Father Philip Khoury taught the Syriac dialect of Aramaic clandestinely after evening prayers for many years by lantern light to avoid attracting attention outside church walls. That was the whole of Syriac education in Iraqi Kurdistan under Saddam Hussein’s rule- a whispered curriculum, taught out of the monastery’s interior rooms, at a time when the state treated the language and the faith behind it as the same threat. Khoury wasn't working alone. He can still list the others by name and by town; Father Odisho in Sarsang, Father Daniel in Duhok, Father Sargis in Barwari, each running the same underground education in his own parish. Zaya Youhanna, now principal of Nisibis Secondary School, recalls the situation clearly: no one dared call themselves Assyrian. Say it, and the state registered you as Arab anyway.
Their story forms the backdrop of The Syriac Language in Kurdistan, a documentary filmed in 2025 and released this year by Rudaw Media Network, tracing how a language once confined to liturgy and kitchen conversation became a mainstream subject taught in classrooms.
In 1992, the newly elected Kurdistan Parliament passed Education Law No. 4, legalizing minority language education and recognizing Syriac-led instruction for the first time. Anlil Ishaq, an eighth grader who didn't know a single Syriac letter when he switched schools that year, spent a summer in church learning the alphabet. He now runs a Syriac school in Sarsing. The priests who had taught catechism by lantern became, almost overnight, the region's first certified Syriac teachers — because they were, for a long time, the only people who knew the language well enough to teach it.
Forty-eight schools across Erbil and Duhok now teach in Syriac, reaching 3,700 students. Duhok alone boasts 32 schools, 29 with full Syriac curriculum; Erbil has 16, with two providing instruction entirely in the language. In 2016, Salahaddin University established Iraq's first university department in Syriac Language and Literature. Its first cohort comprised 20 students, evenly split by gender and home province. More than half of its students now travel from the Nineveh Plains, where no Syriac schooling exists at all, a fact the department only discovered after enrollment took place.
Despite its huge achievements, the revival presents a generational divide. William Odisho Gliana is a retired teacher who cannot read or write the language he speaks; he puts literacy among his own generation at roughly 3%. Samir Buya estimates 70 to 80% literacy among the youth — a reversal achieved in a single generation, and one that leaves grandparents and grandchildren unable to read each other's letters.
In Mosul, the fate of Syriac education remains unresolved. Fatin Faizi, a Syriac-language instructor, departed for Duhok for lack of available offerings in Kurdish or Syriac. Baghdad's Christian population, once numbering a million and a half, has fallen below 40,000, with only a faint shadow of its writers, poets, and publishers who once built the language's cultural life. Akad Murad of the Syriac Writers and Authors Union notes that most of the community's remaining magazine and television output has shifted to Kurdistan or migrated entirely online.
The Syriac language’s survival is a testament to a labor of love safeguarded with perseverance and preserved by lantern- a language now taught in classrooms in broad daylight with the floodgates of its education finally opened to future generations.
