WATCH: The joyous moment Syrian activist Omar Alshogre finds out he's going to Georgetown University
WATCH: The joyous moment Syrian activist Omar Alshogre finds out he's going to Georgetown University
Omar Alshogre, a renowned Syrian anti-torture activist, has won a place at Georgetown University.
2 min read
Alshogre will attend Georgetown next year [Twitter]
A well-known Syrian human rights activist who spent three years in the Assad regime's notorious detention centres has won a place at Georgetown University in Washington, and shared the joyous moment online.
Omar Alshogre jumps in the air with happiness in the video on discovering he was accepted at the prestigious university in Washington DC, which was filmed on a remote stretch of road in Norway.
Moments later, he leaps onto a traffic barrier on the side of a mountain face shouting with joy.
"I've made it to Georgetown," he yells.
Alshogre tweeted the heartwarming video with the message: "We deserve a moment of happiness. I'm officially admitted to Georgetown University."
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Alshogre, like thousands of others, experienced horrific routine acts of torture during his time detention and contracted tuberculosis.
When he was finally released from prison, he weighed only 35 kilogrammes but escaped to Europe where he began to raise awareness about the plight of Syrian detainees.
Since the start of the 2011 uprising, tens of thousands of detainees are thought to have died from poor conditions, disease or under torture and execution.
Alshogre told The New Arab that the spontanious act of joy reflected his own battle against oppression.
"I wanted to show the guards who tried to break me physically and mentally during [my] three years in Syria's detention centres that they have built a resilient person not a broken one," he told The New Arab.
The video won the praise from many on social media, including The New York Times' Anne Barnard.
"WOW. @OmarAlshogre survived yrs of Assad govt torture prisons starting as a teen. Father & brother were killed in a sectarian massacre. He's now part of historic war-crimes trial in Germany," Barnard tweeted.
Alshogre said he will attend Georgetown University next year.
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