Beneath the smoke: Iraq's children and the education just out of reach

Shafaq News

Beneath smoke rising from burning waste on the outskirts of Najaf, Abu Saif, a father of eleven, found a classroom board in the garbage one afternoon and carried it home. That evening, he began teaching his children the Arabic alphabet himself.

He still works the landfill every day, alongside several of his children. Faced with mounting expenses and an income that does not cover them, he eventually encouraged his sons to leave school and contribute to the household. "I advised my sons to stop studying so we could live better," he told Shafaq News. "Life is expensive, and our responsibilities are too many." Then, after a pause, "It hurts me when I think about them not finishing school. But our circumstances are stronger than us."

That image, a blackboard salvaged from garbage, a father teaching letters by hand, captures something that poverty statistics alone cannot. Across Najaf's landfill sites, children sort waste where they might otherwise be sitting in classrooms, and the distance between those two realities is not measured in kilometers.

Voices from the Landfill

Bassem, one of the boys working at the site, described the moment that stays with him longest. "The hardest part isn't the exhaustion or the dust," he told Shafaq News. "It's when I find schoolbooks while searching through the garbage. I open them carefully and look at the writing, but I quickly skip the pages without pictures because I don't understand the words." After a brief pause, he added: "The pictures tell me things the words can't."

His dream, he said, is simple. "I just want to sit in a quiet room and read a book."

Bassem insisted the work was never a choice. "My father can't carry all the burdens of life alone anymore. He avoids roads where students walk to school because he doesn't want us to feel hurt when we see children our age going to class."

Jamal Mohsen's dream is equally ordinary. He wants to wake up carrying a schoolbag instead of a sack of recyclable waste. "Education is every child's dream if they want a better future and a decent life," he said. "Our work is hard, but it's honest. We collect materials from the garbage that can still be used and sell them by weight."

What these children describe reflects a documented national crisis by the UNICEF, which estimated in 2025 that nearly 47.8 percent of Iraqi children continue to face multidimensional poverty, a measure that combines financial hardship with limited access to education and other basic rights. Iraq's illiteracy rate reached around 15.6 percent in 2024, leaving reading and writing beyond the reach of thousands of children outside the formal education system. In its 2025 ranking, Global Finance placed Iraq 76th globally and ninth among Arab states by wealth, estimating GDP based on purchasing power parity per capita at around 15,177 dollars.

Although Iraq officially recorded a decline in poverty rates to around 17.5 percent in July 2025, families working in Najaf's landfills say little has changed in practice.

A Longer Road Back

Not everyone has given up. At 21, Hussein Jassim represents one of those rare attempts to return, though his path began far from the landfill, on farmland outside Najaf, where daily life revolved around livestock, irrigation canals, and seasonal agricultural work.

Hussein enrolled in school like other children in his village, but repeated failures in fourth and fifth grade eventually pushed him out. For years, he worked in farming and raising animals before social media opened a different view of the future. Videos about urban work opportunities encouraged him to imagine another path. He began commuting to the city and eventually secured a job at a restaurant overlooking the Euphrates River, where his dedication earned the owner's trust.

"My dream was always to continue studying and become someone useful to my country and my people, but life didn't go the way I wanted," he told Shafaq News.

Work, he said, clarified rather than extinguished that ambition. "I feel the importance of reading and writing every time I meet workers who cannot do either." He has since applied for external examinations in hopes of resuming his studies. All of his siblings completed university and postgraduate degrees —something he speaks about with pride, not bitterness. "The road is still long."

Kazem Naji left school after fifth grade when his family could no longer afford the associated costs. "My family needs money for daily survival," he said. "But thank God, I can still read and write. I still dream of going back to school if our financial situation improves."

In September 2025, Iraq's Ministry of Education announced that national campaigns had returned nearly 251,000 students to classrooms, a figure that reflects both the scale of the dropout crisis and the limits of what official initiatives have so far reached.

What the Classroom Cannot Fix Alone

Adnan Abdul Khafaji, head of the Educational and Psychological Sciences Department at the University of Kufa's College of Education for Girls, attributed dropout rates to overlapping pressures: bullying inside schools, family instability, poor academic performance, and financial hardship that makes continued enrollment feel impossible. "Some students lose motivation because they cannot afford suitable clothes or participate in school activities," he told Shafaq News. "Others are influenced by peers who are disconnected from education altogether."

Read more: Anxiety, Despair, and Dropouts: the human cost of bullying in Iraq

Many parents ultimately push their children into labor because household income no longer covers basic needs, he added —a pattern visible across Najaf's landfill sites and, by extension, across much of Iraq.

Ahmed Al-Moussawi, director of the Literacy and Accelerated Education Department in Najaf's Education Directorate, pointed to ongoing efforts aimed at containing the crisis. Najaf currently operates 30 accelerated learning schools and 28 literacy centers serving hundreds of learners across different age groups. "The literacy centers are open to anyone who wants to continue learning," he said. "Some attendance is voluntary, while certain employees are required to enroll under administrative regulations."

Read more: Iraq's children face alarming crisis: rising labor, violence, and legal gaps

The gap between those initiatives and the landfill remains wide.

Among the waste and the discarded textbooks, Abu Saif still carries the image of that blackboard home with him. He knows the road his children are on. He taught them their letters anyway.

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.