(25 May 2017) LEADIN:
Educational programmes are helping children displaced from Mosul deal with trauma.
School lessons, sports and entertainment classes are provided for the thousands of youngsters living in IDP camps.
STORYLINE:
In a tent in the Khazer camp for displaced people from Mosul, these little ones are clapping to an Arabic children's tune.
It's a welcome distraction from thinking about what happened back home under occupation by the Islamic State group.
More than 7,000 children have attended school, sports classes and entertainment programmes at this camp, organised by the Norwegian Refugee Council, an aid organisation active in northern Iraq.
On any one day, 500 children turn up for classes in maths, science, English, Arabic, PE and others. Younger ones are offered music and entertainment.
Hadija Ala, programme supervisor, says the main focus is "recreational activities" but she adds they teach normal school subjects too "to refresh their mind and to help them remember".
Many of the children turn up traumatised by what they experienced in Mosul.
But officials says these programmes help them deal with the violence they have seen.
"I think they helped a lot because at the beginning students were painting tanks, they were drawing fire and dead people," says Ala.
"But as time passed they started to draw more like nature, friendly scenes, friends, family."
Some youngsters have witnessed fighting during the Iraqi operation to retake the city. And in the schools run by IS, the lessons themselves were frightening.
"They taught us how to use weapons and they trained us. I was scared and my family didn't allow me to go there," says Mohammed Abdulwahab, a displaced boy from Tel Afar.
"But here they teach us everything in a very nice way. English, Arabic, everything."
He feels safe in the camp but wants to go home "as soon as possible".
As of 8 May, there were 127,000 school-age children displaced from Mosul, according to the UN, and close to half of them were enrolled in some kind of educational programme.
Overall, some 580,000 people are currently displaced from western Mosul where fighting continues between Iraqi forces and IS militants.
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