Britain brings hope for children scarred by the horrors of IS rule

There are girls showing fear of being kidnapped, killed, bombed, or wounded. Others were violated by the Islamic State. A lot have lost family members and their future is unclear,” says Saff Tajaldeen Ali, a school counsellor in Mosul, in a distressing account of the horrific impact that three years of IS rule has had on pupils in the northern Iraqi city.

“Some girls missed two or three years of education living in camps and the attitude of many pupils has changed. They are more aggressive and have worse behaviour, and sometimes mental health problems. It all affects learning.”

Such accounts of the trauma still suffered by those forced either to flee or live under IS are common and illustrate the challenge that Iraq faces as it seeks to recover, not just from the recent war against the Islamists, but from many earlier years similarly blighted by conflict and sectarian violence.

Nor is adequate help widely available in a country where the limited numbers of school counsellors employed are often lacking in training and overloaded with tasks ranging from advising on mental health to study skills and careers advice.

In an attempt to improve the situation, Iraq’s education ministry has asked the British Council to help it train more than 5,000 counsellors in a scheme covering the Iraqi provinces worst affected by IS, as well as Baghdad and Basra.

Marie Delaney, a psychotherapist who has previously worked as an east London teacher, is one of those delivering the training. She warns, at a training session in Erbil, that a huge task lies ahead. “There’s a lot of traumatised adults as well as children. One of the issues is that school counsellors themselves have been through the same trauma and so have the children’s families,” she says.

“But they are very keen to learn. They are very child-centred and very focused on trying to help the children.”

One manifestation of trauma, she says, is when children become “hyper-vigilant” and “can’t settle and learn because they are in a constant state of agitation and change”.

She adds: “They flick to getting aggressive or running around — it’s a form of fight or flight — and it can be very hard to get them to sit and teach them that it’s safe to be still. We teach the counsellors to use creative arts and play therapy. Young children often can’t talk about, or don’t know the words, but you can see it in their drawing or play through things like dolls being hit.”

As well as training the counsellors in methods for dealing with war trauma, the British Council scheme will also teach them how to create an effective system for carrying out their work. This will include how best to make initial assessments and how to follow up, prioritise and close cases. This is necessary because each counsellor can be responsible for up to 1,000 pupils at a time.

Iraq’s school system faces other challenges. There is a huge drop-out rate, particularly among girls, as well as frequent under-achievement. On top of this, there is the new problem of how to reintegrate children of parents who joined IS or are suspected of coming from extremist families. Solutions are all the more important in Iraq where educational failure and resulting poverty, coupled with religious division, has proved a fertile breeding ground for extremism.

In response, the British Council is developing a new human rights curriculum which will teach children to tolerate those from different religious or ethnic minority backgrounds. It is also organising a national enrolment campaign, which will use billboard adverts, social media, radio and TV to emphasise to families the value of having their children educated.

The task ahead is immense, but the reward for the war-scarred county is equally large, as one of the Iraqi staff responsible for delivering the improvements explains. “Education is our best form of defence against extremists,” he says. “It’s very hard for extremists to infiltrate an educated society. That’s what we want to achieve.”