Ukraine crisis: Arab students desperate to return to Syria, Iraq, Morocco

Many Arab students ‘wait to be rescued’ as their governments fail to take concrete measures to repatriate them

Thousands of Arab students lured to Ukraine by the low cost of living and to escape their own troubled homelands face new nightmare

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The aftermath of a rocket strike to a residential building in Kyiv, Ukraine, on February 26, 2022. Photo: Los Angeles Times/TNS

Published: 1:19pm, 27 Feb 2022Updated: 1:22pm, 9 Mar 2022

Thousands of young Arabs who took up studies in Ukraine, often fleeing violence back home, are appealing to be rescued from a new nightmare – Russia’s full scale invasion of the country.

More than 10,000 Arab students attend university in Ukraine, drawn to the former Soviet republic by a low cost of living and, for many, the lure of relative safety compared with their own troubled homelands.

Many have criticised their governments for failing to take concrete measures to repatriate them, and sought refuge in basements or the metro system. Few dared to cross the border into neighbouring Poland or Romania in search of sanctuary.

Smoke rises from a Russian tank destroyed by the Ukrainian forces on the side of a road in Luhansk region on February 26, 2022. Photo: AFP

“We left Iraq to escape war … but it’s the same thing in Ukraine (now),” Ali Mohammed, an Iraqi student said by telephone from the western city of Chernivtsi.

Mohammed said he has been calling the Iraqi embassy in Kyiv around a dozen times a day since Russia launched the invasion but no one has picked up.

“We are demanding to go home. We are waiting to be rescued,” he said. According to an Iraqi government official, there are 5,500 Iraqis in Ukraine, 450 of them students.

Syrian Raed Al-Moudaress, 24, echoed him. “I arrived in Odessa only six months ago, hoping to open a new page far away from war,” he said by telephone.