Four years ago, The National wrote about the efforts of the Iraqi Student Project (ISP), a voluntary, Syria-based initiative that prepared select Iraqi students to study at American universities as Iraq's education system lay in ruins.
Back then, some had recently started classes in the States, having successfully negotiated the US immigration system and various academic and financial hurdles.
Others, a year or two off entry level to US universities, spent their time preparing for the tests of their proficiency in English and hanging out in cafes and gaming rooms in Damascus, chatting about how exciting life in America could be.
It was a time when these young Iraqi students, with help from Gabe Huck and Theresa Kubasak, the American founders of the ISP, looked to build a future of promise from the ruins of a scarred and brutal past.
In 2010, Iraqi student Humam Al Mukhtar was in his first year of university at a small college in Kansas. At first, he found it difficult to interact with fellow students, being Muslim in a Catholic college.
At the same time, 2,700 kilometres to the west in Oregon, another Iraqi student had just started a degree in Middle Eastern affairs. Awab Rawi, who grew up on the streets of Baghdad, suffered homesickness and missed his family 10 time zones to the east in Iraq.
But since then much has changed.
Rawi spent hours discussing Iraq and military intervention with officers of the US army studying at his university. “Going to university and high-school classes on a weekly basis to talk about Iraq was a very enriching experience for me,” he says. And last year something huge happened: he met a fellow student from Arizona in a Palestine and Israel class; months later they were engaged to be married.
“The people [in Kansas] never considered me as an outsider; they took me in and considered me one of them,” says Al Mukhtar. “I spent Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter with their families; I stood on the altar beside several of them to witness their marriage.”
In May, he received his MBA from Benedictine College as his two brothers looked on in the crowds – an achievement not contemplated in his wildest dreams.
“The minute my name and degree was announced, my family, my professors, my friends and the entire audience gave me a loud cheer,” he said. “[It] took away all the pain of not seeing my parents for the past five years.”
While working on his MBA, Al Mukhtar was hired by Benedictine College to revamp its online presence. In June, he left Kansas and moved to New York to pursue his dream of working in advertising. By all accounts, his future is bright.
For other US-based students, their progress, since taking English lessons in Damascus where they lived on the sofas of friends as refugees from Iraq’s war, has been equally remarkable. One from Baghdad was made homecoming queen last October and is vice-president of her Ohio university’s student senate. Another is working as an Arabic language instructor at Dartmouth College, a prestigious Ivy League institution.But as the students have excelled, thanks in large part to guidance, help and schooling from ISP organisers Huck and Kubasak, the ISP’s very existence – and indeed Huck’s and Kubasak’s lives – has been thrown into doubt by another Middle East conflagration: the war in Syria.
When Syria’s largely peaceful protest movement was forced into violence to defend itself from the Syrian government, living in Damascus became increasingly dangerous. The city had become home to the world’s largest urban refugee population in 2008, but these thousands of Iraqis – and the students looking to study in America through the ISP – soon found they were no longer safe in Damascus either.
Once the 2012 students were accepted to their various courses in America and had visas to travel, the ISP founders felt that was that. “There was clearly no way to begin another one-year programme because of the increasing instability in Syria,” says Huck, who’s keen to point out that the Syrian authorities never forced him and Kubasak to leave the country.
When Huck and Kubasak were running the ISP from Damascus, its lifeblood was the flow of Iraqi students from their home country to the Syrian capital in order to prepare. By summer 2012, he recalls, few Iraqis were sending their children to Syria.
“And then there is the problem on the US end: more and more, Iraq was not on the minds of Americans including those handling scholarships to colleges. It was harder each year,” says Huck, a former publisher.
In September 2012, having stayed in Damascus for the first 17 months of Syria’s revolt-cum-war, Huck and Kubasak were forced to leave a life they had built in Syria and Iraq over 13 years. Today, they live in New York City and their Iraqi Student Project has stopped preparing students for college life in the US.
“We’d like to still be there [in Syria]. We could not, for a variety of reasons, expect to work from fall 2012 to summer 2013 with a new group of students. Part of that was the way it had become more difficult, though not impossible yet, to keep our residency. Part of it was the uncertainty of finding eight or more students (a sort of minimum we had set),” says Huck.
For the students, the years of study in the US were to prepare them to become leaders in the building of a new Iraq. But Iraq hasn’t changed that much in the time they’ve been away. In fact, it’s arguably got worse, particularly in recent weeks with militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) capturing a string of towns and cities – including Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city – in the west and north of the country. Only two of the 30-plus students to have graduated through the ISP have gone home.
“If you would’ve asked me five years ago: ‘What do you want to do when you graduate?’, I would’ve said: ‘I’m going home,’” says Al Mukhtar, whose parents now live in Lebanon. “But I gave up on that hope day by day.”
Rawi, whose parents have remained in Baghdad despite the worsening violence, took an extra year studying in Oregon to see if the situation would quiet down. “However, we only continue to see a deteriorating situation in the country so I am planning to stay here until I earn a higher degree (MA). This is only to buy me more time until I can see some positive changes taking place in Iraq,” he says.
“My family left Syria and resettled in Sweden and they are not planning to go back to Iraq, especially not after all the horrible bombing and unknown and random killing,” says Tamara Al Sammarraie, the 26-year-old homecoming queen, who graduated with a degree in early childhood education this year from a university in Ohio.
“Iraq is a country that is open to a lot of terrorists and militias from around the world to practise their criminal acts and destroy every beautiful thing Iraq once had.”
Despite everything, founder Gabe Huck is positive. “Will they ever go back to Iraq? We believe that many will,” he says. “Despite the hardship they experienced growing up in Iraq, there is much that they love about their country.
“In any case, these 50-plus Iraqi graduates will be at work in diverse fields and diverse places for decades to come.”
Stephen Starr is a regular contributor to The National.
