Syrian refugee Omar Alshogre celebrates the news he has been admitted to Georgetown University
Credit: Courtesy Omar Alshogre
His shouts of joy echo from the mountains as the young Syrian refugee pumps his fists in the air on a roadside in Norway.
“I made it into Georgetown!” Omar Alshogre exclaims in disbelief after hearing he has been accepted to study at the prestigious Washington DC University.
The video lasts just nine seconds, shared to Mr Alshogre’s Twitter page, but his joy is so contagious it has been viewed over 100,000 times in the past 24 hours.
“Maybe because I’m happy and people need to see someone who is happy and laughing for a moment,” Mr Alshogre says. by way of explanation.
We deserve a moment of happiness. I’m officially admitted to Georgetown University. @Georgetown pic.twitter.com/M1BVsaY8dS
— Omar Alshogre (@omarAlshogre) November 1, 2020
It has been a long journey to that moment, when the 25-year-old received news of his admission while returning to Sweden after a public speaking engagement last week.
In the early days of the Syrian uprising, Mr Alshogre was arrested for protesting seven times between 2011 and 2013. As the country descended into a brutal civil war, the teenager spent three years in the dungeons of President Bashar Al Assad.
In prison he says he was subjected to daily torture and starvation, which killed his two cousins he was arrested alongside. During his detention, Mr AlShogre says his father and two brothers were killed in a massacre in his village by Syrian government forces.
In a Damascus detention centre he was tasked with removing the bodies of dead prisoners and numbering their foreheads.
Mr AlShogre and his cousins were among the nearly 128,000 Syrians who disappeared after being arrested, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, which estimates that some 14,000 were killed under torture.
By the time his mother had raised enough money to pay a bribe for his release, Mr Alshogre says he weighed 34 kilograms, suffered from tuberculosis and was near death.
Following his release, Mr AlShogre fled Syria, first for Turkey and then to Sweden, where he dedicated himself to his late father’s dreams for his education.
“In Sweden I had to redo three years of high school, that was shocking to me to take me three years back in my life after prison had taken me back three years,” he recalls.
Mr Alshogre has testified to the Syrian government's brutality the US Senate
Credit: US Senate
But Mr AlShogre quickly learned Swedish and English and completed his first three years of high school in nine months. After finishing his secondary education, Mr Alshogre had the choice between attending university in Sweden or travelling to the United States to contribute to the implementation of the Caesar Act, a landmark sanctions law that aims to target key figures of the Assad regime.
“I grew up in a family where my father was really serious about education, he wanted me to go to the best school and have the top school in everything,” Mr Alshogre says.
“I had to choose between fulfilling my father’s dream of finishing my education and ” and going to the US, he said.
Mr Alshogre chose to travel to Washington but worried he was not fulfilling his late father’s expectations.
“Every time I went home and saw my father’s picture it told me I had to study, and I felt guilty,” he says.
Mr Alshogre has since become a public speaker, human rights activist and Director for Detainee Affairs at the Syrian Emergency Task Force. He has testified to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington about abuses in Syrian prisons.
He has also testified to German lawyers and European war crimes investigators building cases against the Syrian government.
By attending Georgetown University, where he plans to study business administration and entrepreneurship, Mr Alshogre hopes to prepare himself to one day return to Syria to help rebuild his homeland.
“I am one of few survivors who is really enjoying his life and benefiting from everything I went through,” he says.
“Now I got into one of the best universities. At every step I am taking I am showing the Syrian regime that they could not break me. And that’s an honour for me and the [other] survivors.”
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