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MAAR SHAMARIN, Syria: In the southern Idlib countryside, once a frontline in Syrian civil war, residents are trickling back to their villages after years in exile.
Repairing and reopening damaged and looted schools is key to the return of the displaced, but nearly a year after former President Bashar Assad was ousted in a rebel offensive, hundreds of schools are still destroyed.
Millions of children in Syria remain out of school, while others are attending class in gutted buildings without basic supplies.
A schoolhouse with no windows or chairs
Safiya Al-Jurok and her family fled the town of Maar Sharamin five years ago when Assad’s army wrested control of the area from opposition forces.
After Assad’s fall last December, the family returned home and are now living in a tent — the same one they stayed in while displaced — next to the remains of their destroyed house.
The local elementary school reopened last month, and Al-Jurok is sending her three children, in 3rd, 4th and 5th grade, to classes there.
The L-shaped school building is disheveled, its walls riddled with bullet holes and its paint peeling in long strips of gray and blue.
Inside classrooms, sunlight spills through gaping window frames stripped of glass. Students sit cross-legged on thin blankets spread over the cold floor, their backs pressed to the wall for support. A young girl balances her notebook on her knees, tracing the Arabic alphabet.
“If it rains, it’ll rain on my children” through the broken windows, Al-Jurok said, “The school doesn’t even have running water.”
The school’s principal, Abdullah Hallak, said the building has lost nearly everything — desks, windows, doors and even even the steel reinforcement stripped from the building — looted, like in many other towns across southern Idlib, after residents fled.
“Our kids are coming here where there are no seats, no boards and no windows and as you know, winter is coming,” Hallak told The Associated Press. “Some parents call us to complain that their kids are getting sick sitting on the floor, so they have them skip school.”
A massive effort needed to rebuild schools
According to Deputy Education Minister Youssef Annan, 40 percent of schools across Syria remain destroyed, most of them in rural Idlib and Hama, which were the site of fierce battles during the country’s nearly 14-year civil war.
In Idlib alone, 350 schools are out of service, and only about 10 percent have been rehabilitated so far, he said.
“Many schools were stripped bare, with iron stolen from roofs and structures, requiring years and significant funds to rebuild,” he said.
The new school year officially began in mid-September, alongside an emergency education plan to accommodate the growing number of returnee students, Annan said, adding that the ministry intends to launch a remote learning program to expand access to education, though it “requires more time” and hasn’t yet been implemented.
Across Syria, 4 million students are currently enrolled in school, Annan said, while roughly 2.5 to 3 million children remain out of school, according to Meritxell Relano Arana, the UNICEF representative in Syria.
“The access to education by many children in Syria is difficult. Many of the schools have been destroyed, many of the teachers did not go back to educate and many of the children don’t even have money to buy the school materials,” she said.
That is the case for Al-Jurok’s family.
“My eldest daughter is very smart and loves to study, but we can’t buy books,” she added, noting that the children help pick olives after school as the family makes a living from olive oil production.
Students falling behind
Hallak said Maar Shamarin Elementary now hosts around 450 students from first to fourth grade, but demand continues to grow.
“We have more students applying, but there is no more space,” he said.
Teacher Bayan Al-Ibrahim said that many of the children who are attending have fallen behind academically after years of displacement.
“Some families had been displaced to areas where education wasn’t supported or their circumstances didn’t allow them to follow up on their kids’ education,” she said.
The lack of seating and school materials makes it harder for teachers to keep order, she added, while parents struggle to stay involved.
“There are no books, so parents aren’t aware what their kids are studying,” she added.
Relaño said that UNICEF is working on rebuilding schools, providing temporary classrooms and training teachers to ensure they have the tools needed for quality education.
The task is particularly urgent with hundreds of thousands of refugees returning from abroad, she said. More than one million refugees have come back to Syria, according to the UN refugee agency.
Beyond infrastructure, Relaño said schools play a key role in the nation’s psychological recovery.
“Many children were traumatized by years of conflict, so they need to go back to safe schools where psychosocial support is available,” she said, adding that catch-up classes are being offered to help students who missed years of schooling reintegrate into the education system.

LONDON: His name — or, at least, his nom de guerre — is Issa Abu Lulu.

Reportedly a senior officer in the Rapid Support Forces, now locked in a vicious civil war with the Sudanese Armed Forces, Abu Lulu has been named the “star” of several distressing videos circulating on social media over the past week.

In at least two clips, filmed after the RSF’s recent takeover of the city of El-Fasher in western Sudan, he appears to shoot unarmed prisoners at point-blank range.

It is not the first time Abu Lulu has allowed himself to be filmed attacking helpless captives.

On Aug. 18, during an earlier RSF assault on El-Fasher, footage surfaced of him interrogating a civilian.

A transcript published by Sudans Post, which describes itself as “an independent, young, grassroots news media organization,” identified Abu Lulu as Brig. Gen. Al-Fatih Abdallah Idris, an RSF officer.

In the video, Abu Lulu reportedly asks the man, who says he is a restaurant owner, to reveal the whereabouts of the leader of an enemy infantry division.

In a translation by Sudans Post, Abu Lulu warns him to “talk straight,” adding: “I swear to God I don’t talk much, and I don’t spare people. Since God established the Rapid Support (Forces), I have never spared anyone — not a prisoner, not anyone.”

The terrified man insists he knows nothing.

When asked about his tribal background, he replies that he is Maba — a non-Arab Sunni Muslim group also known as the Borgo. Without hesitation, Abu Lulu draws his handgun and seems to shoot him dead.

When this footage emerged in August, the RSF said it would investigate, promising that “if it is proven that the perpetrator is indeed a member of our ranks, he will be held accountable without delay.”

There is no evidence that such an investigation ever materialized. Abu Lulu was not held accountable — and in recent days, he has again appeared on camera reveling in the murder of unarmed captives.

His case, while egregious, is far from unique.

On Oct. 29, the World Health Organization condemned the killing of at least 460 patients and relatives at the Saudi Maternity Hospital in El-Fasher, reportedly by RSF fighters, along with the abduction of six health workers — four doctors, a nurse and a pharmacist.

Brazen actions attributed to Abu Lulu underscore how far the RSF has fallen from any semblance of military discipline.

Since gaining independence in 1956 after nearly six decades of joint Anglo-Egyptian rule, Sudan has been plagued by coups and bloodshed as competing factions vie for power.

At times, the sheer scale of suffering has momentarily pierced global indifference toward the country — home to more than 50 million people, bordered by seven nations and the Red Sea to the east.

One such moment came during the Darfur conflict, when government-backed forces targeted non-Arab populations in the western region.

That war, which erupted in 2003 and lingered for 16 years, killed as many as 300,000 people through violence and starvation.

It also triggered an investigation by the International Criminal Court, which issued arrest warrants for Omar Bashir, the ousted Sudan president, and several others on charges of war crimes.

Bashir was ousted by the Sudanese Armed Forces in 2019 and later jailed on corruption charges. He is believed to be in a hospital in northern Sudan, and the government has refused ICC requests to extradite him.

The architects of Darfur’s atrocities are not aligned with the RSF. The military remains dominated by figures from Bashir’s former regime.

However, only one ICC suspect has ever faced justice.

In June 2020, Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, commonly known as Ali Kushayb, surrendered in the Central African Republic. He was accused of 31 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.

Transferred to The Hague, he was convicted on 27 counts in October. A sentencing date has yet to be set.

Abd-Al-Rahman’s conviction revived scrutiny of the RSF’s origins.

When the ICC warrants were first issued, Abd-Al-Rahman was a leader of the Janjaweed — the Arab militias that waged a campaign of rape, murder, looting and village destruction in Darfur.

By 2013, those militias were reorganized and rebranded by the Bashir government as the RSF.

“The RSF has been referred to as an offshoot, an evolution, or rebranding of the Janjaweed militias that were operating in the 2000s in Darfur,” said Michael Jones, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

“It features many of the same constituent parts, although RSF recruitment has expanded beyond the conventional confines of the Janjaweed,” Jones told Arab News. “It has much more sophisticated capabilities and far greater military, political and financial resources than previous militia groups.”

Ironically, the force that Bashir once used as a tool of repression in Darfur has now turned against his former army.

In 2013, even under nominal government oversight, the RSF wasted no time demonstrating its taste for humanitarian crimes.

In September 2015, Human Rights Watch detailed RSF abuses in a report titled “Men With No Mercy.” Based on interviews with 151 survivors who had fled to Chad and South Sudan, the organization accused the RSF and other Sudanese forces of “serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law” in Darfur.

The report cited “a wide range of horrific abuses, including the forced displacement of entire communities; the destruction of wells, food stores and other infrastructure necessary for sustaining life in a harsh desert environment; and the plunder of the collective wealth of families, such as livestock.

“Among the most egregious abuses against civilians were torture, extrajudicial killings and mass rapes,” it added.

The current conflict erupted in April 2023, when the RSF resisted efforts to integrate into the Sudanese Armed Forces.

The clash became a personal power struggle between two former allies — Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, head of the army and Sudan’s de facto leader, and Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known as Hemedti, who commands the RSF.

“The RSF leadership wanted to ensure the paramilitary group’s survival, and by extension their own financial and commercial interests,” Jones said. “So, they pushed back against the proposed integration of the RSF into a single national military force, which would have risked diluting Hemedti’s political clout.”

As the RSF fought to maintain its military might and form a state within a state, it broadened its recruitment and allegiance networks.

“It has increasingly developed into a diverse coalition of different, often highly localized stakeholders,” Jones said.  

“There is a core leadership either drawn from the Dagalo family or its kinship networks, but the group is increasingly reliant on provincial elites and power brokers for mobilizing new recruits,” he added.

“As a result, these local militiamen have been described as operating as a franchise, with close ties to mid-level commanders who do not necessarily align with every decision coming down from the RSF leadership.”

“This is not to say that RSF policies and directives aren’t conditioning what’s happening on the ground,” Jones said.

“There’s a lot of reporting to suggest that there is a deliberate approach by the RSF to engage in ethnic cleansing, repeating patterns evident in Sudan’s past conflicts,” he explained. “But there are also those within its coalition that are pursuing their own agendas and interests.”

The RSF is hardly alone in committing atrocities.

A 2024 UN fact-finding mission found that both the RSF and the Sudanese military had attacked civilians and civilian infrastructure through airstrikes and artillery in populated areas, notably Khartoum and Darfur.

Both sides were also accused of killing and maiming children, conducting arbitrary arrests, and engaging in torture — all “amounting to war crimes.”

With the RSF’s capture of El-Fasher in late October, its leaders have hinted at forming a rival government. Yet Sudan today appears too fractured for either side to establish coherent control, according to Jones.

“The difficulty is that the Sudanese state and Sudanese society more broadly has become steadily more fractured and militarized over time,” he said.

“It is a congested political landscape of different armed groups tussling over control at a local and regional level, leaving any prospect of coherent governance by the RSF or army unlikely in the short to medium term.”

For ordinary Sudanese, the outlook is grim.

“Sudan is a humanitarian catastrophe on so many different levels,” said Jones. “We’re seeing a pattern of violence and atrocity that Sudanese civilians are bearing the brunt of, and which is unlikely to change due in part to the proliferation of armed groups within Sudan.

“Alongside diminishing aid budgets, there are well-documented problems around aid capture, extortion, lack of access, politicization of humanitarian resources, and so on,” he added. “All of that has massive knock-on effects for the Sudanese population, with the collapse of the domestic food and logistical systems across large tracts of Sudan.”

Despite rhetoric about accountability, Jones said there is little concrete evidence that the RSF or other factions in Sudan are pursuing genuine efforts to address war crimes.

“There is a lot of rhetoric around accountability, including by the RSF itself, claiming it will deploy police forces and special investigation committees and field courts to regulate the behavior of its rank and file,” Jones said. “That’s obviously translated into very little.”

“Additionally, you have a raft of middlemen who are converting RSF policy into violent practice, making it very difficult to identify and hold those figures accountable for their actions,” he added.

Moreover, the pursuit of justice often clashes with efforts to broker peace.

There is also “the ongoing tension between peace-making, ceasefires, and atrocity prevention,” Jones said.

“If you are proposing to engage the RSF as part of an effort to resolve or mitigate conflict, how far can you go, now or later, to prosecute those same stakeholders? How far does that undermine your ability to mitigate the conflict or incentivize buy-in?”

And because atrocities are widespread, few actors have clean hands.

“The RSF is not the only force accused of perpetrating war crimes,” Jones said. “While the scale and logic of RSF crimes are qualitatively distinct, reports have documented starvation strategies, indiscriminate shelling and bombing of civilian areas, and extrajudicial violence in territory held by the army and so on.

“A sizeable proportion of the stakeholders across Sudan’s warring coalitions are themselves are either complicit in or were previously involved in similar crimes. So, there is unlikely to be an appetite on the part of these armed groups to impose real accountability.”