Iraqi children desperate to learn in ruined schools

By Wisam Mohammed and Salim Ureibi

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Even after clashes erupted in the Sadr City slum in Baghdad, Thamir Saadoun still tried to go to school, hoping it would be open. When he got there the guard told him to go home. That was more than two weeks ago.

"I miss my friends. I haven't seen them for weeks, I want to play with them," said Saadoun, 12.

"I am fed up from sitting at home. I want to return to school to study and to be a doctor, to treat wounded people in the future if attacks happen."

The education system in Iraq, once the envy of the Middle East, is now in tatters.

Violence, a collapse of school infrastructure and the mass displacement of both pupils and teachers have turned many of Iraq's schools into fetid overcrowded ruins, jeopardizing the futures of millions of children like Saadoun.

At the end of the 1980s, after pouring oil money into schools, Iraq had virtually eliminated illiteracy.

But after two decades of economic sanctions and war, one third of Iraqi adults now cannot read, Education Minister Khodhair al-Khozaei told Reuters.

"It is a problem that cannot be fixed by a magic wand. We need more than 4,300 new schools, existing schools are in bad condition and the population is growing," he said.

No part of Iraq shows the severity of the crisis more than Thamir's neighborhood, Sadr City, a vast east Baghdad slum with an estimated 2 million people and more than 500,000 school pupils but just 260 school buildings, many barely usable.

Its neighborhoods have been a battle-zone in the past few weeks, as security forces have fought the Mehdi Army militia of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. U.S. attack helicopters constantly hover overhead, hunting gunmen.

In many cases two or even three "schools" operate out of the same school in the slum, using the classrooms in shifts staggered throughout the day.

Hundreds of thousands of people moved into the rapidly expanding Shi'ite slum in the 1990s and few new schools were built for them.

"There is no balance between the continuous growth of the population and a number of schools that is almost fixed," said Mohammed al-Moussawi, head of the education directorate for east Baghdad.

On a recent visit to the al-Khaldiya Primary School in Sadr City, raw sewage was seeping onto the ground from blocked and leaky pipes, filling classrooms with an oppressive stench.

Three separate "schools" share the same 12-classroom building -- about 1,600 pupils in total -- arriving in morning, afternoon and evening shifts.