The Syrian youth, Mahmoud Shuhud, aged 32, won one million dollars in the Crown Prince of Dubai’s competition for the best programmer capable of developing a program to train Arab youth in programming. Mahmoud left Syria in 2013 for Jordan and moved to Istanbul after 8 months to work with a British programming company. Mahmoud competed in the finals with five other candidates, each of whom developed a different program and each won $50,000, but Mahmoud surpassed them all by developing the HABIT360 program. Mahmoud stated that he would allocate half of the prize money to help Syrian orphaned children due to the war, and with the other half, he would establish his software company, planning to move to live in Dubai. He also mentioned that he believes God helped him win the prize because he had made a promise to himself to help the orphans when he decided to participate in the competition.
