The Associated Press reports: The radical Islamic fighters showed up at Mohammed Salia’s Quranic school, armed with weapons and demanding to address his students.

The leader, named Hamadi, entered one of the classrooms, took a piece of chalk and scrawled his message on the blackboard.

“How to wage holy war,” he wrote in Arabic. “How to terrorise the enemy in combat,” the lesson plan continued.

Then his mobile phone rang, and he stepped away to answer. Mr Salia urged his students to pose some questions of their own when he returned: Where had he come from and what did he want with a bunch of young people?

Hamadi told the students that people didn’t ask questions like that – where he was from.

Islam knows no nationality, he replied and then left – and did not return before the French-led military operation ousted him and his fighters from power last month.

“I told my students to be careful: that these men may be well-versed in the Quran but their Islamic point of view is not the same as ours,” the teacher recalled.

Nearly a month after the Al Qaeda-linked militants were driven out of Gao and into the surrounding villages, students are now returning to the city’s Quranic schools.

Many classrooms, though, are still half full, as tens of thousands of people fled the fighting and strict Islamic rule the extremists.

However, other pupils left Gao not with their families but with the Islamic fighters when they retreated, say human rights activists and local officials. [Continue reading…]