5 June 2008: In the heated crossfire of Iraq’s deadly internecine conflicts, it becomes easy to neglect one of the most important populations of any war-rent region—the people who aren’t fighting. The 2 million refugees who’ve sought asylum elsewhere rarely surface in mainstream accounts of the conflict in Iraq; and their domestic counterparts—numbering 2.3 million—who’ve been internally displaced within Iraq receive equally insufficient consideration. Their struggle is particularly pronounced in the area of education: scholastic prospects for the children of Iraq are expensive, sparse, and inaccessible at best.

If ever there was a time when education is required to advance in society, now is that time—even more so for the Middle East than for the rest of the world. The population there is disproportionately young and unemployed; often waiting years for their first job when the average world citizen waits only months.

The Iraqi education system was once the envy of the Middle East—home to such academic epicenters as Najaf, whose seminaries have churned out notable Ulama since time immemorial.  Perhaps unexpectedly, education has been on the rise since 2003; the nadir of enrollment having been reached during the Iran-Iraq war and sustained at low levels by Saddam’s academic oppression, amongst other factors.

Even the less optimistic concur that Iraq’s school system is increasing, not decreasing, in quality. As of 2006, enrollment was on the rise with no simple explanation; it was outpacing population growth and couldn’t be explained by the movement of people away from violent areas into peaceful ones. It would seem that Iraqis were hitting the books with renewed fervor. Regime change has been one factor in the equation—under Saddam, most of the state’s funds went to the army—but now public sector employees are earning many times their previous compensation.  Inside Iraq, parents can increasingly afford to send their children to school.

But the trend is reversed for refugees outside Iraq. It was just this year that Jordan opened its public schools to all Iraqis irrespective of their legal status in the country. But mere access is not an indicator of quality; many of the classrooms have in excess of 40 children present. The United Nations and the Jordanian Ministry of Education estimated that approximately 50,000 Iraqi refugees would enroll once the school system was opened to them, but less than half this number did; only 24,000. In Syria—home to the largest Iraqi refugee population—only 34,000 of the estimated 300,000 school-age Iraqi refugees went to class. The disparity indicates that an extremely large percentage—more than half in Jordan and more than 89% in Syria—of the Iraqi child refugees who ought to be going to school are not. But these lost students are not merely malingering; they forego school not by dint of mischief but by necessity—their families need the money.

The Iraqi refugees abroad do not receive the same salaries as their countrymen living back home.  Increasingly for them, education is not monetarily possible. When Iraqi refugees first arrived in host countries, many remained fiscally solvent by selling their possessions. That was five years ago; and the caches of pawnables are now nonexistent. With nothing left to sell, and commodity prices rising meteorically, the luxury of an education is foregone in favor of a day’s work that puts food on the table.

But this dreary reality does have a potential benefit: remaining abroad is becoming a less appealing option than returning home. “If we allow Iraqis to go elsewhere, who will rebuild Iraq?” says Said Hakki, President of the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization. He posits that Iraq must be rebuilt by Iraqis, and so moving back to Iraq must be made an appealing and sensible option. And what could be more appealing to the Iraqis abroad than the option of their children having the opportunity to go to school in Iraq instead of work in Damascus? With over 60 thousand teachers having been trained since 2003 and 6,200 schools built, the incentive to return home may increasingly be centered on the prospect of a once-proud Iraqi education. Both for the parents, who can earn money as teachers, and for the children, who can—through education—restore Iraq to the prominence it once enjoyed.

Viewed objectively, the situation for Iraq’s refugee schoolchildren is a dire one. Despite generous USAID programs, which subsidize Iraqi refugee education in Jordan, Syria, and Egypt to the tune of $39 million, there is still room for improvement. The sad reality is that the number of Iraqis seeking asylum has been increasing but the quantity admitted into industrialized nations in 2006 was less than half the average yearly admission during the six year period preceding the 2003 war. The disparity may perhaps seem disingenuous on the part of countries who would style themselves champions of the Iraqi man-on-the-street.

Many refugees remain optimistic; having perceived a change for the better in Iraq’s security, they’ve been returning home with greater frequency. An Iraqi who operates a transportation company in the Mansour District of Baghdad explained the mood best: “speaking frankly, the people who want to return to Iraq are more than the people who want to travel to Syria. It is due to the improved security situation in Baghdad.”

If the trend towards a more secure Iraq proves sustainable, it will redound the benefit of all Iraqis—on both sides of its borders—and especially the ones who ought to be in school. As Jonathan Cunliffe, emergency-program coordinator for UNICEF in Jordan says seriously: “the whole idea is bums on seats”—getting the children into the classroom. Unfortunately, for many youths the seats in the workplace are more practical than those in the classroom. Making the latter a fiscally viable option is the greatest dilemma facing Iraq’s nascent generation.