Ethnic tensions begin to show over teaching of Kurdish in Raqqa

The few bullet-marked schools Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) did not flatten or booby trap around its former Syrian stronghold of Raqqa are buzzing for the first time in years with the sound of children learning.

In the village of Hazima, north of Raqqa, teachers gave ad-hoc alphabet lessons to crammed classrooms on a recent summer's day before the start of term. 

"Right now, the most important thing is to get children into class," said teacher Ahmed al-Ahmed, standing next to a hole in the school stairwell left by a mine blast that wounded a colleague.

ISIL closed this school and  many others in northern Syria after it seized control of the region in 2014, three years into the country's civil war. Instead it taught children extremist thought in mosques.

But now that the group has been ousted from most territory it held in and around Raqqa by a U.S.-backed military alliance, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a growing debate over education points to the ethnic tensions expected to follow.

What is taught in areas under the control of the SDF, which includes Arab militias but is dominated by the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), is one of many questions over how predominantly Arab parts of northern Syria will be run as they come into the Kurdish fold.

Schools around Raqqa will this year teach a new curriculum that is based on old textbooks but erases the Baathist ideology of President Bashar al-Assad, a decision agreed on by Arab and Kurdish teachers alike.

But an official in the SDF has floated the immediate introduction of Kurdish lessons in Raqqa schools, an idea that makes local officials bristle.

In contrast with other areas under SDF control that have for years...