The Ministry of Education does not keep statistics on attacks against teaching staff, but the latest three incidents suggest that clans and tribes in Iraq are beginning to intimidate and impose their norms on government institutions, in particular the educational system.
Iraqi Education Minister Mohammed Iqbal al-Saidaly said in a statement, “The attacks against teaching staff affect the state’s stature, because these are assaults against those who are raising the next generations. Everyone, without exception, is responsible for protecting our schools.”
Khadija al-Jabri, a member of the parliamentary education committee, told Al-Monitor he believes the increasing assaults on teachers “poses a clear threat to the level of education in the country as well as security,” calling on security institutions to do more to protect teaching staff.
Asked about measures that could help, Jabri said, “The education committee is in the process of passing a law to protect teachers from attacks. The new law would grant schoolteachers the same protections granted to college professors. Whoever assaults a teacher should be punished accordingly and could be sent to prison or forced to pay the teacher financial compensation.”
However, the law that the parliament intends to pass does not seem like it would be much of a deterrent to attackers, since Iraq’s penal code issued in 1969 essentially punishes “whomever insults or threatens any person entrusted with a public service or a council or an official body or a court of law or an administrative court while performing their duties or because of them.”
Jabari also noted that the penal code “currently applies to all those who attacked the teachers.”
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