Iraqis, Swiss Groups Teach Captives : POW Camp a School for Young Iranians

A hundred Iranian children, captured among the soldiers Iran sent into battle against the Iraqis, have started going to school in their POW camp--a program sponsored by the Baghdad government and two Swiss humanitarian organizations.

“Dar, khana, house,” 50 young prisoners of war repeated, following the example of their Iraqi teacher during their first class.

Dar and khana mean house in Arabic and in Farsi, the language of Iran.

The students were dressed in green fatigues. Each had with him an Arabic-language reading book, a notebook and a pencil. Farsi and English words were written on the blackboard by the teacher and copied by the students.

About 100 of the 874 child prisoners reportedly held in this camp voluntarily joined the school in its first day, said Prof. Mohammed Hammoud, an official of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry.

70 West of Baghdad

The age range given by the children interviewed was eight to 17 and several said they were captured two to three years ago while fighting as volunteers with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the four-year-old border war between Iran and Iraq.

Hammoud, talking to a group of foreign reporters at this camp 70 miles west of Baghdad, said there are two sections in the school.

The general-knowledge section teaches Arabic, Farsi and English in addition to mathematics and biology, and the other section trains the young prisoners in some useful skills such as typing and weaving, Hammoud said.

That section is divided into two branches, “one for the illiterate children POWs who never joined a school before, and a relatively advanced branch for those who previously had some schooling.”

The Iraqi government, Hammoud said, “originally proposed the school idea last year and took part in carrying out the project by assigning the teachers and presenting the six-room building.”

The Swiss organizations, the Land of Man and the Defense of Children, “are responsible for the project. They buy the books and the stationery along with the equipment and pay the teachers’ salaries,” he said.

Representatives of the two Swiss organizations will visit the school daily to supervise, Hammoud said.

Mohammed Golam Mohammed, 14, said he never went to school before. “I helped my father in the field.” He was the first among his classmates to learn how to write the words dar and khana, but house was “too difficult,” he said.

Mohammed, speaking heavily accented Arabic, said he was captured by the Iraqis “three years ago in Ahwaz,” the southern region of the 700-mile border.

“I learned to speak Arabic from the (Iraqi) soldiers, but this is the first time I start learning how to write anything, even in Farsi,” said Mohammed, who could not write his name in any language.

Most of the teachers are Iraqis who have graduated from the state universities. They took Farsi courses during their compulsory military service and were later assigned by the army command to teach at the school.

Mohammed said he was free to move inside the camp, which is fenced by barbed wire and surrounded by a chain of Iraqi army barracks. “But we are not allowed to go to the older prisoners section.”

Children, Adults Separate

Hammoud explained that the Ramadi Camp also houses an undisclosed number of adult Iranian prisoners, “but the children POWs are separated from the adults for moral reasons and in accordance with the Geneva conventions.”

Reza Ali, 17, said he was captured three years ago and that he was “happy to learn carpet weaving.”

The boy’s parents, five brothers and two sisters live in the southern Iranian village of Bakhmala. “I receive letters from them through the Red Cross and I send them letters,” he said.

Red Cross representatives, he said, visit him once a month to “talk to me alone, give me letters and take letters.”

Ali, who also spoke Arabic, said he went to school for five years in Iran. Like Mohammed, he said he was treated well by his captors. He answered with only a smile when asked why and how he was involved in the war.

His new program is “learning carpet weaving for one hour each day and other lessons for three hours, then we play football. The prisoners also play volleyball, but I don’t like it, I am better in football.”

Camp warden Col. Qaddouri Flayyeh said the children and other prisoners are paid monthly salaries by the government in accordance with the Geneva conventions.

The prisoners were interviewed without any interference from the Iraqi soldiers who walked across the camp unarmed. Foreign reporters who could not speak Arabic or Farsi communicated with the children through the Iraqi army interpreters.