In 2012, when Syrian government forces started bombing the eastern city of Deir ez-Zor early in the country’s civil war, conservation biologist Ahmad Aidek barely managed to escape his besieged neighborhood. In his apartment, he left behind dozens of rare specimens including the shell of an Eiselt’s pond turtle, a mummified sand gazelle, and a crowned leafnose snake preserved in formalin. Six years of bombardment “completely destroyed” most of the city, not to mention his precious specimens, Aidek says. “I lost them all.”
But Aidek did not lose his passion for science. Whereas many of Syria’s best researchers sought refuge abroad during the civil war, Aidek stuck it out in Deir ez-Zor at one of the nation’s few remaining science institutes, the General Commission for Scientific Agricultural Research. As the 13-year civil war ground on, he published articles with European co-authors on Syria’s biological riches, including a monograph on snakes in 2023 and surveys in Zootaxa of turtles and tortoises in September and of mammals to appear next month. It became a lonely pursuit as Aidek watched the nation’s academic standards crumble. “The state of Syrian universities is miserable,” he says.
Now, the question is whether Syria’s new leaders, who earlier this month toppled President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, can repair the damage. So far, rejuvenating Syria’s higher education and research community is “not on the radar” of the Sunni paramilitary group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham that is consolidating power in Damascus, says Ahmad Sadiddin, a Syrian agricultural economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations who left his homeland in 2012. More urgent problems include easing the plight of millions of Syrians displaced by the war. Tens of thousands of college-age youth and their families are living in tents—many without access to proper nutrition, let alone classes. “Housing and food have to come first,” says Amal Alachkar, a neuroscientist at the University of California (UC), Irvine, who left Syria in 2012.
Alachkar is also losing hope that some of her former students at Aleppo University, whom the government detained years ago, will emerge from regime prisons emptied after Assad’s downfall. “Most likely they were tortured to death,” she says.
Once the immediate crisis passes, Syria’s long-term recovery “will rely on rebuilding higher education,” Alachkar says. And with the backing of institutions that threw them lifelines years ago, she and other members of Syria’s scientific diaspora are hatching plans to help beleaguered colleagues who stayed.
“The good news is that we’ve saved a lot of Syria’s professors,” says Allan Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education (IIE), which over the past decade handed out 203 fellowships to 111 Syrian scholars, securing havens for them at institutions in Europe, North America, and the Middle East. “They’ve practiced their craft while they’ve been in exile,” Goodman says. “There is a real chance they can build [Syrian higher education] back better.”
Syria may not have been an academic powerhouse under the former regime, but it had a few science oases. The most vaunted had malevolent aims: The Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC), a sprawling military R&D enterprise thought to employ as many as 20,000 people. Israel bombed SSRC’s institutes, including chemical weapons labs, hours after Assad fled the country on 7 December.
Civilian science had begun to hollow out years earlier. In 2012, the war forced the nonprofit International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon. Syria’s universities, meanwhile, withered as sanctions imposed on the Assad regime strangled the economy. Now, Alachkar says, “university research is almost entirely absent and curricula are outdated.” Aidek adds that professors at public universities earn about $80 a month—ؙ“absolutely not enough” to subsist on.
Such parlous conditions have turned Syrian campuses into hotbeds of corruption and scientific fraud. “Many university professors take bribes from students to pass their courses,” or earn advanced degrees, Aidek asserts. Theses, he says, are often riddled with “false and completely unrealistic information.” Aidek says he has flagged “serious scientific errors,” such as species misidentifications, in two recent publications from the University of Damascus.
Under Assad, the handful of reputable researchers who stayed in Syria had to maintain low profiles. “For the safety of my colleagues there, I kept only minimal contact,” Alachkar says. “Speaking with them could put their lives in risk.”
Like many Syrian scientists who found succor abroad early in the civil war, Alachkar initially thought she would return to her homeland within months. But as the years passed and Assad, with support from Iran and Russia, strengthened his grip on power, “I lost any of hope of going back,” says Alachkar, who now has a tenured faculty position at UC Irvine, where she studies psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases. She intends to help Syria-based scientists and students from her perch in California. For starters, Alachkar says, she and others could update curricula and teach online courses. Down the road, she foresees taking trips to Syria to mentor students and help establish research centers.
IIE, for one, is eager to facilitate such efforts, for example by possibly funding Syrian scientists who want to revise curricula. IIE is planning a meeting of U.S. stakeholders next month to discuss how to support Syrian academia. “If the chips fall well, we can immediately get to work soon on rebuilding their higher ed,” Goodman says.
Much will have to be refashioned from scratch, Aidek says. Although Syria’s academic ranks include genuine scientific talent, he predicts that the country will need “a whole new generation of honorable researchers for our universities to resemble those in the rest of the world.”
