Identifying academics who helped persecute pro-democracy students in Syria is key to rebuilding the higher education system [Getty]
The Syrian Ministry of Higher Education has suspended Nahla Assaf Issa, a senior member of the Faculty of Media at Damascus University, and referred her for investigation for alleged collaboration with the regime of fallen dictator Bashar al-Assad.
It came just hours after students at the Faculty of Media organised a protest in front of the faculty building, demanding Issa’s removal.
The students accused her of “handing over more than 200 male and female students to Assad regime security branches based on false accusations”.
“We, as students, did not hesitate to take part in the protest to demand the dismissal of Nahla Issa because of her past actions and the reports she filed, which led to the arrest of several students who opposed the [Assad] regime, ruining their futures,” Lynn Al-Zein, a student in the Radio and Television Department, told The New Arab’s Arabic sister outlet Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
Other students interviewed by Al-Araby Al-Jadeed alleged Issa was “setting traps” for students, such as by issuing essay assignments with titles like ‘Who won the Syrian war?’, then directing students not to repeat “the lame slogans we hear on [Syrian state media]”.
Students now believe this was a ploy to set up students to criticise the Assad regime and thus incriminate themselves.
“At that time, most students skipped submitting the assignment out of fear of arrest, knowing it was a trap,” journalism student Janet Tam told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
Meanwhile, Shadi Al-Sayed, a fourth-year media student at Damascus University in 2011, who was expelled from the university over security reports filed against him by Issa, told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed about her direct collaboration with the regime against both students and her fellow colleagues.
“Nahla would spy on professors who sympathised with opposition students and report them to security forces. She also obstructed efforts to reinstate expelled students who were dismissed for political reasons, preventing them from continuing their university education,” Al-Sayed said.
“Additionally, she collaborated directly with the Student Union, whose members regularly visited her office to coordinate the surveillance and targeting of opposition students,” he added.
A year-long investigation carried out by the Syrian British Consortium’s (SBC) investigations team in 2024 found that the National Union of Syrian Students (NUSS), affiliated with the Assad regime, was guilty of war crimes including the targeting of pro-democracy activists at the University of Damascus between 2011 and 2013.
The report found that the Student Union in Syria effectively worked as the educational wing of the Assad regime’s security and intelligence forces, including patrolling campuses and detaining and torturing students.
Al-Sayed says that Issa did not even hide her ultra-loyal attitudes towards the Assad regime and her role in aiding the Student Union in rooting out opposition-supporting or allegedly disloyal students.
“Issa … openly declared her absolute loyalty to the Assad regime and boasted about her father’s influence and his support for the regime. She even used insulting and vulgar language toward students, sometimes calling them animals over the smallest disagreements.”
Since the fall of the Assad regime, several students have come forward to report Issa’s behaviour and alleged collaboration with regime forces against faculty and students.
Several testimonies from students at Damascus University mention Issa by name, implicating her in giving the names of those who opposed Assad to security forces, with many of them “disappearing into the darkness of detention centres”, as one student put it to Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
However, Issa was far from alone in these alleged actions.
The University of Damascus Steering Committee has already suspended three university professors from their positions and teaching duties for three months, starting from 6 January 2025, until the completion of investigations and the collection of necessary evidence into collaboration.
The new Syrian government has set up an initiative for university students to come forward to report those who played a role in persecuting people based on their opposition to Assad, with this seen as key to rebuilding Syria’s shattered higher education system.
A 2019 study by the University of Cambridge found that Syria’s higher education system had been severely fragmented in the era of the Syrian Civil War due to “heightened politicisation” by a variety of means, including violence.
“Human rights violations including detention, patronage, disappearances, displacement and murder are changing the demographic make-up of higher education,” the report stated, adding that this had led to extreme “social distrust” among Syrian students.
