The Real Reason for Refugees: A Lecture

Omar Alshogre is a 23-year-old formerly detained in the brutal prisons of the Assad regime in Syria. Omar was first arrested as a minor at the age of 15. At 17 years old, Omar was arrested for the last time and spent three horrific years in the worst of Syria’s prisons. He spent nearly two years in Syrian Intelligence Agency branch 215, one of the most notorious of Assad’s prisons, where he was responsible for numbering bodies that later appeared in the photos in the Caesar file. He was also arrested for nearly a year in the notorious Seydnaya prison.

Mouaz Moustafa was born and raised in Damascus, Syria before moving to the U.S. as a teenager. He is the current Executive Director for The Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF). As former staffer for Congressman Vic Snyder and Senator Blanche Lincoln, Mr. Mouaz Moustafa spent a few years on Capitol Hill before joining SETF in the fall of 2011 to help advocate on behalf of the pro-democracy movement in his native Syria.

This event is part of the year-long Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Series, “Global Migration: The Humanities and Social Sciences in Dialogue.”