New school boosts attendance in remote village

They used to run at the sound of bombs. Now the children of Biyara run at the sound of a stick hitting an old tin hanging from a string at the village’s primary school. It’s the signal for classes to start and something that wasn’t heard for several months after the school was badly damaged during the war in Iraq last year. Biyara, which lies east of the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah on the Iranian border, had been taken over by fighters from the rebel Ansar al-Islam group for nearly two years until April. The group of Kurds and Arabs forced the villagers to adopt strict Islamic practices. Television and music were outlawed and women had to wear the all-covering chador outside their homes. Biyara primary school headmaster Khalid Hama Ali Mohammed-Amin told IRIN in Biyara that initially girls were prevented from going to intermediate school under Ansar’s rules. When US forces attacked Ansar’s base in the adjacent mosque during the conflict, the school was badly damaged and was closed for two months. But with help from the US Army’s Civil Military Operations Centre (CMOC) the school was completely renovated. Khalid said teachers then worked extra shifts to help the children catch up on their lessons. “The children were forced to live with bombing and explosions and have lived in ruins and felt continuously threatened. Their personalities were full of fear. You could read the fear on their faces.” Doors slamming frightened them and they lost interest in their lessons, he said. “But now they are happy and relaxed and we’ve got great hopes for a peaceful future - the same hope that we have for all of Iraq. We now believe we can complete our plans and bring our children up with a good education and knowledge.” Biyara also suffered during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war but until this year had never received help with rebuilding, he said. The school now has 305 pupils attending in two shifts and is also used to teach illiterate adults after normal classes are over. Fourteen-year-old Khanda Hussein Faraj told IRIN that when Ansar controlled Biyara they didn’t have a normal life. “We couldn’t walk freely - we were always forced to cover up and we always felt tense, afraid, scared. Only in the house we felt free but even there we couldn’t go up to the roof top.” Fellow student Noora Faraj Sa’ad said life had been very sad and when she saw the school had been destroyed she thought it would be the end of her education. “But now we really feel good and we’re learning much better and we have much more hope.” Lieutenant colonel Harry Schute, CMOC’s battalion commander, told IRIN in Arbil that the refurbishment of the school was one of the highlights of the work his team had done in northern Iraq. He said Ansar had treated the village with no respect, even setting up its headquarters in the mosque and driving many of the residents out. “To go back there and see life now - with music coming out of the shops and people openly joking and laughing and enjoying life and the school reopened - that’s really good.”