Three years ago when Rauiya Saed was in the third grade, Islamic State militants took over her neighborhood in West Mosul and closed the school. But at home, the Iraqi girl kept on reading and writing.
In her diary, she wrote about life under IS — about other children who were starving while living under siege and about the restrictions the terrorist group imposed on her family’s way of life.
“I was seeing children who were dying from hunger and couldn’t even get milk to drink,” Rauiya, 11, told ABC News by phone in her native Arabic.
“I wanted to play with my friends, but I couldn’t. I wanted to go to the market and wear colourful clothes, but I couldn’t. We needed a lot of things and were prevented from the simplest things under IS.”
When her city was under IS control, she had to cover her hair and wear the required black “abaya”, a robe-like dress, she said. She rarely left the house because it was too dangerous outside.
But today, she goes to school in her uniform: a white shirt with a blue skirt.
“I am very happy,” said Rauiya, who started the sixth grade after her school reopened. “After three years without school, I want to learn so that I can rebuild my country.”
Since Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared victory over IS in Mosul in July, a sense of normalcy has returned. In West Mosul, 110 schools have reopened to welcome nearly 81,000 children, about 36,000 of them girls, Laila Ali, a media officer with UNICEF in Iraq, told ABC News.
After IS seized control of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in 2014, many schools were shut down and used as headquarters for IS fighters.
Ms Ali and local educators said many parents also chose to keep their children at home because they feared that they could be indoctrinated. This meant that children spent most of their time at home — often in the basements while hiding from airstrikes during the nearly nine-month-long offensive to retake the city.
“No child should witness what the children in Mosul have been forced to endure,” Ms Ali said.
“For them to be back in the classroom, the simple act of putting on their backpacks and walking to school in groups of two or three with their friends and playing in the school courtyard, this is what they have been missing out on. For many of the children, this in itself is a form of therapy: learning, playing and interacting with your friends and being in a safe environment.”
More boys than girls went to school when Mosul was under IS control, Ms Ali said. Many girls were prevented from attending school because the distance between their homes and their schools became longer when the local girls’ school was converted into a school for boys, she said. Walking to school became increasingly dangerous.
“A lot of the parents feared that their daughters would be harassed or that they would be identified as brides for the fighters, so they preferred to keep their children at home,” said Ms Ali.
It has taken longer to reopen schools in West Mosul than in East Mosul, where 437 schools have reopened and 450,000 children have returned to the classroom. The reason is that damage to schools in West Mosul is more widespread, said Ms Ali. Many neighbourhoods in West Mosul are also difficult to access because of the landmines, improvised explosive devices and booby traps that remain there.
Rauiya’s school was used by IS fighters as a headquarters and shelter from airstrikes before it reopened, so damage there is extensive, according to Enas Hisham Al-Imam, a teacher at the school.
“There were several IS families inside the school,” Ms Al-Imam told ABC News by phone in Arabic. “They used the classrooms as homes.”
Ms Al-Imam said she taught at the school before ISIS seized control of the city.
Under IS rule, she was one of five teachers the group forced to stay on to teach their fighters’ children. If she had refused, she would have been interrogated and then taken to an unknown place, she said. She and the other teachers were forced to teach lessons that were in line with the group’s ideology, but Ms Al-Imam said she tried to be creative.
Rauiya said that it’s difficult to stand up during lessons when there aren’t enough chairs and that the heat sometimes gets unbearable without electricity.
“I want to help people who were injured and have scars from the war and who lost legs in the war in our country,” she said.
“We are not giving up on learning.”
