(AFP) At home in the Finnish capital, Ilona Taimela scrolls through hundreds of WhatsApp chats with her former pupils — pictures of animals, maths sums and simple sentences in English and Finnish.
The teacher last year gave lessons to Finnish children imprisoned some 3,000 kilometres (1,800 miles) away in Syria’s Al-Hol displacement camp — using only the messaging app.
Al-Hol is a sprawling tent city housing around 60,000 people, mainly women and children displaced by the US-backed battle to expel the Islamic State group from war-torn Syria.
Among them are thousands of children of foreign mothers who travelled to Syria to be the wives of IS jihadists.
“Some of the children didn’t know what a building is, what a house is, because they’ve always been in a tent,” Taimela told AFP.
