Iraq village kids reclaim school after IS forced out

“ONE bullet plus one bullet equals? Two bullets!” This is how the children of the small Iraqi village of Jaraf were taught mathematics during two years of jihadist rule.

On Saturday, a neighbour opened the gate of their school for the first time since the Islamic State (IS) group was forced out by Iraqi forces last week.

The children took over the building and were soon playing football with soldiers in the main hall and jubilantly ripping up their IS textbooks.

“They brought new books . . . all of them Islamic,” Sanaa Ahmed said, recounting the time in 2014 when IS took over her village south of Mosul.

“There used to be pictures in our books. They changed that, they said it was forbidden,” Sanaa, a lively 10-year-old wearing a pink woolly dress and a stack of white bracelets on both wrists, said.

“They brought us pictures of little girls completely covered, with the niqab [full veil] and even socks and gloves . . . I don’t know how they wouldn’t suffocate in there,” she said.

According to the United Nations Children’s Fund, 4.7 million children have been directly affected by the conflict in Iraq and 3.5 million are out of school.

In Jaraf, many parents decided not to send their children to school when IS took over.

“They were trying to control the children’s minds, they would teach them things that encouraged them to kill,” Abu Salem, a father whose house faces the school, said. “For example, in the mathematics class, they would learn what is a bullet plus a bullet, or a rocket plus a rocket,” Salem Abdel Mohsen, another father who kept his children at home, said. “When the kids grow up, what kind of education will they have had? Of course they will become Daesh (IS),” the man, now a member of the local paramilitary force known as Hashed al-Ashaeri, said. Jaraf is one of several hundred tiny, remote villages dotting the windy roads of the Tigris Valley in Nineveh province.

Before Iraqi forces started retaking swathes of land, the villages were in the heart of the “caliphate” IS proclaimed in June 2014, even more isolated than they previously were.

IS group teachers remonstrated with the children, telling the girls to wear the niqab and boys to dress “Afghani style”. But the children said that was never enforced.

Most of the children there never venture more than a few kilometres from their village and talk about jihadist rule like a benign inconvenience, a couple of school years with an unlucky crop of teachers.

“They tried to teach us their things but we were fed up with Daesh and we already forgot everything,” Sanaa said. – AFP