MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Syria is still struggling three months after its revolution. There are glimmers of hope. At one hotel, hundreds of people recently gathered to talk about jump-starting the country's tech industry, which was virtually nonexistent during Syria's civil war. One young man fled that war as a teenager. He returned as a Stanford grad student and a budding entrepreneur. NPR's Greg Myre has the story from the capital, Damascus. And a warning - this piece does include descriptions of torture and abuse.
GREG MYRE, BYLINE: Some 700 people - most from Syria and some from the U.S. - filled a ballroom at the Sheraton Hotel in Damascus for the tech conference dubbed Silicon Valley in Syria.
ABDULWAHAB OMIRA: Everyone was here, and everyone is excited. Everyone, like - you know, this excitement of like, hey, we want to build. We want to do something for our country. We're so happy.
MYRE: Abdulwahab Omira is a young Syrian American who took a break from his master's program at Stanford to attend. Like everyone at the conference, he acknowledged the staggering challenges after 14 years of civil war.
OMIRA: There's no infrastructure. There is no electricity. There is no water. There's no internet. Showering is an event.
MYRE: Omira says his own experience taught him resilience, and he believes many Syrians have learned the same lesson. As a teenager in Damascus, he studied the high cancer rates in an area where the Syrian government disposed of nuclear waste. He proposed a new method and was awarded a patent at age 14 and was supposed to be honored at the presidential palace. But before that happened, he was stopped one day by the security forces. They found documents related to the nuclear program, and Omira was tossed in prison. The experience was harrowing.
OMIRA: They start bringing people in, killing them under torture, showing me how they killed them. And each room has a different theme of killing - so many horrible stuff. Like, room No. 3, for example, they killed people with, like, a chainsaw.
MYRE: Omira was not physically harmed, but he was warned that if he was arrested again...
OMIRA: You will choose one of those rooms to die in.
MYRE: Omira was released after two months, and his family decided it was time to leave Syria. They went from a prosperous life in Damascus to a tent in a refugee camp in neighboring Turkey. Eventually, they made it to the U.S., landing in Chicago. But Omira didn't speak English or have a valid high school diploma. He kept studying until he got a perfect score on the college entrance exam and admission to Stanford University. He graduated with a computer science degree last year. He's now in the masters program, working on artificial intelligence. He also runs a tech startup designed to help farmers in Syria. And he's meeting with tech students throughout the country.
OMIRA: We went to seven universities across Syria where we give workshops for the students.
MYRE: Still, the obstacles in Syria can seem endless. U.S. sanctions remain. They were imposed against Syria's dictator, Bashar al-Assad, and though he was ousted three months ago, the sanctions have not been lifted. This was a recurring theme at the tech conference. Organizer Rama Chakaki is a Syrian American and a tech investor from California.
RAMA CHAKAKI: Absolutely. So the sanctions now are quite prohibitive. I mean, the banking system is disconnected from the rest of the world. And so folks like me can never invest in Syria until these sanctions are lifted.
MYRE: For now, the goal is to connect Syria's tech community, which was so isolated during the war.
CHAKAKI: One thing about Syrians is we're very socially interconnected. All of us having been in the diaspora, feeling very displaced, couldn't wait for that chance to get together. So my 12,000 connections on LinkedIn worked really well for me.
MYRE: When Abdulwahab Omira returned to Syria, he visited his old family home.
OMIRA: I went to my room. I was digging out my memories, and then I found my first CS book - computer science book - that I got in seventh grade. They were explaining what the internet is, how to use the keyboard, how to turn off the PC.
MYRE: Omira has come a long way since then. He summed up his journey from refugee to Stanford student to tech entrepreneur this way.
OMIRA: The U.S. was definitely the land of opportunity because if you put, like, 100%, you get 100%. In Turkey, if you put 100%, you get probably, like, get 10%. Here if you put 100%, you get in prison.
MYRE: He's hoping to write a new formula for a new Syria.
Greg Myre, NPR News, Damascus.
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