Tarif Bakdash

Dr. Tarif Bakdash was born in 1965 in Damascus, Syria, where his father worked as an accountant. At age seven, he experienced personally the political and sectarian violence that has plagued the Middle East since 1948. While attending Al Thaqafi school in Damascus, Tarif earned honors as top student in his grade level. His performance on the national Baccalaureate test led to his enrollment at the Damascus University Medical School. While attending medical school, he became casual friends with fellow student and the future Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad.

Graduating from medical school in 1988, Dr. Bakdash left Syria for the United States, determined to make a successful medical career for himself in America. From 1990-1992 he held a residency in pediatrics at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit; from 1992-1995 he held a Fellowship in Child Neurology at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston; from 1995-1996 he held a fellowship in Epilepsy at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation; from 1996-1997 he held a Fellowship in Movement Disorders at the Rush University Medical School in Chicago; from 1997-1998 he held Fellowships in Neurophysiology and Behavioral Sleep Medicine at the Harvard Medical School; and from 1998-2002 he was Assistant Professor of Child Neurology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

In 2001, President Assad invited Dr. Bakdash back to Syria to teach at the University of Damascus, While teaching at the University of Damascus, he introduced innovations in the teaching of bioethics, with hundreds of students attending his classes yearly. Dr. Bakdash also opened a private pediatric neurology clinic in Damascus, which he operated from 2002 to 2005 and again from 2006 to 2010. In 2004, he served as the Academic Coordinator for the World Health Organization of the United Nations in Damascus; sponsored by that organization, he attended the University of Toronto from 2005 to 2006, where he obtained a Master in Health Sciences in Bioethics. From 2007 to 2010, he was the Services Director and later the National Plan Director for the Syrian Organization for the Disabled (AAMAL), working closely with the First Lady of Syria, Asma al-Assad a collaboration that led to his government appointment as the first Secretary General for the Disabled in Syria.

Frustrated by the Ba athist bureaucracy impeding his work with the disabled, Dr. Bakdash left Syria in 2010 to work as a pediatric neurologist at St. Vincent s Hospital in Billings, Montana. From 2010 to 2012, he worked as the medical director of child neurology at Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Missouri from 2012-2014. In October, 2014 (after the completing the first draft of this book), he became an Associate Professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin and the Children s Hospital of Wisconsin.

He has recently begun collaborating with the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) on mental and neurological health issues facing Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon; he looks forward to establishing a special SAMS section for persons with disabilities.

Dr. Bakdash hopes to use his memoir to begin an ethical discussion to help change the deadly cycle of dictatorship, religious intolerance, and war that have defined Syria and the Middle East during his lifetime. He hopes his memoir can help begin a discussion, anywhere in the world, that values tolerance over intolerance, democracy over abuse of power, and peace over war.