Yemeni Students Return to School Hit by Saudi Regime

Date: 25 December 2019 - 22:07

News ID: ۷۴۳۳۹

IBB, Yemen (Dispatches) – The Saudi-led war in Yemen has forced more than two million children out of school and put 3.7 million others at high risk because of the non-payment of teachers’ salaries, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
But for those who can return, they will risk everything in order to go back to the classrooms, even to sit on the rubble of airstrike-hit schools.
On the early morning of Sept. 4, 2015, while the parents of Mohammed Othman were preparing to walk him to the nearby Shuhada-Alwahdah School for enrolling him in the first grade, they suddenly heard a loud roar of planes hovering overhead, then explosions shaking the ground and people screaming.
The Saudi warplanes struck the school in Al-Radhmah district in Ibb province, about 193 km south of the capital Sanaa.
There were no military installations near the airstrike-hit school, but it was not the first time that a school has been bombed during the war in Yemen that has been lasting for more than four years, which has since pushed many parents to prevent their children from going to school amid fears of such airstrikes.
Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies launched a devastating campaign against Yemen in March 2015, with the goal of bringing the government of former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi back to power and crushing the Houthi Ansarullah movement.
A number of Western countries — the U.S., France and Britain in particular — are accused of being complicit in the ongoing aggression as they supply Saudi Arabia with advanced weapons and military equipment as well as logistical and intelligence assistance.
Nearly four years after the airstrikes hit the Shuhada-Alwahdah school in Ibb, the now 11-year-old Mohammed Othman along with dozens of his classmates returned in September to the classrooms of the bomb-out school. They have no alternative.
"I cannot understand the lesson when I look up to the destroyed ceiling... I am afraid it could collapse on our heads at any moment,” Mohammed told Xinhua.
"We have no other choice,” he lamented.
The Shuhada-Alwahdah school is like many other bombed-out schools in Yemen, where there were no tables or chairs for the students or the teachers who have not been paid for over two years. They all sit on the cold ground or the rubble left from the ruined windows and doors, or on the bricks that fell down from the rickety walls.
The teachers in Yemen have been suffering greatly along with their families for not being paid for over two years now due to the war. However, many have been keeping up the good work in teaching the young generations in order for broad hopes of helping building a bright future.
Issa al-Dhamini, one of the teachers in the Shuhada-Alwahdah School, stands tall when he talks about his national duty to educate the young generation in wartime.