In the countryside around Aleppo and Idlib, children used to meet on rooftops to catch up on the schooling they missed as a result of Syria’s eight-year civil war. The initiative, interrupted when Turkey initiated Operation Peace Spring in October, is one of several pedagogic initiatives led by Salman Ibrahim, who, in his pre-civil war days, was a high school teacher of Arabic in Aleppo.
In 2011, that hopeful time when it felt as though a wave of popular uprisings could topple the entrenched authoritarian regimes across the Middle East, Ibrahim joined the anti-regime protests. Once the protests were brutally stopped, he continued to express his resistance to Bashar al-Assad’s regime by teaching children how to think critically and express themselves creatively — both in classrooms and on stage.
