Voices: Amid Palmyra atrocities, reasons for hope

Jabeen Bhatti | Special for USA TODAY

BERLIN – Earlier this month, militant thugs from the Islamic State blew up Palmyra's Arch of Triumph, a 2,000-year-old icon of the glorious ancient city in Syria. It was only the latest atrocity there, and videos taken in the city show other treasures laden with explosives promising more destruction to come.

Syrian antiquities officials say if the destruction continues, Palmyra will be wiped out in six months. UNESCO calls it "a war crime." Local residents tell us the situation is tense, as beheadings continue and their city gets obliterated, piece by piece.

I wish I could look away. I wish I didn't know what I know. But as I detailed a few months ago, Palmyra is special to me, too, because of a childhood obsession with its ancient warrior queen, Zenobia.

Some ask, why do they do this? It's fear, says UNESCO chief Irina Bokova: “This new destruction shows how terrified by history and culture the extremists are, because understanding the past undermines and delegitimizes the pretexts they use to justify these crimes and exposes them as expressions of pure hatred and ignorance.”

"Ignorance" is the key word: Thinking people can't be led like sheep. Witness how Cambodia's Khmer Rouge quickly targeted the educated – doctors, lawyers, teachers – during its reign of terror in the 1970s. This also left the country shattered for decades after they were ousted.

While I was absorbing the arch's destruction, I thought about Syrians, and refugees, and what I have learned in the past four years of the war. And I realized, there is a reason to be hopeful in spite of it all.

Not long ago, I attended a conference in Turkey called "Strengthening Delivery of Higher Education to Refugees." It's a pretty dry title for what turned out to be an interesting and ultimately solutions-driven workshop on how to address a dire need: Thousands of young Syrians – and others – have had their education halted due to the war.

This might sound like a luxury when many in Syria, and outside, struggle to meet their daily survival needs. But we have seen how some students brave dangerous checkpoints – and front lines – to get to their classrooms. Others sneak back across borders to take exams or retrieve transcripts. The lengths students will go to to stay on track was initially shocking to me. But talk to anyone dealing with the young in war zones, and it is the same story everywhere.

There are many initiatives already helping: Scholarships, exams administered in refugee camps, new universities popping up, existing ones taking more students, new online degree programs such as Kiron University, which is starting this month. But the need is great: For example, 4,000 Syrian students applied for scholarships from the U.S.-based Institute of International Education last year – 43 won grants.

In Berlin, we work with Riham Kusa, a young Syrian refugee journalist of tremendous promise: She is 24, smart, determined and talented. She spends her mornings in German language school, her afternoons in the library studying German, and her evenings filling out applications for universities – or scholarships to pay for them – to get her Master's degree.

I spoke to her recently because I was concerned at the frantic nature of her search for a program – she has been rejected multiple times, mainly because she is not in Syria anymore. I told her that she needs to calm down: "You're safe, and it will happen. Stop focusing on that as a point for your life to start. Go out with friends sometimes," I said.

She answered, "When I am in the library or filling out applications, I enjoy that, I feel like I am doing something for my future. My Master's was interrupted. I want to finish it. I want to move forward."

That's the point, I realized. It's about lives interrupted, feeling stuck, out of options with little ability to move on, from war, from destruction, from shattered lives. That's why these degrees matter.

At the same time, I can't think of a better counter to the ignorance the Islamic State seeks to sow than people striving for knowledge, skills, achievement and advancement.

When you talk to these young would-be students, they often say, "I will get a degree and then I can help my country with it after the war is over." Well someday, it will be over. And hopefully there will be an army of educated young Syrians ready to rebuild their country – even if Palmyra is gone.

Bhatti, a correspondent in Berlin, is managing editor of Associated Reporters Abroad.