“My dream is that war come to an end to live in peace, I dream to go back to my school with all my friends”, Salam stood looking at her ruined school once passing by it with her mother. She could not stop her tears for sweet and bitter sweets came cross her mind; what a painful scene it is to see your other home destroyed.
Regime warplanes backed by its ally Russia has launched a campaign of intensive air strikes for nearly a month targeting most territories in Idlib and its countryside in which incendiary internationally-forbidden weapons including phosphorus and Napalm bombs leaving hundreds of martyrs and wounded with any concern that the majority is women and children. Regime intensively targeted service and educational facilities such as schools, hospitals and mills in a plan to destroy the understructure and displacing its citizens.
With the school new year coming soon, citizens have fears particularly in Idlib city for what it suffers from a brutal campaign, with so many questions in their minds; what will their children’s destiny will be and what is future awaiting them?. Salam’s mother said: “the nearby female school have been destroyed by regime and became out of order where it really needs a lot to be fixed and till now there is no efforts on reality, besides the other schools are far away form our home.. I have no idea how my children will continue their education in such circumstances”.
With armed opposition advancement in both Hama and Aleppo countryside, people in Idlib city and its countryside are predicting that regime will use this pretext to give vent to his anger avenging its loss, It is set schools will open in the same date after holy Eid. However, the city is almost empty of people where the movement in the streets is so little fearing a perfidious raid claiming their souls although there are few families who refuse to abandon their homes leaving the city where at the same time they are not content to send their kids to school.
Salam kept on walking speaking in anger: “Why did they shelled my school?, there are no terrorists in it like what they said, I know what is their goal, they want us to abandon our schools stop learning in order to be ignorant.. but I will go to another school to earn knowledge against their will”.
Probably children are the most affected slat in a war who have nothing to do with it and with no fault in it. They have lost their innocence, childhood, dreams and even their laughs which become not spontaneous missing childhood innocence. There is a whole generation suffers from psychological pressures for they got mature before it is time and have faced miseries beyond their little body ability to bear. Schools and getting up early used to be a nightmare to them, however, war changed this to be a dream they think about everyday hoping to wake up someday when life is like before safe.
The free education facility in Idlib city recently have a competition to assign some postgraduate in its schools; where the Syrian Opposing Coalition will choose some schools to be linked to it so that some schools remain linked to regime for teachers who want to work in them, but despite these efforts the question will the schools open receiving the students? Or will education in liberated areas remain threatened to retreat as long as regime military fighters are in the sky without any concern for children souls or others’?.
By Samah Alkhaled
Translated by Sabah Najem
#Syrian_Press_Center
