw my colleagues going through it, especially those students whose fathers were enrolled in official or military positions.” They also had to pass through checkpoints around the city and were harassed. Her husband’s two brothers were arrested, and her brother-inlaw died while detained. “Because of my husband’s political views and because he was an activist, we thought it was better to leave Syria. So we went to Lebanon, and planned to move to a third county, until he secured a post in the Faculty of Theology at Pammukale University.”

Aside from revisiting her work on virtual water, in the past year, she has Dr

Kifah Mohamad Hsayan

been teaching the Turkish curricula part-time to Syrian engineers who need to take their Turkish equivalence tests. But her most exciting news is her current collaboration with Bristol University on a study on the state of water in northwest Syria: “It has been beneficial for me because I’ve returned to my own work!” She smiles, modestly and unexpectedly slipping news into the conversation about her return to speaking English. “Cara assisted me when I joined the Syrian academic programme. First, I returned to speaking English. It had been a long time since I had used it. As an academic, you need to know English. Second, Cara arranged research sessions: how to embark upon research, to understand the criteria for scientific journals to publish your research, and most importantly, my research visit to the UK, to the University of Bristol. It was a huge chance and a big opportunity to reconnect with a real academic environment. I can’t forget that I am an academic. I am very focused on my project with Bristol University.”

With Bristol, she will study how water is accessed by the 1.8 million internally displaced persons who live in the camps in northwest Syria, camps established in an emergency without long-term planning, in addition to years of drought and Syria’s low annual precipitation, and poor water distribution. The patchwork of different parties controlling the region has resulted in a situation where people’s rights and needs have been profoundly neglected. “I hope this project will be useful for making decisions and knowing what is happening in the camps. The camps in the northwest don’t comply with UNHCR’s water supply criteria. Now these are ten years in existence, and according to the UN, this is a long-term situation. It has almost been a decade since people have lived in the temporary settlements of northwest Syria. There were various reasons for moving there. Some of them were persecuted by security services. Others were not willing to fight and did not want to be conscripted. Some people were shelled and had nowhere to go. In El Ghouta, Homs and many other areas, people underwent forced displacement and were sent to the northwest. People are now building permanent settlements, so soon, these camps will turn into towns and cities.”

The study will evaluate water resources used for internally displaced

“Cara assisted me when I joined the Syrian academic programme. First, I returned to speaking English. It had been a long time since I had used it. As an academic, you need to know English. Second, Cara arranged research sessions: how to embark upon research, to understand the criteria for scientific journals to publish your research, and most importantly, my research visit to the UK, to the University of Bristol. It was a huge chance and a big opportunity to reconnect with a real academic environment.

I can’t forget that I am an academic. I am very focused on my project with Bristol University.”

persons’ camps in the northwest of Syria, as well as studying the effects of climate change on them. Current practices are unethical and unsustainable. Water affects everything, from food insecurity to public health. As a water engineer and humanitarian, Hsayan fervently hopes that the study will provide a different approach to managing the region’s water resources, so that her fellow Syrians will, at least, have this fundamental right restored to them.

Dr Kifah Mohamad Hsayan

SCENARIOS OF RECONSTRUCTION

Dr Abdulkader Rashwani

“After the crisis, I thought, what I can do to help,” says Dr Abdulkader Rashwani, a Syrian chemist from Aleppo.

“Then it came to me: Concrete! That’s my speciality. There was so much rubble in the region, and I began to think we can reuse this material for short or mid-term to help rebuild!” In 2018, Rashwani embarked on a collaborative research project with the University of Sheffield, the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, facilitated by the Cara Syria Programme, to recycle the rubble and debris from collapsed buildings for new construction materials in the hope that rebuilding would be faster and less costly when the war was truly over.

Chemists can experiment in solitude on their work, remaining underappreciated for their discoveries for years until the community around them finally begins to make sense of their work’s importance. This has been the story for Rashwani who has focused on concrete technologies in Syria for over a decade. At the University of Aleppo, he wrote a doctoral thesis on improving the manufacture of local materials to make the fine aggregates that make up Portland cement; then, in 2016, when he joined Sham University in northwest Syria as an assistant professor (he is now vice-rector), he began to develop novel formulations, test new materials,

and dream of ways to make Syria, and other places, reverse physical destruction caused by conflict. The goal: to become more sustainable and reliant on homegrown innovations. “Academics are not ordinary people”, he says, “We are educated people, so if we don’t understand the issue or have any interest, then why are we here? Why are we alive?”

After the February 2023 earthquakes, the wider local and international community realised the significance of this seemingly singular work. An article was published in the Guardian about rebuilding Syria from recycled aggregate, and people from all over the world began to get in touch. “Now the community understands what we were doing.” Rashwani says, “Before that, the community thought this was a project with no real purpose. In March alone, I received many emails about our project because of the earthquakes. Contractors wrote to me on LinkedIn having seen The Guardian article because they were interested exploring our work for their own industries. A company from England wanted to know whether we had tested for the presence of asbestos in the rubble. Companies from Ukraine said, ‘We have a lot of rubble; we need your experience!’ A German company finally offered to help with much-needed equipment. We are at the first stage, but it looks hopeful.”

Rashwani and the team had to thoroughly assess the recycled concrete aggregate to confirm its reuse potential. They collected and tested materials and began to simulate reconstruction scenarios. The chemical and physical properties of the aggregate were measured, and evidence provided that recycled aggregate can be used as a sustainable alternative to natural coarse aggregates in concrete.  Their work is still in its infancy. It needs to be scaled up, and special equipment needs to be secured, but a German company has promised to help. Rashwani thinks daily about how to get a project building on their work off the ground. “We will do it bit by bit, small initiatives. We need to do some economic and technological research to finalise it. Is it suitable, for example, to bring all this debris into one place or bring a stationary crusher to every site?”

Rashwani has ingenious ideas when it comes to cementitious materials. He has developed a Syrian version of LC3, a novel cement

Dr Abdulkader Rashwani

based on a blend of limestone and calcined clay, which can reduce CO2 emissions by up to 40%. It is cost-effective and does not require capitalintensive work (which is good because the war paralysed the concrete industry,) and it performs.

“I have theoretical and practical experience in concrete and building materials,” he says proudly. While studying to be a chemist at Aleppo University, where he gained both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees, he also worked at a ready-mix concrete factory as the chemistry lab supervisor and gained considerable experience in the field of chemical engineering whilst making new design-mixes. “I went there every morning, and every day we tested different aggregates in the lab and improved the mixes for them. Also, we added new chemicals to the concrete. I also introduced several by-products in this factory.” Those by-products came from vegetable oil waste used to power the furnaces. Rashwani surveyed the industry and concluded that Syria had the resources, but issues with energy and poor cement hindered its growth. “The innovation in my PhD was to add new materials like zeolite and gypsum to the cement.” He discusses the percentages used as if he were producing a cake; for example, which ingredient might replace clinker, and expensive imports that might be substituted with even better materials, making energy savings here, reducing pollution there, as well as other ground-breaking findings.

In retrospect, he sees that official myopia sometimes hindered Syria’s research infrastructure. It was the factory in his native Aleppo that afforded him the space to experiment. After he completed his thesis, which he published in 2010, Rashwani sent a formal letter to the Ministry of Industry. “I told them that Zeolite was a new material and useful for our country etc., but there was no answer. Other people in our lab came up with innovations, but the government did not help. As a chemist, there are many things we can do, but nobody cares about it. In our lab, my friend worked with refractory materials in bricks and stones. We used them inside the furnace to make cement and glass. Syria imported bricks, but here, he had prepared a high-quality local version which would prevent having to import, but nobody cares.” The Ministry of Industry replaced

“I didn’t want to leave my people. So now I cross the border every day. Two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. Every day, four hours on the road. I have a goal. To support people. I don’t want to leave them alone, I want to give them hope for the future. We must think as a society, not individuals or a family.”

the factory owner once the war began, making it difficult for Rashwani to re-enter his lab and causing him some anxiety. The factory was eventually shelled and destroyed, and with it, enormous technical capability.

Upon graduation, Rashwani accepted a teaching position in the civil engineering department at Al-Baath University, half an hour away by car in the city of Homs. He drove there intending to start a new life, but once the uprisings began, he had to abandon his teaching position: “You know, I didn’t accept the war,” he says, “I was not going to fight. About 40 per cent of my city was destroyed by the war. So, I looked for a safe place, and that place was Turkey.”

Arriving in Gaziantep in 2013, where he and his young family still live today, he began to teach chemistry in a high school until his PhD was accredited by the Turkish authorities, a relatively swift process due to his published research. Gaziantep became a not-too-unfamiliar new home of sorts: “It is like Aleppo. There is also a citadel here, like in my city. My wife is covered, so she feels free here, and at least my family is safe.” But the reality of Syria tugged at him, and in 2016, when an opportunity came for him to return to join old colleagues at Sham University in nonregime Northwestern Syria, he did not hesitate: “I didn’t want to leave my people. So now I cross the border every day. Two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. Every day, four hours on the road. I have a goal. To support people. I don’t want to leave them alone, I want to give them hope for the future. We must think as a society, not individuals or a family.”

Dr Abdulkader Rashwani

Rashwani is one of many Syrian academics who cross the border daily to work at Sham University. He carpools with other academics, two women and six men, living in Gaziantep. “We travel together, work together, and teach together. We go in two cars. We are very optimistic, and when we work as a group, you feel that you have given even more, and this feeling supports us, and we support each other.”

Fellow academics living in Turkey introduced Rashwani to Cara’s work. They told him that Cara helped academics at risk, so he sent an email, and they responded. “In 2016, Cara had a background in the Iraq crisis, and then they turned to Syria. They didn’t know what we needed, and we didn’t know what we needed, so we grew together.”

Cara, he feels, has assisted at every twist and turn of his career at Sham. “I am very grateful to Cara. I am a researcher who can read articles in English and publish in English, but my conversation is not good, so in the first strand, I was assigned an English tutor.” Then, he progressed to the literature review and writing workshops held in Istanbul, and in 2018 applied for and was awarded a Syria Programme research grant and partnered with Professor Provis and colleagues at the University of Sheffield. In 2019, he made the most of a Cara-facilitated research incubation visit to the University of Sheffield. “I spent about 22 days researching concrete with Professor John Provis, and Drs Theodore Hanein and Maurizio Guadagnini. Doing this project with an international university was great, and it improved my knowledge and skills. Sheffield is a small city, but they have good modern equipment to classify and test material. It was amazing for Cara to support this stay there.” He and 32 other Syria Programme participants were then granted 5-year fellow status by the University South Wales (USW) as part of the USW/Cara

Fellow Scheme, providing all important institutional affiliation and online access to USW’s resources, including its library. Sham University does not have international recognition.

Rashwani has held many different positions at Sham and is now Vice-rector for Academic Affairs and Chair of Sham’s Quality Assurance Committee, responsible for setting new policies and broadening the school’s academic remit. Along with his collaborative concrete study with Sheffield University and METU (Middle East Technical University), he has been busy integrating new guidelines for the university and its various councils and committees, co-authoring a paper on a risk-based approach to quality management in higher education, a study commissioned by the Cara Syria Programme and published in the International Journal of Educational Research Open (IJEDRO) in 2022. He is committed to Sham and wants to create a suitable environment and institution for the next generation. If we all left, then what would happen? This region would disappear. As a Syrian academic, I want to support this university and its students.”

“I called Cara and said, ‘Now is a good time to establish a research centre at Sham so that we can conduct more research!’ and Kate (Robertson) said she would see what she could do!” What would his vision of a research centre at Sham University look like? He describes an idea of international and regional engineers in collaboration with engineers at Sham, the epicentre of rubble, challenged by major seismic fault lines but emerging out of conflict with energy, expertise and experience. He believes that a small scale sustainable Syrian concrete industry in the northwest, open to the ingenuity of young researchers, would conduct sustainable research that would take into account environmental, socioeconomic, and political forces. It is a vision of reconstruction that finds resonance in the past. There is some poetry when one learns that the first ever concrete-like structures were built by the Nabataean traders in Syria and Jordan who were experimenting with building kilns in 700 BC to supply mortar for the construction of rubble-wall houses, their cool concrete floors and underground hydraulic cisterns, some of which still survive today hidden under the desert.

Dr Abdulkader Rashwani

“In 2016, Cara had a background in the Iraq crisis, and then they turned to Syria. They didn’t know what we needed, and we didn’t know what we needed, so we grew together.”

COMMUNITY

Professor John Provis

“The ability to find interest and excitement in something that 99% of society think is just grey and boring – I revel in that!” Indeed, Professor John Provis delights in concrete and will tell you it is the most underappreciated material and that, after water, it’s the most abundant material in use.

It is so commonplace and evident that we are liable to forget its significance to our lives until we see a building collapse from natural disasters or munitions, or where concrete is in short supply and hard to come by, that skeletal structure without walls or floors which ceases mid-construction until materials become affordable and available to restart. It is a thousand-year dynamic history of cementitious materials that are ever-adapting to our needs. A vision of a concrete brotherhood of scientists working on more sustainable cement binders emerges before your eyes.

John Provis grew up on an olive farm in the Adelaide Hills, in Australia. He studied Chemical Engineering and Applied Mathematics at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and completed a PhD in Chemical Engineering in 2006. For six years, he was able to develop his research on cementitious materials in Australian government-funded research fellowship positions. In 2012, the University of Sheffield offered him a professorship, and without hesitation, he moved to the UK as Professor of

Cement Materials Science and Engineering. A prolific writer, researcher and communicator, Provis has an extensive bibliography and has been Editor-in-Chief of Materials and Structures, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of RILEM Technical Letters, Associate Editor of Cement and Concrete Research, and Speciality Chief Editor for the Structural Materials section of Frontiers in Materials. He has been awarded several honours for his work in geopolymers and other cementitious materials.

He is naturally expansive when he talks and has a warm Antipodean accent, broad grins, and kind encouragement when the Zoom call drops. He wants to share not only the research his department does, which is significant given this most recent project on recycled concrete in Syria but also the academy and his role in it as a teacher, friend and colleague. It’s a reminder of why all academics can do their work: “The worst thing a researcher can do is develop a beautiful answer to a silly question.” Provis says, “To be able to think through, practically, what is important, what can I do to answer a question that is meaningful to people, is what makes research relevant and meaningful.”

After telling me about his long relationship with Cara, which he thinks does excellent work and deserves to be supported, and the colleagues he has come to know through Cara and how his own extensive research has been deepened as a consequence, he tells me that the Syrian project enabled him to call upon Cagla Meral Akgul, an old colleague, a Turkish friend, now an associate professor at the Department of Civil Engineering at the Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara. They once shared an office as young researchers at UC Berkeley, in California. Now that they are in positions to support their colleagues and make a difference in society, working on this important project was a no-brainer. “The international connections and the relationships you build through a career in the academic world are, to a large degree, what makes it all worthwhile. The ability to connect to people, to understand people and to go and see people all around the world is for me, as an engineer, vastly more than the engineering side. It is a community.”

He has been working on technologies to lower carbon emissions and immobilise nuclear waste at the Department of Material Science and

Engineering at Sheffield, where he leads a large team focused on the science and engineering of cements. “Essentially, what we’re trying to do is to make sure that when we’re doing things with cement - and the world needs to do things with cement - we want to enable people to make the right decisions about which cements to use, how to use them and how to do it sustainably? We want to give them more options and flexibility so that we can build sustainably and treat the wastes that we have to treat. We cover very deep science at the fundamental chemical level, all the way through to the very practically focused.”

One of society’s genuinely challenging questions is how nuclear waste can be stored in concrete deep underground to avoid the worst radioactive contamination tragedies that have happened in the UK, North America, Europe and Japan in the past sixty years. This work, he tells me, has involved ethical questioning, community consultation, clarity of communication, technological precision and the ability to form longstanding relationships across universities worldwide. In the UK, he has been involved with the decommissioning process at Sellafield, using cement as an effective and affordable way to treat large volumes of lower-level wastes, “One of the best ways to solidify something is to design the right cement that will harden it, and this means you don’t have to dry the material,” he explains. “There are different pathways to treat high-level nuclear waste that generates heat, but the lower level waste, the stuff that does not generate heat but is still radioactive, is put into cement which is effective and affordable.” He is involved with other projects, including putting the “green” into the “concrete jungle”, showing how concrete can be sustainable by optimising specific inputs into the production chain of cement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 50 per cent.

In 2019, partnering with colleagues Drs Abdulkader Rashwani, Bakry Kadan and Yousef Alhammoudi from Sham University, Cagla Meral Akgul and Sepehr Seyedian Choubi from Middle East Technical University, and Theodore Hanein and Maurizio Guadagnini from Sheffield University, facilitated by Cara, Provis embarked on a study to see whether debris from damaged war-torn buildings in the northwest region could be

“The international connections and the relationships you build through a career in the academic world are, to a large degree, what makes it all worthwhile. The ability to connect to people, to understand people and to go and see people all around the world is for me, as an engineer, vastly more than the engineering side. It is a community.”

recycled into new construction materials for human habitation. It was a multi-layered, multi-country project involving sampling and the transport of debris from Syria to labs in Turkey and the UK to conduct tests and process the recycled aggregates to a safe enough standard to provide building materials for the millions displaced due to the war and their destroyed or damaged homes. When he was approached by Cara about the project, he contacted associate professor and friend, Cagla Meral Akgul, to ask whether she would agree to be involved - she agreed:

“We had last seen each other in 2009/2010, but stayed in touch. We have known each other for a decade, and it was a chance to set up a project and work together after all this time.”

Look at the photos of shelled-out buildings by Syrian photographers Baraa Al-Halabbi or Ameer Alhalbi or any of the photographic records after the earthquakes, and you get an immediate understanding of the importance and urgency of the study. However, Provis says, “There is still a way to go before rebuilding. We have to scale up, but it is important research for the first stage. We have demonstrated that you can make the concrete and that the concrete can meet the standards used for those applications. The intention is to make it safe for human habitation. We did a lot of radioactivity testing to ensure the material was safe in case any depleted uranium munitions were used, and we need to understand other forms of potential contamination that may exist in structures in different parts of the world, so it is something to be cautious about if we are unsure of what is there. We are providing a methodology specialised

for future stages of development. We are being appropriately cautious. In an engineering sense, we can say we are putting in place the process that will protect people and workers on-site, as and when people go forward with something like this.”

Provis first met Syrian chemists, Dr Rashwani, now the Vice-Rector at Sham University, and Dr Bakry Kadan when he hosted them at Sheffield as Cara Research Fellows in 2019. “I have enjoyed getting to know them as collaborators and friends. We had detailed discussions and they worked hard in the labs, and I then flew to Istanbul for a Cara workshop to continued our work and write up of findings, where I got to know them better. It really puts a perspective, a human face, on the situation. It helps you understand how creative people will find a way to be creative. Sitting down and having coffee with them, having lunch together, talking about families and what we all have in common brings a greater degree of closeness to, and understanding of, these international events. I recommend academics partner with anyone from around the world.” He says, “You understand people and what motivates them and how society works. The ability to see things from a different perspective. That is what the world needs.”

THE REVOLUTION OF HOPE

Dr Hanadi Omaish

Dr Hanadi Omaish has been involved with some of the most important advances in technology for over a decade. As a mathematician working in informatics, she has taught the implications of deep learning and artificial intelligence, imagining a future where AI models are applied to the health field and the agricultural sector in both her native Syria and present home of Turkey. She also participates in the long-term rebuilding of her country, using her expertise to explore the issues the war has caused for students in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine) sector. She was among the last of a generation to properly benefit from a tradition of STEM excellence in Syria, and to witness its demise.

“... It really puts a perspective, a human face, on the situation. It helps you understand how creative people will find a way to be creative. Sitting down and having coffee with them, having lunch together, talking about families and what we all have in common brings a greater degree of closeness to, and understanding of, these international events.”

As a young girl growing up in the City of Homs with her father’s constant support, Omaish was surrounded by inspiring people from whom she drew counsel. Her neighbours were respected in society because of their educational attainment and aspiration for their children to do well. “Their children studied medicine and engineering and contributed to their society. My passion was mathematics, not medicine or engineering, but seeing how they valued education and that dynamic with society inspired me to work hard.”

Dr Hanadi Omaish

She began to emulate teachers in the ninth grade, teaching people around her, “That helped me to improve myself and my teaching techniques.” As a result, she came top of her class and graduated with firsts in all her mathematics and informatics degrees and was on her way to Turkey, armed with a scholarship to do her PhD in 2011, when the protests broke out and derailed all her plans. Two days before she was due to travel, the offer was rescinded, and the programme was turned into a local PhD at Al-Ba’ath University in Homs, where she had done her previous degrees.

Acquiring a PhD can be a soul-destroying exercise in self-annihilation, at the best of times. She did it during the worst time possible, while relatives were harmed and detained, and people couldn’t leave their homes, her city under siege, with fluctuating electricity and a young baby to care for. “We moved to Damascus but were subject to various kinds of harassment because we came from Homs. I spent only five months there before returning to Homs, to be able to meet with my supervisor more regularly.” In 2015, she completed her thesis, ‘Moving from Static Testing to Automated Testing in Software’ and managed to leave Syria with her family to join her husband in Turkey, also an academic, who had gone ahead to prepare the way for her and the children. She likes Turkey but tells me that her husband is more proficient in Turkish than she is and has published in Turkish. He will soon obtain his PhD from Kahramanmaras Sutcu Imam University, which will enable him to teach, whilst she still has to get her Turkish equivalence for her PhD.

“My eldest,” she says, “remembers the displacement from Damascus and back to Homs. He still remembers the bombardments, checkpoints, and military tanks, so he hates Syria. He says he will never return to Syria. He is happy here in Turkey. My youngest knows nothing about Syria; they are happy in our community. Among my family members, I am the one who misses Syria the most. I spent a lot of time in Syria, studying then teaching at the university.”

That first year of exile was a difficult time. “I felt uprooted from my academic environment. So, Cara inviting us to attend academic workshops was really helpful in giving us this sense of being an academic

“I felt uprooted from my academic environment. So, Cara inviting us to attend academic workshops was really helpful in giving us this sense of being an academic person again, someone who is part of a community in addition to the direct benefit of research and language training skills. At the time, I think all the academics were feeling the same loss of community. Then we started conducting research ourselves in collaboration with other academics and research teams abroad. After that came the publication process, which Cara facilitated – this was also very helpful.”

person again, someone who is part of a community in addition to the direct benefit of research and language training skills. At the time, I think all the academics were feeling the same loss of community. Then we started conducting research ourselves in collaboration with other academics and research teams abroad. After that came the publication process, which Cara facilitated – this was also very helpful. It was difficult because I’d get an invitation to attend a workshop, and then I would have to decline. Kate (Robertson) would communicate with me to ask, ‘why won’t you be able to come?’ and I’d clarify that it was difficult to leave my young children. She covered the expenses for me to attend the workshops and the training with my children so that I wouldn’t be left out. So, the research skills, the English lessons, the fellowships and the publications were all very helpful.”

Omaish now lectures at two universities. Gaziantep University in southern Turkey, where she teaches modules in Arabic in the Faculty of Engineering, and Al-Sham University in northwest Syria, an area outside of the Assad government’s control, where she is the only female lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering, teaching mathematics and computer science

in the departments of civil engineering, electronics and communications, and chemical engineering.

It’s a long commute across the border to Al-Sham University opened in 2016. But the university, serving a population of people who have undergone the trauma of conflict, means a great deal to the academics who have returned from exile to work there to stem the brain drain.

“I was keen to work with Syrian colleagues. I am passionate about my work at Sham University. Every year, I try to introduce something new to the students and the curricula so that I feel I am developing myself. The financial reward is not very encouraging, but I feel that I am doing something I like and, at the same time, able to serve students in Northern Syria. It is something I am proud to do.”

She had been stunned by the changes wrought by war. “Before the revolution, “she explains, “we used to accept the highest achieving students graduating from high school, now they have basic knowledge gaps that will affect their university education.” She also noticed a decrease of women in STEM, a complete breakdown of educational infrastructure, trauma and disability and debilitating knowledge gaps which preclude academic success. With the support of a Cara mentor from the University of Bristol, she published a paper on students’ mathematical knowledge gaps. Al-Sham is now implementing some of the study’s recommendations.

Omaish began offering pre-university curriculum type courses for students who were struggling with mathematics, “I focus on the basics to ensure that all students can address their knowledge gaps, to allow them to progress in their university education.” She offered students opportunities to study more practical aspects “something they could use in their professional life later, especially regarding software programming and similar modules.” She mentors her students when she sees them struggling to carve out a space to think. “As a female lecturer, I always encourage my female students to enrol in this discipline if they are interested. I assure them that they will be able to succeed if they manage their time well and prioritise their responsibilities. They can work at home, work outside and still study if they are passionate about the subject.”

In addition, she has just finished working on a forthcoming paper with another female academic supported by Cara, which explores the requirements necessary to facilitating a safe return for Syrians in exile.

When we talk it is not long after the earthquake and Gaziantep has been affected. The family are staying with a friend. Her classes at Al-Sham have had to move online. Her students have been affected. Plans have had to be changed. She turns off her camera during the interview because of flagging internet, but her voice, strident and vulnerable in places, is at pains to convey only her hope for human progress in the future.

“I was keen to work with Syrian colleagues. I am passionate about my work at Sham University. Every year, I try to introduce something new to the students and the curricula so that I feel I am developing myself. The financial reward is not very encouraging, but I feel that I am doing something I like and, at the same time, able to serve students in Northern Syria. It is something I am proud to do.”

THE GREAT FIGHTERS

Saad

Vafaibaaj

All human beings contain multitudes, Whitman wrote. And the eternal problem for creative people such as Saad Vafaibaaj during wartime and in its aftermath is navigating the balancing act between innate radicalism and studied neutrality to avoid being targeted by people who believe indeed that all human beings are linear. It’s like walking a tightrope without a safety net, knowing how to navigate ideological and military silencing with grace.

Vafaibaaj knows he is a son of the culture, the religion, and the nationstate, and because he respects cultures, he stays within their limits. But listen to him talk about his work, read his work on the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih, and you see that his interest soars above the idea of a nationstate; his easy openness is a foil for insular definitions xenophobia, racism and misogyny. As a skilled multi-linguist mediating between cultures of all kinds, he is fascinated by their reproduction, not their death. When he left Syria in 2013, his wife led their journey abroad. She searched for new opportunities and convinced him they should move their small family to Turkey. She had lost her job in medical quality assurance when the factory where she was working was utterly destroyed. Overnight her financial independence was stolen from her. Ten years and two more degrees later, she resumed work and now works between

Germany and Kuwait, teaching Arabic to Syrian students, supporting the family and supplementing the income that he gets from being an assistant professor at their diaspora. Saad had always travelled and lived in different places - Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, and now Turkey, but it was intense to leave with such finality, and when his courage faltered, she bolstered him. He tells this story and others. Of the two female professors based in Turkey and Lebanon who supervised his PhD as he struggled to complete it during the first seven years of the conflict, and of the translation work he does for the UN now as an accredited UN translator - 50 articles in total, all about women and children. They are now his principal focus, the women and children, “the Great Fighters, I call them. They sacrificed their studies, education, jobs, to keep their families intact”.

Now, Vafaibaaj is an accomplished linguist, simultaneous translator, journalist and academic. Still, to understand his profound response to “the vulnerable part of society,” it’s worth remembering that he resonates with literature’s moral and ethical strains, that he is a storyteller, and a hard worker. By the age of seven, he knew that he wanted to learn English. He was living in Kuwait at the time. His father took him to visit his friend, an Indian, who spoke Arabic and English very well, and this intercultural conundrum must have left an imprint on his young mind. The man introduced him to Shakespeare and agreed to teach him English by giving him a giant rubber pencil, almost half-a-metre, that was to be used for English words only. “Come back in a week and let me see what you write,” the man instructed. So Vafaibaaj went away and wrote down every English word he could find, without understanding the meaning. He then went to the library and was able to find originals and translations of Russian and English literature; then he read stories from around the world, from Japan, Poland, from across the Middle East. He read first in Arabic, then in English, and his passion and imagination for stories grew. By the time he was 14, he knew that he wanted to study English, and by 16, he “wanted to become a doctor of English! When I was 18, I decided I’d visit England one day.”

And now that he is in England on a Cara research trip, having never been here before, I ask him if it is what he expected. “Yes, yes, it is.”

Saad Vafaibaaj

In Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, there is an absurd moment when the protagonist returns home to Sudan from England and installs a chimney in his home. “Can you imagine he built a chimney in a hot country like Sudan. And it seems like the house he built is like the houses I see here. It is this very beautiful mixture of cultures that I am interested in”. Now thanks to Cara, he has experienced it. He studied English literature for his undergraduate studies and a diploma in advanced literary studies, specialised in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Then, between yet another master’s degree and a doctorate, for which he looked critically at Tayeb Salih’s Wedding of Zwein, a 1969 classic of Arab/ African literature, he gained degrees in translation and interpretation, and for one of his theses, wrote about language and power. When he was doing simultaneous translation, his performance was like the narration of a story. His audience would knock on the translator’s booth and ask him to give them the paper because they didn’t believe it. He translated for many international agencies and embassies. Lately, he has been thinking more about Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian writer whose work he would like to write something about one day.

But for now, the stories of the Syrian diaspora claim his attention and haunt him.

“Many nurses, many doctors, many parents, many kids migrated. Universities are missing many of their professors, and schools are missing teachers. Businesses are missing the people that used to run the country. Now, I need to serve my society and the Syrian diaspora and detect what is happening to them. I feel that is the duty I should shoulder, within limits drawn within the society I live in. I am very cautious but meticulously working on getting something that would serve generations ahead so that one day they would read what it is like to live under war and what would happen if suddenly millions of people migrated. How would that affect the receiving society and the country of origin, for example?”

Why are fluent young people still discriminated against because of their accents? What pushes them to leave destinations chosen by their parents? It’s a rarity in the literature of migration, for migrants, after three years, usually want to stay. Why do second-generation Syrian children

lose their Arabic speaking skills, and what does it mean for Syrian cultures if the way they dream, and draw is all not in their heritage language? What is cultural exchange without fear?

In Vafaibaaj’s world, the great fight is one against the tragedy of displacement.

He feels blessed to have discovered Cara through his mentor, Dr Mahar Jesry, a Syrian academic. After his PhD, Vafaibaaj realised he needed help between countries, legal restrictions, careers, and fields. He was an academic without an academy. When he wrote his first article, he could find nowhere to publish it. The emotional pressure from the conflict was proving too much. Cara helped with practical steps. Put him in touch with another writer, Emily Downes, who specialised in English academic writing and in a matter of three months, the article was completed, and in six months, it was published. Since then, he worked on three Cara research papers related to Syrian women, youth and children, which explore language policies, employment chances and educational levels in the diaspora.

“Cara’s most important fingerprint on my career was that it shortened the time it would take me to make connections. It would have taken me many years to reach those people had Cara not been there. It is not easy to see a professor, a scholar, or a researcher without having someone introduce you to him or her; this is what Cara has done. It has shortened the time. As it says on its website. It’s a lifeline, but it’s also a guideline. You know you are lost, and you are missing something, but you are not sure what, and Cara comes in and guides you. If someone is serious enough, they will achieve so much.”

THE GREAT FIGHTERS Saad Vafaibaaj

“Cara’s most important fingerprint on my career was that it shortened the time it would take me to make connections. It would have taken me many years to reach those people had Cara not been there.”

are rare places where this happens, where you will meet people from all over Syria.”

LANGUAGE IS POWER

Dr Mohammed Ateek

Dr Mohammed Ateek teaches applied linguistics and languages at the University of Leicester and has worked with Cara since 2018. He believes that both linguistic and non-linguistic gestures make up communication and that taken together, linguistics and semiotics are significations of ideas and identities, codes and forms of power: “I’ve always looked at language beyond the borders of communication,” he pauses, “for me, it is very powerful. When George Bush said, ‘I declare war on terrorism!’ It is in fact, the movement of armies and people displaced! This use of language has real implications on all our lives. I think this aspect of how language works affects us…how it is used to construct our identities. I’ve always considered languages and language a driving force for societies.”

In the last 10-15 years, Ateek has worked on some of the most pressing questions facing Syrians in this most recent diaspora, caused by civil war. He has collaborated on many different projects in many places: in Britain, researching resilience among refugees in Jordan and Turkey with the British Council, and at the University of Reading, where he lectured for one year, Ateek has been invited to provide expert opinions to courts in

the UK on behalf of refugees because of discriminatory language policies in the UK. In Greece, he did a stint interpreting for Syrian American doctors in the Idomeni camp on the Greek Macedonian border. In Turkey, alongside other Cara academics, he worked on research projects on how Syrian families are faring against a rise in hostility towards them. He also worked on a research project about displaced learners in Jordan and, discovered in Kurdistan and Lebanon the importance of translanguaging, semiotic gestures and psychosocial support for successful language learning for refugees.

Ateek grew up in Idlib, Syria, speaking Arabic but discovered his aptitude for languages by learning to speak English fluently at an early age. At 14, he happened upon Hemmingway’s Old Man and the Sea and, after reading it, gradually decided to learn more. Ateek studied English Language and Literature for his bachelor’s degree, then Applied Linguistics for his master’s degree, gaining distinction in the course at the University of Aleppo. “These were the happiest moments in my life so far,” he grins. “I have travelled a lot and worked in different organisations and spaces, but when I remember my days studying at Aleppo, I am always filled with joy. A smile comes to my face.”

Perhaps he grew up being aware of Syria’s cosmopolitanism, its diversity of languages kept alive by different sects, tribal groups and religions. But it was at the University of Aleppo, as a young student, that Ateek first came into contact with Kurdish, Syriac, Assyrian, Circassian, and Armenian languages and histories of cultures born from migratory flows over centuries. “Syria is a multicultural and multilingual

“Syria is a multicultural and multilingual country”, Ateek explains, “unfortunately, there were not many spaces for celebrating these different cultures. Universities

country”, Ateek explains, “unfortunately, there were not many spaces for celebrating these different cultures. Universities are rare places where this happens, where you will meet people from all over Syria.”

Civil spaces for ideological difference and dissent were rare, and the Syrian government was transparent in their disdain for specific languages. Teaching Kurdish was forbidden precisely to pre-empt any political challenge. “My Kurdish friends were not allowed to celebrate Nawroz, the celebration of Spring!” he says, “Imagine! I tell you I want to celebrate Spring, life and hope, and I am told that if I do, I will be taken to jail. Kurdish was officially repressed. Some people didn’t have IDs or rights. This changed after the revolution because the regime wanted the Kurdish people on their side, so they began to teach Kurdish in different universities in Syria. So, you can see how language is used for political purposes or to repress people, and how governments use language and allow multilingualism in the country.” Syrian histories are littered with references to sectarian cleavages, and the rural/urban divide is a familiar trope, but Ateek explains far less is written about how language policies divided people from one another. It strikes him that recent scholarship in applied linguistics challenges the idea of homogeneity and stability in language as the norm and as fiction in a cosmopolitan society.

After graduating from university, he worked as a TV journalist and was involved in different investigative reports on contemporary international stories and researching emerging news stories, but in 2012, he left life in Syria behind. “It wasn’t my plan to leave, but the regime detained me twice. The second time was a horrific experience, so fearing for my life, I left for Jordan in August 2012. I stayed there for a few months and taught English there, then I came to do my PhD at Anglia Ruskin University in 2013.” Armed with a degree in applied linguistics and intercultural communication, he started his academic life as a Teaching Fellow in English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Reading, followed by a post as a Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. In the UK, he has been active in challenging what he calls “horrendous and inhumane immigration laws” and has written about the language and analysis for determination of Origin (LADO) tests that the Home Office

uses to assess the nationality of asylum seekers when they apply for asylum: “When they say there is a lack of evidence for where this person comes from, we use this language as a piece of evidence.” He did a research project on this and was consulted by several law firms on cases that went to the court concerning LADO.

He believes that when attention is paid to making learning environments for displaced learners feel safe rather than stressful, we move closer to reconstructing and rehabilitating a person’s life.

“Refugees are already vulnerable, suffering traumas that host countries do not always understand. Some host countries expect refugees and asylum seekers to adapt to enforced language learning. Others remain unprepared. Some make special efforts. Countries should let them use their languages to lower their anxiety because languages are one of people’s greatest assets. Imagine vulnerable students coming to learn and being deprived of one of their greatest assets, their mother tongue.” He admits that sometimes people who have experienced trauma might retreat from communicating altogether or choose to live somewhere where they can be left alone. Others might find learning a new language as one way to escape the memory of a particular experience of persecution that they would prefer to forget. But what is known is that in a hostile environment that agitates against migrants, bullying policies used to speed assimilation or marginalise the importance of language, sometimes even depriving people of its use, is anathema to him.

“There are really compassionate people who work for refugees and work for their rights. But unfortunately, the reality is that countries, mainly politicians, use refugees, asylum seekers and migrants for political scores.

“Refugees are already vulnerable, suffering traumas that host countries do not always understand. Some host countries expect refugees and asylum seekers to adapt to enforced language learning.”

They use scapegoating and blame their internal failures in economics and politics on these groups, which are easy targets. Moreover, with the rise of the populist media, the right-wing and politicians brainwash many people about migrants who are seen as a threat to our identity, Britishness, and values. It is this narrative, this discourse, that we need to fight against and push back.”

Wanting to be of service, he contacted Cara in 2018. As a result, he began to partner with fellow Syrian academics on research, completing last year two Cara-sponsored research projects with academics based both in Turkey and in the UK: “Cara is an initiative and organisation that is much needed in our lives as academics, especially in the current circumstances, where fewer and fewer resources are available to refugees and asylum seekers. One of the most important things is to push for knowledge and research to help and support refugee academics. Cara mobilises people, businesses, universities and academic institutions. They are doing a great job connecting all these networks and fostering collaboration between academics in exile and those settled in universities in the UK and elsewhere.”

The first project examined the online teaching of Arabic as a foreign language in Turkish Universities during the Pandemic and how it differed from in-person teaching against a broader background of academic cutbacks in Arabic language teaching. The second, which is forthcoming, focuses on how refugee families negotiate the use of languages in Turkey. Has the tense socio-political atmosphere towards migrants there affected their linguistic choices? For example, did people deliberately avoid using Arabic out of fear of societal backlash? “We were not shocked,” he said, “but we were sad when we learned that children avoided using Arabic, especially in public or schools. There is a stigma around refugees and Syrians in Turkey, so they avoided it deliberately and consciously. They avoid using their mother tongue language, which is really important for their identity. The children suppress their identities because, of course, they are conscious of nationalist ideologies.”

It was a valuable piece of research drawing attention to an issue close to his heart with researchers he was proud to work with. “Academics

build their capacity, continue with their research skills and collaborate with other academics in Europe and elsewhere, but it is also important for the countries they have come from, their countries of origin. When circumstances allow them to return to their countries, these skills will help build a new society and country, and education is on the top list of any country that wishes to rebuild.”

“Cara is an initiative and organisation that is much needed in our lives as academics, especially in the current circumstances, where fewer and fewer resources are available to refugees and asylum seekers. One of the most important things is to push for knowledge and research to help and support refugee academics. Cara mobilises people, businesses, universities and academic institutions. They are doing a great job connecting all these networks and fostering collaboration between academics in exile and those settled in universities in the UK and elsewhere.”

TIME WILL TELL

Rohat Zada

Rohat Zada’s field is the complex and endless generative world of finance studies. His scholarly interests include emerging stock markets, corporate governance, financial performance indicators, novel accounting systems in new emerging markets, and managerial sciences in business administration. He has also completed a report looking at financial inclusion for vulnerable groups in Baghdad with the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). Along with a passion for history, he also has an offbeat, onpoint humour and a comic sense of tragedy that not everyone is armed with, nor can anyone master.

For the past seven weeks, Zada has been in the UK as a visiting research fellow at the University of Cambridge, on a Cara Syria Programme ‘research incubation visit’. Whilst in the UK, he reconnected with on old schoolfriend from Syria who now teaches at the University of Sussex, as well as connecting with other Syrian academics working at the University of Oxford However, the primary focus of his visit has been a project on corporate governance and stock performance working with Professor Simon Deakin at the Cambridge Judge Business School. He has enjoyed the collegial support and the exchange of ideas and will miss his desk

at Fitzwilliam House. “I have been involved in the Cara Syria Programme since 2021. They provide a lot of opportunities including this visit, and last year, I participated in an online 5-week literature review course for [University of Edinburgh] PhD students, as well as benefiting from weekly one-to-one online English for academic purposes sessions.”

In the first few days here, he was given a tour of the campus and was impressed by the styles of architecture around Cambridge; it made him feel as if he were back in the ancient city of Aleppo, where he had spent his youth and was planning to embark upon life – Aleppo or the “Game of Thrones”, he adds.

Zada tells me he grew up between Aleppo city and Afrin, in the Governate of Aleppo. His village, Zeitounak, was just outside Afrin and so small that it consisted of just 55 houses where everyone knew each other. He is Kurdish and, thereby, a minority within Syria, and his experiences and multifaceted identity informed the decisions that have shaped his life. It’s been a journey of multiple belongings, but he rejects compartmentalisation and ultimately, is identical to no one.

The last time that Zada lived in Aleppo was in 2012. He returned to the city after three-years in Cairo studying business administration on a Syrian government scholarship. “I loved Cairo and still miss it.” He adds, “To be young and independent was very nice for me. I was there during the Egyptian revolution. I believe that I have been a witness to many historical revolutions.” The protests followed suit in Syria, but Zada misjudged the severity of the regime’s crackdown. He stayed until he discovered he had been conscripted and was wanted by the military.

So, he dodged out of Aleppo, not for another country but for his hometown near Afrin. It was a safe place, under the control of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) at the time and so outside of the Syrian government’s control. Now though, it was the turn of the PYD’s YPG (People’s Protection Units) to conscript him. “They asked me twice to be involved in military activities, to guard the village, but I refused. At the start, they don’t force you into such activities, but become more forceful over time, culminating in 9-months conscription.”

The conflagration widened with the advance of Daesh (Islamic State),

and his father eventually made him leave Syria. Zada crossed the border, first to Turkey, and then across the mountainous border to Iraqi Kurdistan, an internationally acknowledged (but not recognised) territory, which has long operated as a space for Kurdish self-determination outside of the discriminatory nationalist projects of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria –countries where Kurdish minorities have historically been construed as a divisive threat. “We have a joke,” Zada says, “Right now, Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq are enemies. But when it comes to Kurds, they are aligned. When it is related to Kurds, they forget their differences. The trend, in every country in the world, is to become smaller and more divided, not larger! But should we ever decide to unite”, Zada teases, “we would be a majority in the region. Blame Sykes-Picot, not us!”  He refers to the treaty between the United Kingdom and France, which arbitrarily carved up the Ottoman Empire to create the modern Middle East.

Thousands of fellow Kurdish Syrians moved to Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, during the war. As a result, he says, Syrian restaurants serving good home cooking abound. He joined them in 2013, first lecturing at the Lebanese French University, and then as a visiting lecturer at the University of Kurdistan, in addition to a number of NGO consultancies. He is now working at the Catholic University in Erbil. In 2015, he married an Iraqi Arab statistician from Mosul, and now they have three children. They learned to speak Kurmanji, the Kurdish dialect spoken in Syria and Turkey, and now he is fluent in what he calls “Surmanji”, a mixture of Sorani (the Kurdish dialect spoken in Erbil) and the Syrian Kurdish dialect of Kurmanji, which it was legally forbidden to speak or write in Syria for decades lest the nation unravel.

“We grew up thinking it was wrong to speak our language, and from kindergarten until university, our teaching was in Arabic. So we preserved our language through conversation and speaking. When I was at Aleppo University, five or six of us, all friends, secretly conducted lessons on the Kurdish language. Security forces could have arrested us for six months without having access to a judge or a trial between 1963-2013. There was a lot of discrimination against us.” He refers to the blatant act of political manipulation when the previously stateless Syrian Kurds of the Al Hasakah

“We grew up thinking it was wrong to speak our language, and from kindergarten until university, our teaching was in Arabic. So we preserved our language through conversation and speaking.

territory in northwest Syria were finally granted citizenship in 2011 simply to garner political support.

Could he return to Syria, given this history?

“I did.” He says calmly. “It is my home. I went to see my mother.” His village was unrecognisable: camps of displaced people lined the roads and everyone he once knew had left, their homes occupied by strangers. But he thinks that he could return under the right conditions, namely where people grapple with the challenges of injustice, discrimination, and economic corruption. He reads widely outside of the world of economics, history is his passion after all, and he laughs otherwise he would cry.

He suggests Amin Maalouf’s In the name of identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, which dissects adeptly “how people of all countries, of all conditions and faiths, can be transformed into butchers, while passing themselves off as defenders of identity.” Reading it, you get a glimpse into Zada’s mind, perhaps dreaming of revolutions as a young man, quietly knowing as a witness, that injustice left to fester can only engulf everyone in the end. His experiences across the region inform and enhance his work – a historical gaze and detached ability to measure and record some of the most important events of a century. His imagined community is one of free thinkers. His next research project is with other Kurdish academics, sponsored by Cara, and will explore the entrepreneurship under conditions of conflict in northeast Syria.

PSYCHE

Professor Anastasia Christou

Professor Anastasia Christou, a sociologist, feminist and geographer, is on her way to northern Greece to interview survivors of the Greek Civil War (1946-1949). She hopes to better understand the legacies bequeathed to generations of Greeks who lost family members either to the brutality of the war or through displacement, and to understand the political identities of Greek towns and villages once pitted against each other through political ideology. It was not long, five years, but an intergenerational trauma that has continued in the shadows, successfully resisting the oxygen of excavation. With the impact still felt today, some of the survivors, now in their 90s, have agreed to speak to her about the war.

Christou has some trepidation about the responsibility and the ethical care involved in bringing such issues to light, rather than the issues that may emerge; women worldwide have had to voice the intangible and difficult issues, as well as push for their rights, to go to school, push for genuine political representation, financial equality and self-actualisation, the violence done to their bodies and minds, and the silences they shoulder, for the sake of everyone else. Care for the participants; wellbeing and concern for the psychological trauma which such stories

may unearth. As we talk, a butterfly enters through her window and crosses the screen. She is in East Sussex where it has rained all summer. This is the first she has seen all year, so she stops mid-sentence to admire it.

Christou was born and raised in New York to migrant Greek parents, who left Greece during the dictatorship, “practically eloping”, she says, after they met in Athens. Her late father came from a tiny hamlet outside of Thebes, and her mother, who now lives in Athens, came from a village in the mountains in the centre of the Peloponnese. Growing up in New York, her parents discussed their ancestral homeland. Even though it had become a somewhat “imaginary” one and many of their “scripted” stories, she says, had a frozen quality to them, they were, nonetheless, stories about stories, about food and relationships and family values and other things that sustained her and planted the seed of an idea to return deep within. She went back and forth to Greece all her life and knows it intimately, but when her parents moved back to Greece in the nineties, Christou left America permanently to be with them. Undeniably brilliant, she did well in Greece, coming first in the country for a doctorate in Geography (she has two PhDs), but, as a keen observer of society, she found higher education there to be complicated, “dysfunctional, materialistic, conservative, class-ridden, misogynistic even”, and came instead to the UK, anchoring her research and a second doctorate in Geography at the University of Sussex.

Over the years, she has built up an exciting interdisciplinary body of work on migration and social justice, which straddles and draws on the fields of history, law, sociology, and geography, inspired by philosophy and literature. But there is always the return to Greece to understand, the displacement that occurred, why it has required a working-class, feminist, critical scholar to help unearth the stories from a difficult past.

She is about to finalise a paper on what she calls femicide, over the pandemic in Greece, how shockingly excessive the many forms of violence, physical and emotional, against women are “Every single loss of life is precious, but the degree and the occurrence of women being tortured in terms of domestic violence by their partners, husbands and

fathers has increased and been exacerbated by the pandemic. It’s a national issue, but it’s also a global one. We tend to embrace mothers as biological producers of the nation, but they’re abused. Even in a patriarchal society like Greece, mothers were valued, but we see shocking abuse and intergenerational violence.”

Christou is committed to finding solidarity with others. As Professor of Sociology and Social Justice at Middlesex University, London, and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, she is also proudly the Chair of her university’s trade union. She is an anti-racist feminist, influenced by black feminists and their scholarship, indigenous poets and stories: “I go back to those communities that have given so much humanity through their oppression. That is an enormous responsibility to infuse my learning.” Her politics belong to the left liberatory movements, praxis and philosophies that 20th century America bequeathed the world; politics which she had to discover on her own, outside the Eurocentric canon in which she was immersed. Through these prisms, in addition to her work on Greece, she has explored Polish, Cuban and Jewish communities, taken snapshots of Romanian, Bulgarian, Polish and Albanian women against a backdrop of post-socialist political change, studied intergenerational communities in France (Toulouse) and Britain (Seaford and Newhaven) and also examined legacies of societal divisions caused by colonialism and how war has left countries like Israel and Palestine or Cyprus divided. “My life and activism are shaped by a quest for social justice” she says, “It informs the teaching and research that I do, and my research is shaped through activism, and they all seem interconnected. And that’s been a part of my existential sense of identity as an individual, an activist, and an academic.”

She says she developed a strong work ethic growing up in a workingclass community, where everyone laboured to stay afloat, so the local library became an oasis of possibility for her: “Words had an incredible textual stimulation for me. They were a magnet for me to imagine what the outside world was beyond the parameters of our very small basement flat. So English literature and philosophy, words, ideas, and concepts were the first full and magnetic attraction during an era where everybody

“Every single loss of life is precious, but the degree and the occurrence of women being tortured in terms of domestic violence by their partners, husbands and fathers has increased and been exacerbated by the pandemic. It’s a national issue, but it’s also a global one. We tend to embrace mothers as biological producers of the nation, but they’re abused. Even in a patriarchal society like Greece, mothers were valued, but we see shocking abuse and intergenerational violence.”

kept telling me, ‘Oh, you’ll never get a job; you need to study business or IT.” Clever and self-determined, she was accepted to St. John’s University in New York, where she graduated with a BA in English Literature and Philosophy with a concentration in Government and Politics, gaining a Master of Arts in International Relations and Comparative Politics one year later. From 1994 to 2000, Christou worked as Associate Dean and Head of the English Department at New York College/the State University of New York at New Paltz and Empire State College. In 2001, however, soon after 9/11, she moved from Greece to the UK, travelling back and forth between the countries in a pre-Brexit world. This enabled her to complete a DPhil in Geography from the University of Sussex and a PhD in Social and Cultural Geography from the University of the Aegean, Greece, with one- and two-year fellowships in Greece, Denmark, Canada, and Berlin. Before moving to Middlesex, she spent eight years at the University of Sussex as a research fellow, and then as a lecturer in Cultural Geography and Programme Convenor of the Globalisation, Ethnicity and Culture MA.

In 2020, she says, an email from Cara had been circulated, asking for mentors for research projects by Syria Programme participants, and

PSYCHE Professor Anastasia Christou

one of the projects, to her delight, was feminist movements in northwest Syria. “I persuaded another newly appointed colleague to join me as a co-mentor. We were thrilled that this topic was an undertaking by two male participants.” Ayman Alnabo, a former lecturer in semitic languages at Aleppo University and Director of the Idlib Antiquities Centre, and Houssein Hory, who gained his doctorate in the history and preservation of art objects and architecture from the University of Rome III in 2008, before working as a researcher at the General Directorate of Antiquities and Museums through to 2011, submitted a research proposal to the Cara Syria Programme in 2020, on the diversity of women’s experiences during the conflict, and the feminist movements that drew on Syrian cultural heritage, as well as progressive revolutionary ideals. It was a surprise for Christou to find a research project bridging the politics of social justice and people’s everyday lived experiences, so she was excited to mentor, teach, collaborate with them, and to be informed through a reciprocal learning journey.

The team developed the paper and devised methodologies together. Alnabo conducted ethnographic qualitative research, analysing elements of political, economic, and social discrimination and exclusion. It was a particular story with universal resonance. Syrian women have fought many battles, family separation, loss of culture, sexual violence, discrimination and exclusion, and yet, kept alive a feminist ethic of care over their communities. It was a demanding and challenging project, she says, with a lot of discussion around gender and analytical constructs. “They went through all the hurdles to do it, collected some amazing data, and wrote a rich and extensive paper, which is due to be resubmitted to the Journal of Gender and Religion following revisions. Fingers crossed, the publication will be out soon and how amazing that will be.”

She hopes there will be future collaboration with Cara and laments not knowing about the Syria Programme before 2020: “I am constantly intrigued by so much that we need to do as educators and, at the same time, also need to learn, so I see myself not just as a teacher but also as a learner and co-learner and co-producing knowledge with other colleagues. And here is where Cara has enormously enlightened my

journey to self-discovery and self-understanding. I have been conducting voluntary work for many years because doing voluntary work is a lifeline to sustaining my self-motivation to action and activism. It’s enriching, fulfilling, and rewarding. It helps me stay motivated to do my day job. It has become a compass to redirect me to all the other tasks I need to do.”

“I am constantly intrigued by so much that we need to do as educators and, at the same time, also need to learn, so I see myself not just as a teacher but also as a learner and co-learner and co-producing knowledge with other colleagues. And here is where Cara has enormously enlightened my journey to self-discovery and selfunderstanding.”

SUNRISE

Dr Ahmed Halil

ON THE HORIZON

Dr Ahmed Halil, a Syrian literary theorist, translator and Arab/ Turkish linguist had the good fortune to know and write about Walid Ikhlasi, one of Syria’s greatest and most surrealistic writers:

“He spoke about different aspects of Syrian society, and you can find amongst his work, short stories about nationalism, society, and even fantastic stories about animals talking.”

Halil wrote a doctorate on his techniques on time and narrative, then published a book on Ikhlasi’s short stories, following him until his death last year aged 86.

“Walid refused to leave Aleppo. I had a talk with his son. Walid was an old man and said he would rather die in Aleppo than leave! He left for a few months but returned. He preferred to stay there until the last days. One of his friends was my professor at the university, and a few years ago, we had a chat. He said that Walid was very upset. He is very old, and nobody visits him, but he still refuses to leave. The last years of his life were not easy.” Helping to keep Walid’s stories alive is a testament to his contribution to Syrian literature.

“Syrians like stories”, he says, “they have a passion for reading, and they read a lot. I once worked at a local bookshop in Aleppo, and if you said to someone that you didn’t have a book, they would come again and

again to check if it had arrived. In 2004, I used to read the literary journal Al Arabi, and I remember walking around for almost half an hour to find a copy.” Halil was born in Aleppo. His father came to the city from the rural area of Jarablus before Halil was born. The eldest of nine children, Halil grew up in the city, and studied Arabic language and literature at Aleppo University. Even now, despite a decade of war and exile, he remembers how optimistic the future seemed then.

In 2011, when war broke out, the family moved from Aleppo to Jarablus, postponing dreams of an academic career in Arabic literature at Aleppo. “My father was a pilot and couldn’t work at that time, and there were five or six students in our house and only one income.” The military were also after him. “It wasn’t easy, but I am an optimistic person and always prefer to look at the bright side, the optimistic side.”

At 23, with only one friend in Turkey, he went first to the southern border town of Gaziantep looking for work and then found his way to Konya, in the centre of the country. He worked in a factory selling macaroni for two years, sending money and savings back home to get his family out of Syria. At first, his siblings were worried about leaving. “Generally, people like their home,” he smiles. “They do not want to leave if they know they are not coming back. But ISIS showed up, so they had no choice. First, you ran from Assad and then from ISIS. ISIS did horrible things. They forced girls to get married to soldiers and after that, you lose them, which was a risk for my young sisters.” By 2014, Halil had managed to get his entire family out of a spiralling situation. Years later, someone sent a picture of their house in Aleppo; it was a burned-out shell. “Psychologically speaking, I am afraid of seeing Syria in that situation. I would like to keep a good picture in my mind,” he says. Having lost everything, they still had each other.

Determined to resume his academic career, Halil embarked on a master’s degree at Selçuk University in Konya. He had already begun teaching part-time at the university, mentoring students on the curriculum, slowly becoming bilingual and discovering his aptitude for Arabic/Turkish translation, even gaining certification in Osmanlıca –Old Turkish. He published an article in Turkish – The Demographic

Dr Ahmed Halil

Structure of Syria and Manner Toward Revolution (2017) while working on his doctorate in Arabic Language and Literature and the stories of Walid Ikhlasi, which he completed in 2019. He began to delve into literary translation from Arabic into Turkish, translating several short poems and stories for local magazines and for Türkpress. When he graduated it was no surprise that he was appointed to an assistant professorship at the Higher Institute of Languages, Arabic – Turkish. During his time spent in Turkey, Halil had become a Turkish citizen, completed his military service, got married and had two children.

The university town, however, was not immune to the discrimination Syrians face. “Whenever I pointed out unfair treatment, I was told, “but you are Syrian!” Usually, people are uncomfortable admitting this” he laughs, “but I have been told, ‘You are Syrian; so, you need to be grateful and thankful for having a job!’ There is no law here against discrimination. You can’t complain. Only you will lose out, and perhaps it will be worse than before, so it is better to focus on new goals. I was done with the racism. So, I chose to use my energy on better things – ideas.”

He and his young family left Konya for Istanbul. “I am still very new here. I don’t have a regular income, but psychologically I feel better.” From Aleppo to Jarablus, from Jarablus to Gaziantep, to Konya, and now to Istanbul, it’s been a journey. Four of his siblings have finished university, with two who are still studying: one in business school and the other interpretating and translation. None of it was a waste, yet there have been tragedies and losses, particularly that of his father last year during the pandemic.

Now he works freelance in Istanbul with ideas for the future: Arabic literature, Turkish/Arabic literary journals, and publishing presses where there are none, research ideas for studies on translation and ideology, bilingualism, the language of migrants and code-switching. He is currently collaborating with Dr Jerome Devaux, from the Open University School of Languages and Applied Linguistics, on a study – Interpreting during migration crisis: The case of interpreting for Syrian refugees in Turkey; “In translation”, Halil says, “ideology is crucial. A translator can translate in several ways but will choose to translate in a particular way

because of ideology, which shows the power of translation; the way you translate a sentence will affect your reader and their whole idea, and translation is crucial to the understanding of the idea.”

Halil found out about the Cara Syria Programme in 2018 through a colleague at his old university. “To be honest there are a lot of NGOs working with the refugees, and when you try to find out what they are doing, you don’t find anything. So, in the beginning, I wasn’t excited; maybe my colleague did not explain it well, but when he told me Cara had given him an instructor to teach him English one-to-one, I liked that. I am so glad that I did join. It has offered much more than language teaching. Cara has assisted in several aspects. They brought us all together and gave us inspiration and good ideas. We were losing hope, but Cara made us believe that we could do something, that we could produce. They connect people of different backgrounds together to do research. Several of our colleagues are now teaching in other countries and wouldn’t be there without Cara’s support.”

In 2019, he attended Oxford University on a Cara Syria Programme research incubation visit, which had a positive influence, he says.

“It changed my point of view and my views about the academy. I attended several courses about teaching. More recently I conducted research with Syria Programme supporters from Oxford, Edinburgh and Reading universities and presented on our joint work at a conference in Padua, Italy, in 2022. Cara also put several Syria Programme colleagues forward for an Open University consultancy to develop an online Arabic Language and Culture course. The OU chose me, and I am very happy that I am doing it. They are very supportive, and I am thankful to them.” Perhaps the greatest thing he says that Cara has done for him is that he is not alone, and that now he has many friends who have broadened his horizons and brought him some hope and clarity.

SUNRISE ON THE HORIZON Dr Ahmed Halil

We were losing hope, but Cara made us believe that we could do something, that we could produce.”

OPPORTUNITY AND LOSS

Professor Sarah Brewer

Professor Sarah Brewer is a good conversationalist and storyteller who has spent a lifetime involved in one way or another with texts and books and stories. She has worked for more than 20 years at the University of Reading, in the International Study and Language Institute (ISLI) and been at the epicentre of several language networks, teaching and writing groups. Only last year did she step down from her role as Chair of BALEAP, the global forum for EAP (English for Academic Purposes) professionals.

Before joining Reading, however, she had a variety of jobs. She can recall the exact layout of a former London antiquarian bookseller where she worked for years along Marylebone High Street; the serendipity of finding huge crates containing perfectly preserved 16th-century documents and treasured locks of children’s hair while working as a researcher for an auctioneer in Suffolk; typing up the letters of Richard Hurd, the Bishop of Worcester, in triplicate on a portable typewriter for her doctorate in the seventies at the beginning of an academic career; her love for the fenland town of Cambridge where she grew up, and her critique of social disparities after also living in London and Reading, alive to diversity, having taught hundreds of international students over the past thirty years. These are stories of a changing England from the perspective of

someone who teaches English, with an academic cast of mind, which it would need a well-deserved sabbatical to write about.

One of those stories will be how an international group of language professionals, academics, volunteers, and administrators, came together to do something powerful in the face of displacement and war. It is true that academics who find themselves in exile might not have imagined they would have to work in translation one day. And often, self-reflexive and aware, they may have wondered about the global hegemony of the Western academy. Still, language empowers and broadens horizons. Collaboration and friendship can change what is considered a loss into an opportunity, with time.

Although the Cara Syria Programme was initiated in 2012 through the Cara Fellowship Programme, the Syria Programme in region, including the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) strand, only started in 2016. Armed with lessons from the Iraq Programme (2006-2012) it was clear that issues such as language barriers, the ability to write academic papers or to give presentations in English needed more attention to allow participants to thrive. The then ISLI director and Brewer’s boss, Ros Richards, returned from a Cara Syria-related meeting to galvanise ISLI colleagues and lead on the development of an EAP strand, driven by her view that Syrian academics forced into exile would need more than English as a second language.

“What is fascinating about English for Academic Purposes is that you are looking at academic communication, which goes beyond the communicative processes in day-to-day life. So how do you write about ideas?” The language used needs to take account of disciplinary differences and genres and the functions of text required to talk about research both to specialists and to a broader audience. “You’ve got to be interested in that sort of approach to language.” Brewer says, “We work more with the texts, although oracy is a big area in EAP given that oral communication is essential for presentations and seminars, but a lot of what we do with the Syrian academics is about text and the texts they’re producing.”

Kate Robertson (Cara) welcomed the inclusion of EAP into the programme, and Brewer, BALEAP Events Officer at the time, sent out a call

Professor Sarah Brewer

to see whether individuals or institutions could provide time, resources or teachers for the programme and join a development meeting at ISLI. Representatives of eleven institutions came together around the programme with participants from the universities of Durham, Edinburgh, Kent, Reading, and Sheffield forming an initial core group.

When Karen Whiteside, also from Reading University, got involved, Brewer described her contribution as invaluable: “She was an absolute genius at breaking down the complex aspects of language to make it intelligible and teachable for this particular group. There is a tension in that their English language may not be very highly developed, but they are highly professional, experienced, mature academics. Karin began to do more teaching at the Syria programme workshops in Istanbul, and I was the connection to BALEAP. We are both members of the Syria Programme EAP Steering Group, of which I have recently become chair. I do more of the administrative side, keeping things going in the background and recruiting more teachers as the programme has grown. It was interesting to see how many EAP tutors have been supporting the programme for several years. You get people who want to contribute beyond their everyday job and are happy to give their time freely.”

Since 2017, Brewer has worked with a core group of EAP specialists, organising parallel online social events, shaping the overall pedagogy. She believes that people derive meaning from their involvement in the programme. “You know, there are always things that you can contribute to, but because we’re specialists in EAP, it’s good for us to have the opportunity to contribute within our specialism. It’s been a great privilege

to feel that we can use our expertise to help in some way. I think the tutors really value it.”

Over a hundred Syrian academics have gone through the EAP strand of the programme. Here and there are nods of gratitude to their EAP tutors, anecdotal remarks about how invaluable regular intensive residential events in Istanbul were, and casual admissions of the benefits of the weekly one-to-one EAP lessons and the parallel academic skill development soiree sessions.

Syria Programme participants who benefit from research incubation visits to the UK, often travel across the UK to meet their EAP tutors in person, who, in turn, might fly to Istanbul to support Syria Programme research-related academic writing workshops. Like Brewer, they appear to have dedicated years, not just months towards building the fluency of their participant, with very tangible outcomes in the form of published articles, presentations, lectures, jobs, and research connections and collaborations. Something has worked. Brewer agrees and suggests that it is partly the connections that are made and feeling part of a new academic community after losing their place in a different academic world.

Brewer will retire from her full-time commitments at the University of Reading this year but plans to continue working with Cara and chairing the Syria Programme EAP Steering Group. It’s a unique programme and a mission dear to her heart, and she will work as long as needed:

“It’s been a privilege to work with Kate, her energy, her experience, and her can-do attitude. I feel very privileged to have been in a position where I could contribute. I would say this is also true for the other members of the steering group.” Retiring also hands her an expanse of time to write those stories she once saw hidden away in vaults and Record Offices across the country, rooted not only in the 18th century which she still loves, but to find stories - where they are – hidden and in plain view –that she will now have enough time to unearth.

Professor Sarah Brewer

“We work more with the texts, although oracy is a big area in EAP given that oral communication is essential for presentations and seminars, but a lot of what we do with the Syrian academics is about text and the texts they’re producing.”

A BEACON OF HUMANITY

Dr Izdin Elkadour

It is not easy to build a university from the ground up, but this is precisely what Dr Izdin Elkadour, and other Syrian academics, did in 2015, when faced with no alternative but to oppose Assad’s takeover of the national universities. As a result, Al Sham University is now a small-fledged institution, not yet a decade old, situated in the northwest corner of Syria. It has become a lifeline to people living in the increasingly precarious and isolated areas outside Assad’s control. Operating in an environment riven by conflicts.

The former rector of Al Sham and its current Vice-Rector of Academic Affairs, Dr Izdin has navigated takeovers by armed groups, ideological detractors, aerial bombardments, a slow but steady encroachment of governmental control, a lack of international recognition and support, but perhaps the biggest challenge yet has been the impact of the recent earthquakes that hit Turkey and northern/northwest Syria on the 6th February 2023. Particularly galling were the days of aerial bombardment by the Syrian air force that followed the earthquakes. Given their vulnerability on the ground, the international community’s near abandonment of them, because of Russia’s arbitrary veto of border crossings causing delays for urgently needed assistance, has left people floored by the immorality and illegality of the situation.

Elkadour received his political education over the past 25 years. As a legal theorist and international relations scholar, he has written about Syrian foreign policy during the Gulf crisis, the legal dimensions of the war on Iraq, Libya and the devastation of civil society in Syria, most notably in higher education. In his career, he has seen many instances of failed diplomacy, murderous inaction by the United Nations and the slow death of an international community. His thoughts on realpolitik are straightforward. “What is happening in Syria is entirely in the hands of world powers, Russia and Iran have their own agenda. Different regional powers have their agendas. I can never tell what will happen. Will we remain a unified country, whether Syria will be divided or whether the regime will be supported, and will the dictatorship continue? The future of is out of Syrian control.”

However, his disillusionment with international relations is far from total. When it comes to the all-consuming work on the ground, he strives for shared vision and partnership. Building a university that will serve its unique community’s needs so that it can stand as a beacon of excellence for the hopes and dreams of the Syrian people, and as a corrective to the past. Al Sham is a community of returning academics and internally displaced students rebuilding lives, innovating without resources, starting businesses, and fighting for an education. It is led by returning academics who fought for self-determination and have a vision of where they want to go next. This is how universities rooted in free thinking begin.I am reminded of a line of Abdellatif Laabi’s poems. “Will we realise some day that the real centre is in the margin?”

Originally from Idlib, Elkadour grew up in Aleppo, living in Lebanon briefly.  He lived for over eleven years in North Africa, which he loved, meeting students from across Africa and the Middle East, completing all his studies at Muhammad V University, Agdal, Morocco, where he witnessed the Arab Spring. “During the early days, I participated in protests against the Syrian regime. After that I became involved in supporting the local structures, in developing alternative governance structures in liberated areas. Then I moved to focus on the Higher Education sector.”

He joined a group of activist academics who were setting up a university in what was then known as the liberated areas of northwest Syria, in order to provide access to higher education for people who had been left out of the equation. “Back when we started preparing to launch International Sham University in 2015, there were only two universities in the northwest at the time: one in Idlib and one in Aleppo City. There were no universities in the suburbs north of Aleppo, and people had to travel to get an education. So, we were practically the first university in the area. When we first opened, only a few faculties were available: Political Science, Engineering (mechatronics, chemical engineering, informatics and civil), and the Faculty of Sharia & Law. Since then, the university has gradually expanded. Now we have a Faculty of Education with two departments, we have opened a new department in the Faculty of Engineering and a new Faculty of Health Sciences, which includes nursing, emergency medicine, physiotherapy and anaesthesia.”

The University serves over 2100 students: “Some of them are older high school graduates from regime-controlled areas, and others, especially when we first opened the University, were older. Because we opened five years after the start of the war, many students had been unable to continue their education, living in areas without access, which is why they were older.” “Our first academic year was 2016-2017, and in 2020, we celebrated our first graduates.”

Remarkably, the university has gained a good reputation in the community in a relatively short time. Elkadour believes it is due to the dedication of all who have been involved and the underpinning of their idealism with quality provision, and the introduction of quality-related policies and practices to create a modern and professional institution. “We developed modules and programmes based on our analysis of programmes in neighbouring countries, including Turkey and other Arab countries in the region, as well as adopting of European criteria, specifically the credit hour system.” He explains, “We were keen to ensure that these criteria were implemented in the best way possible. This applies to teaching and assessment. This is why I believe that Al Sham has a good reputation.”

Through collaboration with their main donors, a Turkish charity, Elkadour was able to secure travel permits for academics to cross the border between Turkey and Syria to work inside Syria. It is a miniature model of international collaboration that benefits all involved and allows for some constructive flow across the border. The university has over 60 teaching staff, recruiting academics who are currently in exile. “At the time, I heard from colleagues living in Turkey how Cara was helping them. However, I did not have direct communication with Cara until 2019. At the time, Cara organised a roundtable to discuss the challenges facing higher education in northwest Syria. We discussed the sector’s challenges and met with academics from other conflict-affected countries who shared their experiences and approaches with us.”

Since then, Cara has facilitated several other round tables: “Of course, one of the aims of our collaboration with Cara is to share and build our experience, with the hope that we have more opportunities to collaborate with international partners and obtain international accreditation for Al Sham.” Dr Elkadour has also been involved in other projects to improve governance. “We have bylaws and processes in place but are trying to improve those and identify a new governance structure to ensure that we align with internationally recognised quality management and assurance standards. Cara also facilitated visits to several UK universities, Leeds, Kent and Sussex, where we discussed their quality assurance frameworks.”

Elkadour is a diplomat, an activist academic who can detach when need be. He talks about al Sham, with the reality of the earthquakes a background reality. He talks about constitutional amendments and Syrian history and international statecraft, without mentioning the pain caused by this recent tragedy, but it is palpable in the room.

Dr Izdin Elkadour

“Cara organised a roundtable to discuss the challenges facing higher education in northwest Syria.”

A DIFFERENT WORLD

Dr Mahmoud Zin Alabadin

Like many architects, Mahmoud Zin Alabadin has a visceral response to architectural heritage and traditional buildings. Before writing, he must visit, feel, photograph, and sketch them. He understands these interrelated parts of a process as one that allows him to be in dialogue with his physical surroundings, an intangible conversation we all have daily.

Zin Alabadin’s passions are rooted in an endless appreciation and documentation of historical architectural styles across the Middle East. Since the nineties, he has published nine books, each filled with his own drawings and photographs covering his myriad interests: Ottoman architectural styles in Damascus and Saudi Arabia, traditional and modern building styles in Abu Dhabi, Islamic houses - buildings marked and shaped by elements of Persian, Umayyad, Abbasid, Ayyubid, Ottoman architectural styles, civilisations stacked upon each other, like so many buildings in his beloved birth town of Aleppo, where he had planned to teach architecture before the war upended a young architect’s plans.  In 2012, he left Syria for Turkey. He can never forget how friends and colleagues in Turkey reached out to him during the war and invited him back to Yıldız Technical University in Turkey, where he had lived and studied during the nineties. “It was not in my mind that one day I would

return to teach at the university I had graduated from. But this is life. You cannot say whether it is an advantage or disadvantage.”

He lectures at Yıldız in the History of Architecture Department and directs, with the help of his students, a massive database project called Aleppo, Yesterday Today and Tomorrow. Teaching is fulfilling and there is pleasure in working alongside some of his senior professors, architects such as Nuran Kara Pilehvarian, who taught him as an undergraduate.

Aleppo, Yesterday Today and Tomorrow has documented the complicated journey toward reconstruction in Aleppo, raising questions about preserving and conserving some of Aleppo’s most iconic buildings. “Aleppo is starting to be rebuilt, but there needs to be a clear strategy. It needs time, will and knowledge. There are many problems; there is not enough expert manpower or engineers. There are financial problems. There are questions about the quality of the reconstruction. Now, I am working on restoration and architectural renovation with my students. I have given many lectures in Turkish cities about destruction and renovation.”

“Cara has supported me and helped with so much. Last year I conducted a project funded by Cara with my colleague Adnan Almohamad, about the destruction of Aleppo buildings. We made five case studies of historical buildings and asked questions about the restoration and what sort of quality control there was.” Some reconstruction projects were done perfectly; others didn’t meet international standards. Certain important considerations may never cross your mind if you are not an engineer, an architect, a restoration expert, like when clearing rubble from streets. Apparently, when inexperienced teams of volunteers did what seemed necessary, there was no thought that ornamental stones might go missing. Some were lost, and some may have been stolen, but they are all now lost. In the Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton quotes Epictetus, who is said to have demanded of a heartbroken friend whose house had burnt to the ground, “If you really understand what governs the universe, how can you yearn for bits of stone and pretty rock?” In Aleppo, it seems possible to do both.

Dr Mahmoud Zin Alabadin

With any project, Zinalbadin discusses it first with his students. He relies on the importance of dialogue and discussion to bolster their confidence in their architectural ideas. He created a strong relationship with his students at Aleppo University and continues to do so at Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul. Sometimes, as an exercise in creation and imagination, he might take his students to workshops at the covered bazaar in Istanbul. It reminds him of the al-Saqtiyeh souk in his birth town of Aleppo before its destruction in 2015. He admits that a sort of solace can be found there. “When I am missing Aleppo, I feel as if I am missing my mother. You know, you are looking for your mother everywhere, sensing her scent. I can catch this smell when I am in a market. I can remember my childhood, and my parents, both of whom died. In Syria, I grew up in a traditional house with a courtyard, and I could see the fountain from my bedroom window… When I was little, I could also see the Citadel from my window. Aleppo Citadel is the most important building to me. It is strong, high, and in the city centre; you can feel and recognise it anywhere. It feels protective. Inside the Citadel are historical buildings, a mosque and a hammam, it’s a city within a city. We were a big family. I was the youngest, and my relationship with my mother and father was very strong. I could do anything; I was lucky. They were always supportive. Seriously, I had a special relationship with my parents, and I am missing them.”

The souk in old Aleppo was eventually reconstructed perfectly, but sadly, the place never regained its spirit because so many people –customers and traders – had gone. It made Zin Alabadin see concretely how a place is more than about sustainability or aesthetic pleasure, or cost or replication but that somehow, when places become invested with soul, there is harmony and they become places of collective memories. “Our collective memories are very important. All of us are living in our memories, looking for our friends, our homes, our neighbours even. In Syria, we have a strong relationship with our neighbours. Now we are living in a different world. The new generation has started to grow up outside of Syria. They are born in Istanbul or Germany and don’t have feelings or memories for the city. I have some workshops with Syrian Students. We went together to the covered bazaar, and I asked how can

we connect to our past, the smells? Remember Aleppo, when you are entering this market, what do you feel? Then they write, and it is very profound.”

In 1978, the German filmmaker Georgia Friedrich shot some footage of Aleppo. She captured the souq, the Citadel, and the Gate of Antioch. What is so special is the way she captures people in her frame. They live, play, work and grow up with these ancient monuments in the background, silent guardians, witnesses to their lives. It is painful and revelatory to watch.

Zin Alabadin was nearing the end of a four-week Cara-facilitated visit to the UK, hosted by The Courtauld Institute, when the earthquakes struck southern Turkey and northern Syria. As of February 2023, over 50,000 people had been reported dead or missing. Millions are without homes or food. UNESCO has gone to Aleppo, a world heritage site that has been on the World Heritage in Danger List since 2013, to record newly damaged buildings There are reports that parts of the Citadel have again been damaged. He also discovered that two of his students had died, one visiting family in Antakya. He knows others in border cities who have also suffered. His family remains in Aleppo. It is extremely gracious of him agree to this interview in the circumstances.

In just five short weeks in the UK, Zin Alabadin says, he had begun to feel himself again, that he has found the UK welcoming and beautiful. His time at The Courtauld has allowed him to delve into their important resources, as well as those of The British Library and the V&A Museum, amongst others. His Courtauld hosts, Prof. Alixe Bovey and Dr Lucy

“Our collective memories are very important. All of us are living in our memories, looking for our friends, our homes, our neighbours even. In Syria, we have a strong relationship with our neighbours. Now we are living in a different world.”

Bradnock, arranged for him to give a public lecture on his work, with another given at the University of Dundee, both followed by fascinating exchanges on the destruction and reconstruction of Aleppo’s architectural heritage. He packed in as much as he could whilst in the UK, even managing to visit his Cara English tutor in Brighton, and was delighted, following his lecture at The Courtauld, to be invited by the V&A to present on his work as part of its ‘Culture in Crisis: Architecture Responds’ London Festival of Architecture 2023 programme in June 2023. His return will again be supported by Cara.

It is part of life to live happily with nostalgia and sadness. “Sometimes, some songs, smells and memories can carry you to a different world. This is why I am always trying to be busy. Because if I have free time, I will be sad. I try to be busy and write, create, prepare, and organise something to do with the students, so I don’t have time to remember.” He smiles sadly “that’s what I am doing here in the UK. I don’t want to think about yesterday. Tomorrow will be better than today.”

THE CALL

Dr Maggie Grant

Dr Maggie Grant believes that this country and she means “us/ the entire UK”, not just Scotland, where she is based, has been severely damaged by the deliberate dehumanising of migrants and the specific othering that occurs in everyday discourse about immigration. The hostile environment and the conscious shift towards using language and policy to make people’s lives more and more complex and how this impacts young people, mainly trafficked and separated children, with whom she is concerned, is to deprive them of their futures and grounding in life:

“Sometimes, some songs, smells and memories can carry you to a different world. This is why I am always trying to be busy. Because if I have free time, I will be sad. I try to be busy and write, create, prepare, and organise something to do with the students, so I don’t have time to remember.” He smiles sadly “that’s what I am doing here in the UK.

I don’t want to think about yesterday. Tomorrow will be better than today.”

“The asylum system as it’s currently constructed is ‘broken’, and deliberately so. It makes it easier to blame the people than the systems. We blame the people being forced to move rather than those making decisions about what kind of country we are and how we allocate our resources.”

Her dad, a Scotsman, decided to do something about the kind of country he wanted to live in. In 2015 amidst divisive Brexit rhetoric about migrants, he was part of a small group that set up Stirling Citizens of Sanctuary, which later became “Forth Valley Welcome”. It announces on its website that it welcomes “New Scots” who have come to the UK as refugees from Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. Its initial purpose, Grant says,

was to pressurise local authorities in the Forth Valley area to participate in the Vulnerable Persons resettlement scheme. It began with Syrian families and later Afghan families. “I also know that for him, part of the reason for setting it up was because he had been to Syria when I was there and met my Syrian colleagues.” A combination of his compassion, natural sense of justice, and direct exposure to the human realities and context, strengthened his resolve, rather than passively watching it on the news.

In 2006, Grant’s family visited her in Syria. At the time, she had found a place in Aleppo, learning Arabic and falling in love with the City’s history and culture. “It’s a cliche, but people are so generous with their time and are so welcoming.” She had a job with the UN agency, UNRWA, and was assisting with a refugee employment project. She had just come from London, where she had worked at a refugee employment centre for Brent Council, so she was not wholly inexperienced. “There were already a lot of Iraqis there, and obviously, from decades back, Palestinians had also moved to Syria. But during the 2006 invasion of Southern Lebanon, I saw Lebanese families fleeing war who also needed sanctuary in Syria. It feels so hard to think about it now because when I was there, Syria was the refugee-receiving country in the region. The idea of how fast and how much things have changed, just how much pain and tragedy there is, is hard to wrap your head around. I have very fond memories of that time and often look back at the photos and wonder what those areas would look like now. My parents and I have talked a lot about it.”

Grant’s family are from Scotland, but growing up, they travelled. She was born in London but soon moved to America where her father got a job. Seven years later, the family returned to live in Scotland, where she remained until, at 18, she went to England to study at Newcastle University. Her undergraduate degree in Combined Studies in Japanese, Korean and Understanding Asian Cultures would take her to Fukuoka University in Japan, and then to Sogang University in South Korea. Various administrative posts kept her in Japan for a couple of years before she was accepted to do an MSc in Social Policy and Planning at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2003. In subsequent years, post-Syria, and a job with a charity where she was involved with

“... during the 2006 invasion of Southern Lebanon, I saw Lebanese families fleeing war who also needed sanctuary in Syria. It feels so hard to think about it now because when I was there, Syria was the refugee-receiving country in the region. The idea of how fast and how much things have changed, just how much pain and tragedy there is, is hard to wrap your head around.”

qualitative research and children, Grant decided to settle on research as her career. She began exploring family issues but was also drawn to better understand the lives of young people in care (foster, kinship, residential) or in adoptive families, writing about unaccompanied and trafficked young people whose long but invisible presence in Scotland was coming to the fore. Her PhD in Mental Health from the School of Health Sciences, City University, London, completed in 2012, used data from The British Chinese Adoption Study to explore the perception and lifeways of women who had been internationally adopted in childhood.

Currently, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Stirling, Centre for Child Well-Being and Protection, Grant juggles her time between her work there and third-sector research projects. Academics working with social workers, medical advisors and lawyers will, she hopes, become a more formalised praxis, where academics become of greater use in their communities, informing protection policies and influencing policy change. She notes the inspiring work of academic colleagues like Paul Rigby whose research and scholarly work draws on his experience as a social worker, grounding policy in genuine practice.

In the past ten years, she has made a significant contribution to several large third sector research projects, such as an AHRC-funded study looking at essential support for trafficked children through the Modern Slavery Policy and Evidence Centre, and a study on maltreatment

in foster care for the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry. One of her many projects in Scotland is the Adoption and Fostering Alliance of Scotland, a multi-disciplinary organisation that supports all those working in adoption, fostering and caring for looked-after children, which she co-founded.

Back when Grant worked at Brent Council supporting refugee teachers to requalify, if an academic walked in, then Cara was amongst the first organisations to which they were referred. She admired Cara’s work, and had already considered supporting it when, out of the blue: “she received a last-minute memo about the Cara Syria Programme looking for research team mentors. Some of the projects listed involved young people and I thought, now that is something I probably could contribute to! I had also missed working in multilingual environments, so the idea of getting involved in something like the Syria Programme just appealed. I thought I might be too late because the email was very close to the deadline, or the deadline had passed by this time.”

That was over a year ago and is how she was partnered with Syrian colleagues and now friends: Dr Ahmad Korabi, a Syrian legal theorist who works with the Syrian Dialogue Centre, and Dr Husam Al Saad, a Syrian Sociologist who works at the Aleppo Free University. They had submitted a research proposal to explore young Syrians’ participation in local political structures and, more broadly, in civil society in Syria. Her co-mentor was Johan Siebers, a Dutch Professor of Philosophy based at Middlesex University. He would advise from the viewpoint of politics and philosophy, and Grant would support the research design and frameworks and the ethics approval process. It was a multilingual group, so one of her dreams had come true, and learning from one another highlighted how crucial cross-cultural communication is, especially when different perspectives call for more challenging and reflective discussions. As Grant adds, “just more fun!” In the beginning, they used interpreters, but improved English by the end removed the need, and she found this transformation to be “astounding”, inspiring her to rethink learning languages all over again.

Grant was apprehensive about the ethics process, given the Syrians were not affiliated to the University of Stirling, but the ethics committee

members themselves appeared to benefit from the way Ahmad handled their questions about the project. “He raised a lot of good points about the different perceptions of risk when you are working in a context like NW Syria versus working in the UK, and the importance of his community relationships and networks in the region, quite different from a team parachuting in to do research in an area where they haven’t lived or worked before. I thought about that a lot and ethical considerations linked to my own research and what we’re teaching our students about research. Somebody on the panel asked a question about the role of interpreting, which was a good reminder of hugely important role of interpreters’, which was invaluable.”

Relying on Ahmad’s extensive relationships, networks and connections, the team was able to collect good data. Over 300 young people were surveyed in three areas of NW Syria: “Ahmed and Husam were phenomenal in just how quickly they collected data. I remember a meeting where they apologised that after a week of their survey, they only had 180 responses or something, and I’m so used to people saying, ‘Oh well, we’ve only got four responses!’ So, seeing how quickly they could do that, again because they’re so well embedded, was so motivating!”

Due to Covid 19, the team initially met over Zoom, and then finally in-person in Istanbul in March 2022, although without Johan who had contracted Covid. In November 2022, Ahmad was supported by the Cara Syria Programme to make a research incubation visit to the UK, spending 3 weeks at Middlesex University with Johan Siebers, and 2 weeks at the University of Stirling. She felt sorry for him as he navigated his way around icy Stirling in the middle of December, but “he made the most of it, and she marvelled at his use of English.”

Three months later, the data was analysed and ready to be shared; the paper was almost ready, but then came the earthquakes, upended all their plans. Ahmad and his family, who were living in the worst affected area, were forced to move, supported by friends and Cara: “It was awful, but one thing I know about Ahmad is that he’s very determined and the paper will be published.”

FAREWELL, ALEPPO

Dr Maher Jesry

In the first few years of the Syrian civil war, it is thought that over 2000 academics fled Syria for their security to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and countries further afield in Europe. “I didn’t leave Syria with those who left in the first two years of the civil war for many reasons,” explains Dr Maher Jesry. Bound by different obligations, familial and professional, an extended assistant professorship contract at the University of Aleppo, where he taught Phonetics and English translation, Jesry was among those who stayed behind: “When the war started in 2011, I used to say, let me stay longer. Maybe things will change because when these demonstrations started in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, they lasted a couple of months and were finished. It will finish next month, next week, next year, but it went on and on, and things got more difficult.”

The chaos of civil war has devastated the Syrian education system in many ways, not least through brain drain, infrastructural damage and financial hardship, but as in all societies where freedom of expression is censored, academics and thinkers are always the first targets; they’re always on the run, fearing detention. The first to be accused of propaganda, they are detained, interrogated, tortured, and sometimes killed. When scholars left in such great numbers, in 2014, the Syrian

government even threatened to put them on trial should they return. But this is a not a war story, even if the war overshadows everything, whether you were an academic, restaurant owner or pickpocket living on the streets of Aleppo or Damascus. To tell stories like this requires that you compromise the safety of others you left behind, and also, the work ahead, and Dr Jesry is too focussed for that.

He does say that in retrospect, life in Aleppo was relatively easy before people dared hope for political change, before people went on peaceful demonstrations to protest against the rule of the Assad family. There was still art, literature, music, and some sense of academic freedom. Electricity, water and gas were not rationed before life became unspeakably tragic. The city had survived wars, earthquakes and plagues and so there was an unshakeable confidence in its survival. After all, Aleppo was a regional and world centre of antiquity, a place of inspiration for the Arab world from time immemorial. “Sometimes,” Jesry says, “when I think of the beauty of Aleppo, Old Aleppo and even the new part, I can’t help but cry. I am sixty years old, so you can imagine how long I lived there.”

A few years before the uprisings, Jesry was part of a pan-Arab festival featuring symposia, publications and architectural rehabilitation. He had researched and translated an Arabic historical text into English, The Golden Book, Documenting the Festival Celebrating Aleppo as the Capital of Islamic Culture, which extolled the longue durée of Aleppo; the rise and fall of civilisations, a city of “trade and industry, tolerance, thought, art and originality”.

Aleppo was a large part of Jesry’s life. He studied English Language and Literature, graduating with his BA in 1984 at Aleppo University. After that, he did mandatory army service before devoting himself to six more years of graduate study in Linguistics at the University of Essex, in England, and later a PhD in Phonetics. In 1996 he returned to Syria to teach, and, except for a six-year teaching post in Saudi Arabia at King Saud University and a few years teaching at Ebla Private University in Saraqeb, he worked at Aleppo University continuously –coaching students, supporting colleagues, a stalwart representative of the Faculty of Arts and Humanity until he could no longer bear the

FAREWELL, ALEPPO Dr Maher Jesry

detentions and political violence and shortages that destroyed life in Aleppo as he knew it.

In 2017 he moved to Turkey first, and his wife followed, where millions of fellow Syrians had already settled and where some Syrian academics were being given contracts by Turkish universities. He was reunited with friends and three of his siblings. His children, already living in Germany, at least knew their parents were safe. Gradually, Jesry and his wife adapted to life with uncertainties as exiles do, not knowing when they might see their elderly relatives, avoiding the past, worrying about the safety of those left behind, about finances and the expenses of a new life, about permits, visas, and contracts that are rejected or take too long under red tape, worrying that the people they love might die in the interim. “My wife stayed with her mother for four months last year, but then she had to come back to Turkey. Last month her mother died, and it was very hard. My wife was waiting for a residence permit and in this time, her mother died. We always say things will end well politically. We wait to hear good news. Maybe they will take place soon or never, we don’t know.”

These uncertainties made work difficult, although chaos presents opportunities and he is clear that joining Cara was one. He describes the new opportunities Cara gave him to collaborate on projects with Syrian colleagues, mentored by UK academics and to get his research to publication. “Cara has helped me to a great extent; they offered me the opportunity, opportunities, actually, to work with new colleagues from Syria and with colleagues from the UK. They have shared their time, knowledge and skills and help to get our research to publication, and for this, I’m very grateful to Cara. So far, I have got one paper, and another paper is now under review in one of the journals. We are finishing a draft and we will give it to our mentor; we have started analysing data for another, that was recently approved and funded by Cara.”

With seven other colleagues from Turkey and Syria, he has just worked on an important paper exploring the best ways to deliver quality higher education in the conflict-affected northwest of Syria by applying riskmanagement quality-assurance models for emerging universities in NWS.

However, these universities function with a fraction of the staff they need. In addition, they need more financial support, better oversight, and better international recognition and accreditation and Jesry is proud of this article because everyone poured their hearts into it because they cared about the future of education in Syria. Furthermore, he is proud of the collaborative nature of the paper, the hard work done between Turkey, Syria and the UK. “Everyone played their part, working with Prof. John Simons, our Cara mentor who guided and gave feedback on the academic writing.” he says.

What is obvious is the strength and vitality he and his colleagues possess, crucial since they will be the rebuilders of the community, quietly, without recognition, addressing the complex needs of the people through their research. Jesry (sixty years young), with his colleagues, are surely among those experts who will be called upon to do the heavy mental lifting, rebuilding, and remembering.

Recently in England for a month at Leicester University, on a Carafunded visit with two Cara-research mentors, a fellow Syrian, Dr Mohammed Ateek, based at Leicester University, and Dr Sebastian Rasinger, based at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, he made time on a rainy evening to talk. The week had been busy and productive, observing seminars and discussions about a new Cara-supported project on language policies among Syrian refugees in Turkey, which he will be doing with his old colleague Dr Saad Vafaibaaj. “We have to work,” he says, “I want to work. When I talk about the past, it is painful, so I don’t. I focus instead on the work that faces the Syrian abroad.” That’s what you do when you say farewell and move on. “So, what shall we talk about?” is the first thing he says with a smile.

“I want to work. When I talk about the past, it is painful, so I don’t. I focus instead on the work that faces the Syrian abroad.”

Miranda Pyne is a freelance writer, editor and researcher. She holds a BA (History) from the School of Oriental and African Studies, an MSc (Public Health) from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard University. She started off working as a researcher for the Department of African American Studies at Harvard University for many years and has subsequently continued to work on a range of books, films and texts for authors and academics, as well as her own creative writing. Like everyone who has worked with the Syria Programme, she wishes to thank Cara and all the Syria Programme supporters and participants she has had the pleasure of interviewing for these stories. It has been so meaningful and inspiring to be reminded of lives devoted to ideals.

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Reproduced by kind permission of Ali Al Ferzat