Imran Jasem is among the thousands of Syrians who had to flee their country when the civil war broke out out. Two years after the unrest began, Jasem sought refuge with his family in Turkey in 2013. Almost a decade later, it is back in his homeland – this time for rebuild this.
Jasem, who graduated from Uludağ University in the northwestern Turkish province of Bursa, where he studied civil engineering, now works for the city advice of his hometown Tal Abyad, a town in northern Syria freed from terrorist groups with Turkey support.
“We are the children of Tal Abyad. We have to come back. We must rebuild that”, he says. Turkey has long been the top destination of displaced Syrians and the host country more over 3.7 millions of Syrian refugees. The ongoing war deters millions to return to their native country, but some 480,000 people have voluntarily returned to safer areas of Syria. Tal Abyad, although still reeling from the menace of terrorism is one of them. The Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) had helped liberate the city from the YPG, the Syrian branch of the terrorist group PKK, in 2019 with son Operation Peace Spring.
The life of 25-year-old Jasem and son family changed when the Daesh terrorist group who was expelled from the city by the YPG/PKK in 2015, Tal Abyad occupied in 2013. The family colonized in Gaziantep, a Turkish province close to the border, but four months later, son parents returned to Syria. However, he remained behind to continue his studies and was only able to bring them together in 2020. After obtaining son high school diploma in Turkey, he was admitted to university and obtained son diploma with A degree in public works last year.
Jasem says it was son childhood dream to be a civil engineer and he had to leave Tal Abyad to pursue it. “The YPG and Daesh were recruiting force young, so I couldn’t go back“, he said. Jasem took an exam in Turkey for international students but failed new times. He was determined, however, and passed the tenth exam. He couldn’t adjust to college life in a foreign country, but he overcame the obstacles and completed the fouryear program in three years, thanks to his exceptionally high grades. . “I remember the stress I was under during my studies for exams in October 2019 but after hearing about Operation Peace Spring took away from all the stress,” he told Anadolu Agency (AA) on Friday. “After the operation was over, I had hope for the future. I began to dream of returning to Syria, of reuniting my family“, he recalls.
He is grateful to Turkey for giving him the opportunity to study and thousands of others from Syria. “This is my second home,” he stated.
