Father Philip Khoury taught the Syriac dialect of Aramaic clandestinely after evening prayers for many years to avoid attracting attention outside church walls.
"After evening prayers at the church, I would teach them by the light of a lantern" in a village in the Nerwa area of Duhok province, he told Rudaw. Khoury recalls the other priests by name and town; Father Odisho in Sarsang, Father Daniel in Duhok, and Father Sargis in Barwari, each running a parallel underground education in his own parish.
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.
"This was all done in secret," said Khoury. "The government was against our language and our faith."
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.
Severe restrictions imposed by Iraqi governments in the 1970s and 1980s coerced religious and ethnic minorities into taking on identification as 'Arab' amid threats of displacement and property confiscation. The Baath regime (1963 - 2003) prohibited education in languages other than Arabic and Kurdish. Although a decree was announced permitting public instruction in Syriac in 1972, it was never implemented.
Zaya Youhanna, now principal of Nisibis Secondary School, told Rudaw that "before, no one dared to speak Syriac. No one dared to say, 'I am Assyrian.' Even if we said we were Assyrian, they would register us as Arabs."
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.
When the Kurdistan Parliament's law came into effect, Anlil Ishaq was studying in Arabic and was in the eighth grade. Ishaq, 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.
"The church was the reason for the revival of the Syriac language," said Ishaq, describing the clandestine courses as "the foundation for Syriac in schools."
"If it weren't for those the church had taught, there would have been no one to become teachers in the Syriac schools."
In 2016, Salahaddin University established Iraq's first university department in Syriac Language and Literature. Its first cohort comprised 20 students, more than half of whom now travel from the Nineveh Plains, where no Syriac schooling exists at all, a fact the department only discovered after enrollment took place.
While Baghdad's Christian population, once numbering a million and a half, has fallen below 40,000 - a faint shadow of its former legacy of writers, poets, and publishers who were imprisoned for their intellectual works under Baathist control and surveillance - Kurdistan Region's Syriac community now enjoys 12 print magazines and publications, in addition to four radio stations and three television channels, totaling 32 cultural and social organizations with Ainkawa as its hub.
Samir Buya of the Social Academic Center estimates a 70 to 80% literacy among the youth — a reversal achieved in a single generation and a far cry from that of William Odisho Gliana, a retired teacher who cannot read or write the language he speaks, who puts literacy among his own peers at roughly 3%.
Today, 3,700 Christian students in the provinces of Erbil and Duhok study in their own language across 48 schools. Duhok alone boasts 32, 29 with full Syriac curriculum; Erbil has 16, with two providing instruction entirely in Syriac.
Unlike Ishaq and generations before him, they have studied in their mother tongue since kindergarten.
"This language is our language and the language of our school," described elementary school student Berla Khoshaba.
"I prefer the Syriac language class because it is my mother tongue."
The Syriac language’s survival is a testament to a labor of love forged through many nights under lantern lights - a language whose proverbial floodgates are finally opened to future generations.
Last updated: July 10 at 6:45pm
