I. Background

Among developing countries, Syria’s children are well-educated. In 2010, about 93 percent of all eligible children were enrolled in primary education, and 67 percent in secondary education.[1]Before the war, literacy rates among young people were high: approximately 95 percent of the population between ages 15 and 24 could read and write.[2]

However, since the start of Syria’s internal conflict in March 2011, schools and universities have become charged political sites in which government authorities have monitored, threatened, and sometimes physically assaulted students critical of the Assad government. Protests in Daraa, a governorate in southern Syria, began in March 2011 after schoolchildren scrawled anti-government graffiti on the walls of their schools.[3] State security officers detained and tortured them for weeks at various detention centers.[4]

Over the next year, students around the country began protesting in their school courtyards or organizing marches at the end of the school day while still wearing uniforms.[5]Teachers from Idlib, the Damascus suburbs, Homs, and Daraa told Human Rights Watch that their students painted anti-Assad and anti-government slogans on school walls, mimicking the boys from Daraa. “This revolution was a youth revolution,” an activist doctor said. “Every kid thinks he’s a hero.”[6]

As early as November 2011, as Syria’s detention centers filled, security forces turned civilian buildings, including schools and kindergartens, into makeshift detention centers.[7]Human Rights Watch has documented, since September 2012, several incidents in which government snipers shot at civilian demonstrators and passersby—including children—from the rooftops of schools.[8]

Children and parents told Human Rights Watch that shabiha and members of state security branches entered their schools and arrested their classmates in the classrooms, sometimes accompanied by threats and shooting. They described how these arrests gave them further reasons to believe that schools were no longer safe.[9]

By September 2011, the conflict intensified and armed opposition groups began fighting government troops and pro-government militias. Over the next year and a half, schools suffered damage from gunfire, artillery and tank shelling, and aerial bombardment by government forces. In some cases there appears to have been no legitimate military objective, while in others, government troops or armed groups had occupied school buildings, turning them into military targets. Both government forces and armed opposition groups occupied and used schools for military purposes.

In December 2012, the Ministry of Education announced that at least 2,362 of Syria’s 22,000 school buildings—more than 10 percent of Syria’s schools—had sustained damage as a result of the conflict,[10]and that 1,468 additional schools could no longer be used for education because they had become shelters for internally displaced persons.[11] That month, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a London-based monitoring group, reported that over 450 schools had been completely destroyed, the majority of these in Homs, Rural Damascus and Aleppo, and that 3,423 schools had been partially damaged.[12]

The 16 teachers and school principals who had become refugees said that, since the beginning of the conflict, enrollment dropped below half the number of students that would ordinarily be registered. Many reported dramatically lower attendance rates. In its February 2013 report, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria stated that “[s]chool attendances ranges from 38 to 100 percent across Government controlled areas,” and that attendance “appears severely limited” in opposition controlled areas. In March 2013, UNICEF reported that only 6 percent of children in the Aleppo governorate, an area particularly hard hit by the conflict, could attend school.[13]

In response to the education crisis, local civilian councils and activist groups started improvised schools and community schools in areas where government schools were destroyed or no longer safe to attend, as well as in opposition-controlled areas.[14]Communities have located these schools in mosques and in private homes.[15] However, they lack school supplies, and teaching materials, as well as sufficient teachers, and require greater support in order to continue.[16]