Inside a health center where he works as a volunteer, medical student Muhammad Hassan Shashu browses through books in the German language and video clips on the Internet to verify how to pronounce words, hoping that he will reach a level that enables him to travel to Germany to complete his studies and work.
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With the outbreak of the conflict, which is approaching the start of its twelfth year, Germany in particular has become the dream of hundreds of students of medical specialties to enter the labor market in it, which explains the increase in the number of educational centers that teach its language in Syria from one center before the outbreak of the conflict in 2011 to more than eighty centers today.
"The German language is very difficult, especially since it is not taught in Syria by native speakers," Shashu, 23, a sixth-year student at the Faculty of Medicine in Damascus, told AFP.
And he adds, while sitting near Bahra, in the middle of the health center located in a traditional Arab house, that learning this language "is worth the effort and fatigue that will vanish with the first step I take in Germany."
During the years of conflict, Syrians found themselves facing closed doors in terms of obtaining travel visas to most countries of the world, especially European ones, with the start of the influx of refugees fleeing battles and bombings.
However, doctors constituted an exception when they were able to obtain travel visas, especially to Germany, according to certain conditions that could be achieved, most notably mastering a relatively high level of the German language. Those wishing to obtain a visa to Germany should go to its diplomatic missions in Lebanon, Jordan or Erbil due to the absence of German representation in Syria.
Shashu and his college classmate, Jaafar Mustafa, take advantage of their free time to review their lessons in German.
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They try to speak it all the time in order to practice pronunciation, and to memorize vocabulary quickly.
"All of my friends I know have either traveled, are preparing to travel, or are studying the decision to travel," Mustafa told AFP, in light of the difficult economic and social conditions in the country, which has been exhausted by years of war and exhausted its capabilities.
The young man continues, "Why Germany? Because it is the easiest and safest destination," considering that "its degree is strong and there are a large number of Syrians in it, so I will not feel alienated."
At the Arab Center Institute, one of the oldest institutes for teaching foreign languages in Damascus, more than a thousand students are registered in 2022 to learn the German language, about seventy percent of them from medical specialties, according to what the director of the institute, Abdullah Saleh, explains to AFP.
He explains that before the outbreak of the conflict, students were focused on learning French and English, but this has changed successively since 2013.
He explains, "The Goethe Institute in Damascus was the only one specialized in teaching the German language and fully met the need. Today, there are more than eighty centers and institutes, and students need early registration to reserve their seats."
Inside one of the halls of the institute, teacher Omar Fattouh, a graduate student in German literature from the University of Damascus, is following a new lesson with his students, and is training a number of them on specialized medical words.
Fattouh, who spends his day moving from one institute to another, and meets about 100 students daily, notes that the learners are distributed "between those seeking family reunification and students, most of whom are in medical specializations."
About 924,000 Syrians currently live in Germany, compared to 118,000 at the end of 2014, according to the Office of Immigration and Refugees, which has registered more than 700,000 asylum requests from Syrians in Germany since 2015.
In 2020, Germany granted facilities for the arrival of "qualified" foreign workers to its lands in response to the shortage of skilled labor.
According to the annual report issued in 2022 by the Expert Council of German Institutions for Integration and Migration, there is "a special need for skilled workers in the health and social care sector."
At the end of 2021, about 5,404 Syrian doctors practiced in Germany, and they constituted the largest group of foreign doctors practicing in the country, according to the Federal Medical Association, outperforming Romania, then Greece and Austria.
In Syria, the authorities have never previously announced statistics on the number of students who emigrate annually, but officials and trade unionists talk in press interviews about a drop in the number of doctors, whether fresh graduates or practitioners with high-paying job opportunities abroad.
Assistant Minister of Higher Education Fadia Deeb said in an interview with a local radio in May 2022 that the emigration of doctors is "a fait accompli and real, as a result of the economic conditions the country is going through."
And she talked about "specialties that have become missing and rare, such as oncology, physical therapy, radiology and anesthesia."
Regarding the bleeding that occurred, the feelings of the former dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Damascus University, Dr. Nabugh Al-Awa (69 years old), are mixed between concern about the future of medicine in Syria and his sadness at the departure of the new generation of doctors and nurses.
"It saddens me that we lose our students and our children, as they are supposed to receive the banner that we carried," said the professor at the college for three decades.
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He adds, "I see my students start learning German from their early school years, and this is the first warning I receive from them, and the first sign that they are on their way to travel."
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