ISTANBUL — The Syrian conflict has entered its seventh year, leaving more than 6 million people, including 2.8 million children, displaced inside the war-torn country. According to the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, this is the largest number of internally displaced people in the world. Today, out of Syria’s 22 million pre-war population, close to 5 million Syrians are scattered all across the Middle East and in Europe as refugees and asylum seekers. Human Rights Watch reports that children under the age of 18 represent about half of the Syrian refugee population, with approximately 40% of them under the age of 12. As the United States and its allies continue to contemplate budgets and strategies in their fight against the Islamic State (IS), and Russia’s military assistance remains a pivotal support for the Bashar al-Assad regime, Syria grows into a charnel house whose fate remains a global calamity.

On Feb. 18, Syrian opposition stakeholders, regional nonprofit organizations and Gulf donors met for the first International Conference for Syrian Education (ICSE). The two-day conference held in Istanbul discussed potential solutions to the multilayered challenges of the broken education system for children inside Syria, as well as the hundreds of thousands who are deprived of educational opportunities in neighboring countries.

While the opposition forces inside Syria and their supporters in neighboring countries aim to create some sort of normality through the support of grassroots and local groups and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), there is still no unified Syrian curriculum for Syrian children inside Syria and outside the country. In addition, language barriers outside the country, economic hardship and absence of accreditation leave education as one of the biggest casualties of the Syrian civil war.

On the sidelines of the ICSE, Imad Barq, the education minister for the Syrian interim government, spoke with Al-Monitor. Barq has a doctoral degree in education and was a professor at Al-Baath University in Homs. In 2013, he was detained by the Assad regime and forced to leave the country to Turkey. The Syrian interim government formed its “Ministry of Education” in 2013 as a “national committee for education” that was under the supervision of the Syrian opposition coalition. In May 2014, the ministry was officially established in Turkey, and Barq was elected to oversee the operation out of Gaziantep. But in May 2015 he shifted the headquarters back to Syria, and despite ongoing unrest decided to manage the education crisis inside the opposition-held areas. For him, the only way to monitor the volatile education landscape was to be in his ravaged country. Barq was able to return by road to opposition-held areas. He currently resides in western Aleppo.