After two years of Islamic State control, the school children receive standard textbooks instead of violent ones given by militants.  

• Although the school term began officially in September, only this week have pupils in the northern town of Qayyara been re-issued with standard Iraqi textbooks, which the militants replaced with their own in an attempt to brainwash a generation.
• Islamic State was driven from the town three months ago in the early stages of a campaign to recapture the city of Mosul.
• “We are happy to be back at school,” said eight-year-old Iman, who like most of her classmates stopped attending classes after Islamic State took control. “They wanted us to come but we didn’t want to because we don’t know how to study in their language, the language of violence.”
• According to locals, when the militants overran the area in the summer of 2014 it wasn’t long before they banned subjects they considered un-Islamic such as geography, history and civic education, and used boys’ schools as a recruiting ground.
• The following school year, beginning in 2015, Islamic State imposed an entirely new curriculum to inculcate children with their ideology. Math exercises were expressed in terms of weapons and ammunition: “one bullet plus two bullets equals how many bullets?”.
• Most parents stopped sending their children to school.
• Missing from the classroom in the girls’ school are dozens of pupils whose male relatives were associated with Islamic State and are no longer welcome in Qayyara.
• The spiritual and emotional impact on these children cannot be measured by man. Recovery in those areas will take much more than textbooks and teachers.

Reuters copy / TRUNEWS review.