Islamic State "bans Christians from school"

Ankawa (AsiaNews) - For the first time in history, Iraqi Christians who always had a "high standard of education" in the region, are being deprived of the right to study and cannot attend schools. This represents a further threat to the survival of the minority, not only in Iraq but throughout the Middle East, because there is not the risk that an entire generation "will not be educated", which is a "very bad sign". The warning comes from Msgr. Shimoun Emil Nona, Chaldean Archbishop of Mosul, in the north, the second most important city in the country and first city to fall into the hands of the militia of the Islamic State.

Interviewed by AsiaNews, the prelate confirms that "currently children from many of the refugee families" as well as "children who live in Christian areas" cannot start the school year. "There are about 700 schools scattered between Erbil, Ankawa and Zakkho - he explains - but they are hosting displaced people and are full. In other non-Christian areas the lessons have begun, but not here". Moreover in the areas occupied by the Islamic Caliphate the curriculum has been changed to promote Islam and the Koran. [...]

An Mosul elementary school teacher of mathematics and Arabic states that "we are in 2014, but it seems have regressed 14 centuries." 95% of the 2,450 schools in the area - Mosul and Nineveh Plain - are in the hands of the Islamists, who have forbidden mixed classes and have closed the Faculty of Law, because "conventional law is no longer in force." Rigid rules, imposed by force, are increasingly arousing the impatience of the local population. If at first people saw them as liberators from a central government (under former Shiite Prime Minister al-Maliki) regarded as the oppressor, today 98% of the people - as reported by an academic in Mosul - "would like to see them gone as soon as possible".

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