Yazidi Students Abandon Arabic Script With Eye Toward Europe

Yazidi Students Abandon Arabic Script With Eye Toward Europe
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey -- In a tent city outside Diyarbakir, the largest city of Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, efforts are underway to provide an education to the children of Yazidi refugees from neighboring Iraq. In one novelty for Yazidi children, they are now learning the Latin script, as many Yazidis are reluctant to return home and hope to make it to Europe.
The classes, led by Yazidi teachers, include also English, mathematics, Kurdish and other subjects. The makeshift school, assisted by local and foreign nongovernmental organizations, became operational earlier this year in a bid to jumpstart education services for Yazidi children, a year after the Islamic State's bloody onslaught on Sinjar sparked their dramatic exodus.
The school program in the camp, which shelters about 4,000 refugees, started with classes teaching the Latin alphabet, a major novelty for Yazidi students, who had so far used the Arabic script. Then, classes in English as well as in math, Kurdish and social sciences followed, again using the Latin script. The Yazidis of Sinjar, a distinct community in the Kurdish fold, speak the Kurmanji dialect of the Kurdish language, just like Turkey's Kurds, who use the Latin script. Similar programs have been introduced in several other Yazidi refugee camps in Turkey's southeast.
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