In Syria, schools welcome children frozen out of education by jihadis

Oct 1, 2018 by

by Peter Oborne, Middle East Eye:

The children of Syria’s Sinjar will remember their return to school this September for the rest of their lives.

Education ceased totally when this traumatised market town in northern Idlib province was overrun by jihadi rebels in 2014. Many families fled. Those who remained found themselves trapped in a nightmare.

Parents had the option of keeping their children hidden at home – or being taken away and indoctrinated by jihadis. Girls were covered up, while their mothers could not walk down the street.

Yet when I arrived at recently liberated Sinjar Elementary School this week, I found the headmaster, Mohamad Hussein, hard at work. He was busy painting a new sign in front of his school. It read in Arabic: “Sinjar Elementary School”.

At the start of 2018, when pro-Syrian government forces captured the town, this building was an arms dump.

There is still restoration work to be done, and I was told mortars still strike the town. But life is returning to normal after almost five years of pure, unadulterated horror.

The headmaster took me into a room where an alert, motivated, mixed class of about 25 children spoke to me of their dreams of becoming doctors, engineers and teachers.

Hussein looked older than his 47 years, and no wonder. This brave and softly spoken man has – like everybody else in in this tragic town – endured fear and suffering on a scale far beyond ordinary human comprehension.

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