Three months after Fallujah was pounded to rubble, teachers, children and volunteers are sifting through the ruins to salvage a few school books as classes resume. "Be careful, don't come here, the roof could collapse," says a municipal employee, as he shovels bricks into a wheel-barrow in what used to be the Dhat al-Salasil school's storage room. A gaggle of children are huddled behind him in expectation. Any dog-eared, half-burnt school book will do.
The education ministry announced that teaching should resume on February 5, but many of the schools have been destroyed in the November US-led offensive and many residents have yet to return to the devastated city.
"We have managed to clean up five of six classrooms," says headmaster Shalal Saddah Haraj, as he gives a tour of the school's only structure still standing in the middle of a field of rubble and mangled metal.
"All the furniture has been destroyed, most of the supplies, books and stationery as well. There is not one single window on this building," he says.
The lack of facilities is compounded by the fact that even primary schools are not mixed in this conservative city, which had become a theocratic enclave ruled by hard-line Sunni clerics and jihadists before last autumn's assault.
"When my family and I came back to Fallujah, we found our house burnt, the houses around it and the school destroyed. I have been moved to another school, but all the books there were stolen. How am I going to study?," asks Hadil Khaled, a nine-year-old girl.
Most of the 250,000-strong population of Fallujah fled the city before the launch on November 8 of what was the largest military offensive in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.
After staying with relatives or being encamped in Baghdad and villages neighbouring Fallujah, some families have started trickling back in to the city, often to find their homes had been levelled or looted.
Marwa Jawad, another sixth grade pupil, was more lucky. "I was happy when the mosques announced that we should start our classes again. We returned to Fallujah and, thanks to God, my school was okay. I hope there will be no more fighting now," she says.
So far, only one out of four school children have showed up, and many teachers are also missing.
Sitting in her crumbling office, the headmistress of the Aisha school for girls, laments that teaching will have to resume with less than half of the staff and virtually no equipment.
"Most of my teachers are not back. I don't know where they are, I don't even know if they are still alive... I've had their salaries with me for months, but they haven't collected them," says Liqaa Shaker.
"I don't have enough books for my own students, but now three other schools are being merged into mine because the others were destroyed," she explains.
The Faiha school for girls was spared more than most. Teacher Maysun Hawas will have to write around the bullet holes dotting her blackboard, but she predicts that more daunting challenges lie ahead for her pupils.
"To catch up on the curriculum, we will have to study through the summer, when other provinces will have finished the school year. But for the moment we have no electricity and water," says the woman, speaking from behind the black cloth of her all-enveloping burqa.
In the desert western province of Al-Anbar where Fallujah lies, summer temperatures can exceed 50 degrees Celsius.
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