A protest on Umayyad Square in Damascus for democracy and women's rights, December 19, 2024. Photo Credit: AFP
On December 8, the Syrian regime led by Bashar al-Assad and his Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party collapsed following an offensive led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) that controlled territories in northwestern Syria. This unexpected development will likely have significant and long-lasting consequences in many aspects of life for those living in Syria, including in higher education.
Conditions of academic freedom have been severely limited in Syria for multiple decades and the civil war that has been going on since 2011 has put significant strains on higher education as well. Since the 1970s, Syria’s Academic Freedom Index score has oscillated between 0.04 and 0.06 out of 1.00 and it is currently the country with the tenth lowest score.
One way in which Ba’athist regimes exerted control over universities in Syria has been the National Union of Syrian Students (NUSS). Functioning effectively as a party branch in universities, the NUSS was used by the Assad regime to curb student involvement in social movements such as in Aleppo University in 2011. According to a 2024 report of the Syrian-British Consortium, actions of the NUSS at this time included “attacking peaceful anti-regime protests; arbitrarily detaining students due to (suspicion of) anti-regime activity; and torturing students including by beating, tasing, and verbally and psychologically abusing them.” Students were also recruited for direct military purposes through the Ba’ath Brigades formed in 2012, tasked with controlling university campuses and providing support to government military operations.[1] This dynamic is similar to that experienced in Bangladesh until very recently under the Awami League government which was ousted following a student movement in August 2024. The student wing of the governing party, the Chhatra League, was banned shortly after the Awami League government collapsed. Similarly, in Syria, the new transitional government has frozen the works of NUSS in Syrian Universities, although the future of the organization is still uncertain.
In addition to these longer-term factors, the civil war brought other threats to academic freedom. In 2022 and 2023, the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA) identified 95 attacks on schools and universities as well as 80 instances in which educational institutions were used for military purposes.[2] Recently, on November 29, 2024, student housing in Aleppo University was hit with an artillery strike. Both government and opposition forces have used schools for military purposes while the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) issued a directive in 2020 that prohibits such usage and the targeting of schools for attacks.[3] Prior to the outbreak of armed conflict between the government and opposition groups, many professors were forced to leave the country or were imprisoned by the Syrian government led by al-Assad. In other parts of the country, in territories controlled by the SDF, teachers were fired for refusing conscription.
Conscription was also a significant problem for many male students who purposefully failed their classes in order to postpone their graduation as a way of avoiding the mandatory conscription that was imposed under the al-Assad regime. According to University World News, this has led to a drop in the percentage of men among all graduates from 45% in 2010 to 39% in 2021.
The threat of conscription has only added to the strains of the war on students’ mental health. A 2017 report published on BMC Medical Education found that more than half of Syrian medical students were depressed, one in two students suffered from stress and one in third suffered from anxiety.[4] Another study conducted on university students in the Deir-Ez-Zor city of Syria found that 86% of all students participating in the study reported experiencing at least one traumatic event with nearly 30% of the participants meeting criteria for a post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis.[5] Due these difficult conditions, many of those with the means to do so, both students and faculty, have left the country. By 2015, around one-third of all professors in Syria were either fired from their positions or had resigned if not otherwise rendered incapable of engaging in academic activity. This prompted the government of the time to raise the retirement age from 60 to 70 in order to bring some professors back to teaching positions.[6]
The al-Assad regime and the civil war have been two main sources for the limits on academic freedom in Syria in the near past. The downfall of the al-Assad regime as well as the civil war being closer to ending than it has ever been harbor certain positive potentials for the future of academic freedom in Syria. However, there are very important questions that are yet to be answered and they are likely to determine if academic freedom can improve in Syria in the near future. Firstly, women’s access to higher education could be endangered given the weight of Islamist groups within the coalition that ousted al-Assad. In fact, women’s entry to Idlib University, controlled by the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG) and HTS, was prohibited in 2022, citing a “lack of the necessary infrastructure to allocate a special department for women” as the reasoning for the decision. The SSG had been imposing gender segregation in educational institutions including universities. With the formalized establishment of a gender apartheid regime in Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover, as part of which formal education for women beyond 6th grade became prohibited, it is ever more important to protect women’s right to higher education in Syria.[7]
A second question relates to the presence of Kurdish armed groups in the northeastern regions of the country. Education in Kurdish had been banned in Syria for many decades. The Higher Education Minister in the current transitional government stated that “all components” of Syria would be incorporated into the new higher education system. However, given the ideological differences between the SDF and the groups currently in control of the transition government, conflicts regarding higher education are likely to persist. The arrest of dozens of teachers by the SDF for teaching the government’s curriculum in 2021 instead of their own hints towards the possibility of similar tensions in the future.[8]
Endangered Scholars Worldwide (ESW) is following developments regarding the future of higher education in Syria with care and concern. We call on the transitional government in Syria to take all necessary steps to eliminate existing threats to academic freedom inherited as legacies of the civil war. We further call on the Syrian government to uphold the rights of groups such as women and the Kurdish population in Syria to access higher education freely. We invite the global community dedicated to upholding human rights globally to join our call.
Sources and further reading:
[1] https://omranstudies.org/index.php/publications/papers/soft-tools-of-the-assad-regime-“the-national-union-of-syrian-students-as-a-model”.html?goal=0_9fe67c082e-fc5089628d-89022593&mc_cid=fc5089628d&mc_eid=773f4885af&fbclid=IwAR27IbN4jZz0vM_vkfgudX5WZq71L1RreoMnomtBnC8Dv0Et1UkpI9KKOkw
[2] Education Under Attack 2024. (2024). Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack. (pp. 192-194) https://protectingeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/eua_2024.pdf
[3] Non-State Armed Groups and Attacks on Education: Exploring Trends and Practices to Curb Violations. (2023). Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack. (p. 22) https://protectingeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/GCPEA_NSAG_ScopingPaper.pdf
[4] Al Saadi, T., Zaher Addeen, S., Turk, T. et al.(2017). Psychological Distress Among Medical Students In Conflicts: A Cross-Sectional Study From Syria. BMC Med Educ 17, 173. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-017-1012-2
[5] Yousef, L., Ebrahim, O., AlNahr, M. H., Mohsen, F., Ibrahim, N., & Sawaf, B. (2021). War-related Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Prevalence Among Syrian University Students. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2021.1954774
[6] Sansom Milton (2019). Syrian Higher Education During Conflict: Survival, Protection, and Regime Security,
International Journal of Educational Development, 64, pp. 38-47, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2018.11.003.
[7] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/womens-place-higher-education-question-after-syrian-coup
[8] Non-State Armed Groups and Attacks on Education: Exploring Trends and Practices to Curb Violations. (2023). Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack. (p. 17) https://protectingeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/GCPEA_NSAG_ScopingPaper.pdf
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