The U.S.-backed People's Protection Units (YPG), the armed wing of the PKK terrorist group's Syrian offshoot the Democratic Union Party (PYD), shut down two more minority schools in northeastern Syria for refusing to implement the curriculum forced on them by the terrorist group.
The Armenian and Assyrian private schools in the town of Malikiyah, also known as Derik in Kurdish, were closed on Aug. 7 with decrees issued by PYD-linked local education authorities citing that they did not take necessary permissions or abide by the curriculum.
The terrorist group also closed three Assyrian schools last week in Malikiyah and the nearby town of Darbasiyah.
The Assyrian Democratic Society (ADS) had accused the YPG of "intimidating" the region's Assyrian community.
"The YPG is harming education by promoting its ideologies through school curriculum," the ADS said in a statement, going on to demand that the terrorist group immediately allow the schools to reopen. Various Christian groups also condemned the closures.
The private Assyrian schools, administered by the Syriac Orthodox Church, have been operating in the region since mid-1950 and have been implementing a curriculum specialized in the Assyrian language and religion developed jointly with the Syrian Education Ministry.
The YPG has used schools in areas under its control to indoctrinate students with its militarist, ethnocentric ideologies.
During the upcoming academic year, the YPG reportedly hopes to expand the use of its curriculum to high schools. This has prompted many parents in the region, who do not want their children to be brainwashed by terrorist propaganda, to send their children to private schools instead.
The YPG, however, has also reportedly threatened a number of private schools with closures.
The terrorist group is the U.S.' closest ally in Syria, under the pretext of fighting Daesh and under the umbrella of the YPG-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), despite the group's history of human rights violations and its organic links with the PKK, a group recognized as a terrorist organization by the U.S., the European Union, and Turkey.