Home, for Alhamad, is Deir Ezzor, a city in eastern Syria, where he was a student, a photographer and journalist, and a democracy activist in a country riven by conflict. After being detained by Bashar al-Assad’s government four times — the last for nearly a year— he fled to Turkey in 2014. Since then, he has worked in international development; spent time in the United States on a fellowship; finished his degree in Berlin; got married; started a blockchain nonprofit; and, after being admitted to the Jackson Institute for the fall of 2020, spent a year and half waiting to take his place at Yale.
In 2011, when protests in the country began, part of the pro-democracy movement around the region known as the Arab Spring, Alhamad took to the streets as well. He carried his camera to document the movement and, to protect his identity, wore a mask in the style of the main character from the movie “V for Vendetta.”
“We have a saying in Syria: ‘Even walls can hear you,’” says Alhamad. “You can’t trust even your family. There is always this state of fear that someone would try to report you.”
As the protests, met with force by the army, escalated into armed resistance, Alhamad remained dedicated to opposition in the form of reportage. “I saw my friends holding guns,” he says. “I decided to continue holding my camera.” He provided photographs to the Washington Post, Reuters, and the Associated Press, using the pseudonyms Karam Jamar or Zendetta — a portmanteau of Deir Ezzor, his hometown, and Vendetta.
In 2011 and 2012 he was detained three times. The first lasted only a day. The second time, security forces took his brother Karem in, too, confused by the similarities in their names. His brother was released after 14 days, but Alhamad was detained for 70, interrogated and tortured by intelligence officers. Two days after being released, he rejoined the protests. “The idea of detention is to put you down and make you fear, but it just fuels you,” says Alhamad. “I’ve seen people dying with me, I don’t mind dying now in the demonstration.”
After his third detention, he decided to limit himself to areas controlled by revolutionaries. He continued his studies, established a media office for the city, and was elected to the Deir Ezzor provincial council. The position gave him the opportunity to work closely with international donors and to travel to Turkey for training and meetings with diplomats and humanitarian organizations, giving him new perspective on Syria’s conflict.
Then, in August 2013, he returned briefly to a régime-controlled area to visit his mother — who he hadn’t seen for months — and to get a passport a family member had helped him secure. Within hours, the family member arrived — accompanied by several cars full of soldiers. They again took Alhamad and his brother. “This time was the most horrifying one,” says Alhamad. The brothers were transported by military plane to Damascus and held at the Palestine Branch, a prison operated by Syrian intelligence agents.
Alhamad recalls the year he spent in the Palestine Branch calmly but vividly: the heat of the small room, where detainees crowded together; the constant fear and anguish of watching others die and knowing you might be next. The extreme stress caused his brother to wake up one day having lost three years of memory: he had no idea where they were or why.
Alhamad, along with Karem, was finally released in July of 2014, and a month later he’d made his way to Turkey.
What fuels him is the sense that he’s in a position to make a real difference for all Syrians — a position that is anchored and amplified by the Jackson Institute. “The freedom the curriculum gives is amazing — there is a lot of support here to do what you have passion for,” Alhamad says. “I can’t think of any other school that could possibly help me grow in my chosen field like that.”
He points to classes like Robert S. Ford’s “Arab Spring, Arab Winter,” which brought together students with a variety of backgrounds working in the region, including military service. “I like to engage with people who have a different experience, so I can learn from them,” Alhamad says. “But at the same time, I try to be vocal about my ideas about American diplomacy, invasion, military operations, so they can learn from me.”
Alhamad’s move to New Haven, for all its rewards, also has its strains. His wife remains in Berlin, and the nature of his visa — which needs to be renewed every three months — means that his status in the U.S. still feels tenuous. He suffers from survivor’s syndrome: guilt that he managed to make it out of detention when so many others did not, and a feeling of responsibility for those left behind. He finds refuge and respite in the shisha bar. “I know it’s unhealthy,” he says. “But there’s a lot of stress — it’s not all milk and honey. It’s hard to continue working on Syria, focus on what’s going on in terms of the detainees and advocate for a free Syria, do the educational aspect of my work, and study as well.” '
