Around the courtyard fountain and up to the upper floor, the old Damascene house is packed with students working on their lessons. A monastic silence reigns in the study area Bab Touma, far from the hustle and bustle of the old town souk. Samia (like the other witnesses cited, she did not want to give her name and her name has been changed) has been coming here almost every day for three years, straight from the engineering faculty at Damascus University. For a modest fee, she has internet, electricity and the peace and quiet she cannot find in her family home in the Kafr-Sousah district, with a brother and a sister.
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The “Syrian Notebooks” are a series of reports compiled in the summer of 2024. For security reasons, some of the people quoted speak under pseudonyms. For these same reasons, the names of the authors of these reports are not mentioned.
Always a good word to start a conversation with, and a big smile on her face, the 25-year-old met many friends there and even a boyfriend. Future engineers, doctors, graphic designers or architects who, like her, only have one idea in mind: to go abroad. The civil war that has been raging since 2011 has already pushed more than five million Syrians into exile. The economic crisis and military service are creating a new wave of departures among young people living in areas controlled by the Damascus regime.
Samia is preparing to leave in a year, once she earns her master’s degree. “All my friends want to leave, except for a handful of them whose parents forbid it or who have the security of a stable job here after university. The phenomenon is new for women, especially Muslim women like me.”she said, dressed in a black veil and a colorful robe. “Before we couldn’t travel without a companion, but today it’s okay, because we have relatives abroad”duck.
Her mother refused a visa that Germany offered the family in 2017. Her aunt was the first to leave, four years ago with her children, when her husband died. She was followed by a cousin, now married with two children. “At first it was a shock for the family. Now everyone is convinced that this is the best thing to do.”said Samia. Even the prospects of starting a family in Syria are slim these days. Samia and her boyfriend, a master’s degree holder in mechanical engineering, have just broken up. “He wanted to get married, but he doesn’t have enough to pay the dowry. He has to go into exile to save money. It will take time. We prefer to stay there and remain good friends.”he says philosophically.
Samia became bilingual in English thanks to the hours she spent watching American films. She would like to emigrate to England but visas are scarce. She is therefore thinking of Germany, which welcomed more than a million Syrian refugees during the war and which still offers host programmes for Syrian students and young graduates. She learned German thanks to online tutorials, as she could not afford private lessons.
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