Every morning, Abdullah watches children leave his neighbourhood carrying their school bags, while he stays behind near his home, kicking a small football with younger children until his sisters return from school hours later.
Inside the family’s modest home in Mosul, the capital of Nineveh Governorate, the 10-year-old keeps his school bag and stationery untouched, months after his family returned to the city in late 2024, as he waits for the day he can finally sit in a classroom like other children.
His mother, who asked to be identified only as Umm Abdullah, tells The New Arab that her son becomes visibly upset whenever he sees children his age going to school.
“He keeps asking me, ‘Why can’t I go to school? Everyone else goes, so why can’t I?’” she says.
For his mother, it is a question she still cannot answer, even though she still tries to teach him basic writing and letters at home.
“I do not want him to go to school one day without knowing anything,” she explains, before adding quietly: “Two years of his life have already gone.” School enrolment held up by missing paperwork Born in 2016, Abdullah was living with his family in displacement camps after they fled their area in Nineveh following the Islamic State takeover of the province in 2014 .
Despite the Islamic State no longer holding territory in Nineveh , he still lacks the civil documents required for school registration. As a result, like many children born during years of displacement, he remains outside the classroom.
His mother is now raising four children alone, and although she managed to enrol her daughters after completing part of the required paperwork, Abdullah has remained out of school for nearly two years.
His case, however, is not unique, as years after the conflict between the Iraqi army, Kurdish Peshmerga forces and the Islamic State between 2014 and 2017 , many families are still dealing with the aftermath of displacement camps closing in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq , following nationwide efforts in 2024 to bring an end to prolonged internal displacement and encourage residents to return to their areas of origin.
As a result, many children across the province continue to struggle to return to school because they lack the civil documentation required for enrolment.
That being said, some children were born while their families were living in displacement camps after fleeing the conflict, while others lost their official papers during the fighting, leaving them caught between lengthy documentation procedures and repeated attempts to return to school. According to data from Nineveh’s Directorate of Education, around 4,000 children were still facing these documentation-related barriers to school enrolment by mid-2025, despite measures authorities say were introduced to address the issue.
Explaining the policy response, Khalid Al-Shaheen, assistant director of Nineveh’s Directorate of Education, says authorities have in recent years allowed undocumented students to enrol temporarily through written pledges submitted by parents, provided the required documents are completed before the child reaches sixth grade.
He adds that the number of such cases has declined compared with previous years, when it exceeded 5,000, and says he hopes the figures will continue to fall through coordination with civil status departments and appeal courts.
Nevertheless, recent reports by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees suggest the issue of civil documentation remains unresolved, despite government and international efforts to address the problem.
According to the agency, legal assistance and advocacy efforts helped Iraqi authorities issue around 273,000 civil documents between 2019 and 2025.
Even so, documentation remains one of the main obstacles preventing children from accessing education and basic services. Exceptions that do not reach everyone While authorities point to policy adjustments, local schools say many children are still falling through the gaps.
In western Mosul’s Hay al-Tanak neighbourhood, Sundus, the principal of a local school, says she accepted around 50 female students from displaced families with missing or incomplete documentation.
She says she tries to accept as many children as possible “because depriving a child of education means depriving them of a future.”
However, she adds that exemptions do not apply to children who completely lack a birth certificate or proof of lineage, describing such cases as “legally impossible to enrol” without completing the required procedures.
While some students have since obtained their unified national IDs and completed their paperwork, others remain unable to enrol due to complications with lineage verification and incomplete procedures.
This gap is reflected in Abdullah’s case.
His mother says she tried to enrol him after returning to Mosul, but the school rejected the request because he lacked a birth certificate.
“They told me, ‘Complete his papers and come back,’” she says, adding that she cannot currently afford the costs of obtaining the documents. When identity becomes an obstacle Beyond school policies, families say losing documents is only the beginning of a much longer struggle.
That has been the experience of Umm Shaimaa, who returned to Nineveh nearly a year ago after years of displacement, hoping her children could finally begin a normal life again. Instead, she says returning to school proved more difficult than expected.
As she puts it, her nine-year-old son remains out of school despite repeated attempts to enrol him, as she says she was told she needed to complete the procedures and bring a clearance paper, referring to bara’at al-dhimmah requirements she has so far been unable to complete because of their complexity.
Each morning, her son watches other children walk to school while he remains at home.
“He wishes he could go like them,” she says, adding that he keeps asking her why he cannot study.
For her, returning home did not resolve the difficulties. Instead, it introduced a new set of barriers, with official procedures standing between her child and education.
Clarifying the legal position, lawyer Fares al-Khatib says Iraqi law requires full civil documentation for school enrolment, including unified national IDs for the child and both parents, as well as a residency card.
He explains that when documents are lost, parents must file a court case, after which judges coordinate with security authorities and civil status departments to verify records and issue replacements.
Fares notes that the process can take considerable time, particularly due to overcrowded government offices and missing or damaged records.
“The problem is not really the law itself,” he says. “It is the bureaucratic procedures families face while trying to complete the process.”
At a national level, Iraq’s High Commission for Human Rights told The New Arab that the issue remains unresolved in many complex cases, particularly those involving missing parents, absent fathers, undocumented marriages during the conflict years, or difficulties linked to lineage verification.
The commission said it has coordinated with the Ministry of Education to amend enrolment instructions for undocumented children, extending the grace period for completing paperwork from 30 days to one year, and allowing temporary school records to be opened until documents are issued.
It added that coordination is also underway with courts and civil status authorities to process lineage verification cases and to issue documents for children born during displacement, as well as for families who lost their papers during the conflict.
The commission further noted that it has also worked with judicial and security authorities to ease certain procedures that had previously delayed documentation issuance, including “clearance” requirements in some cases.
However, the commission said some cases remain particularly difficult, especially those involving missing parents, undocumented marriages, or unresolved lineage verification procedures. Poverty complicates the road back to school Alongside legal barriers, economic hardship is also shaping whether families can complete documentation and return their children to education.
Speaking to The New Arab earlier this week, Iraqi activist Burhan al-Obaidi said the government had only partially succeeded in returning children to education because it had failed to tackle the root causes driving students to drop out.
"The issue is no longer only educational," he said. "It has become a complex social and economic crisis linked to poverty, unemployment, child labour and family instability," while also pointing to the continuing effects of displacement in several areas.
Shifting focus to the outskirts of Mosul, many families now live in impoverished or under-serviced areas, where transport costs and repeated visits to government offices add further strain and delay the process.
Mohammed Dylan, head of the humanitarian organisation Wasel Tasel , says the problem is not limited to legal procedures, but also to whether families can afford the costs involved in completing them.
He says inconsistent implementation between schools means some children are still excluded despite official exemptions, with some schools applying flexibility while others reject cases involving missing birth certificates or proof of lineage.
He adds that families also require economic and social support alongside legal assistance.
“Legal support alone is not enough,” he says. “Some families simply cannot afford to follow up on the procedures or cover the associated costs.”
He also says funding cuts in recent months have reduced the scale of work addressing the issue, even as major gaps remain. Many families, he adds, still rely on organisations to help cover transport and documentation costs.
According to Mohammed, the Wasel Tasel Foundation continues to work on civil documentation cases for returnee families in Nineveh and Anbar, alongside efforts to support children returning to education.
On the ground, Ahmad al-Hadidi, who works with returnees from displacement camps in Nineveh, says many families cannot afford transport or documentation costs. Others delay the process because they do not know where to begin or which offices to approach.
At the same time, he says some schools still refuse to enrol cases they consider “complex,” particularly those linked to lineage verification or complete loss of documentation.
“Some parents genuinely do not know where to go,” he says. “Others cannot afford transport or paperwork costs. And some schools consider the case too complicated and immediately turn the child away.”
He adds that field teams have helped return nearly 100 students to classrooms in one school alone by following up on cases and supporting families through the documentation process.
He says legal awareness sessions and field visits have also helped dozens more return to education, while others have joined accelerated or non-formal learning programmes to make up for years lost outside school.
Even so, he says many cases remain unresolved because of missing parents, lineage verification issues, or lengthy legal procedures.
For Abdullah, however, those solutions remain out of reach for now.
His school bag remains untouched in the corner of the room, and he refuses to let anyone move it because, as he says, “these are my school things,” while he waits for the day he can finally sit inside a classroom like other children. Ruqaya Al-Najafi is an Iraqi freelance journalist and storyteller covering displacement, social issues, and human-centred stories from Iraq. Follow her on Instagram: @ruqaya.alnajafi