The Counter-Terrorism Service in the Iraqi Kurdistan region said, on Thursday evening, that a camp for displaced people from Iranian Kurdistan was bombed with two strikes in Khabat district in Erbil Governorate (450 km north of Baghdad).
A statement by the region's Counter-Terrorism Service stated that, according to the agency's information, a camp for displaced people from Iranian Kurdistan in the Rizgari district of Khabat District in Erbil Governorate was attacked on Thursday evening by two explosive-laden drones, and the attack did not result in any human casualties.
The university admission requirements announced by the Ministry of Higher Education in Syria, restricting a number of specializations to males, raised criticism and fears about the narrowing of women’s opportunities for education and work under the new authorities, according to Agence France-Presse.
On September 30, the Ministry announced the admission requirements for the current academic year within a mechanism known as “differentiation,” to distribute students to universities and institutes according to their grades in high school and their desires.
The restrictions include programs at two universities specialized in military and security sciences created by the authorities in July, including the legal sciences program at the National University of Defense Sciences.
But both universities accept female students in other programs. The conditions do not prevent women from studying law, engineering, and media, which remain available to them in institutions, including the University of Damascus.
The restrictions also include civil institutions, including the specialty of radio and television directing at the Media Institute in Idlib. The Ministry allocated some oil and gas institutes for males this year, and specializations remained available to female students at Damascus University, the largest in the country.
The Ministry did not respond to questions sent by Agence France-Presse regarding the reasons for restricting admission to these specializations to males.
But a former ministry official told Agence France-Presse that not all of these restrictions are new.
However, the restrictions anger many people. Nanny Ahlam Othman considered her “an additional obstacle in the face of women in Syria.”
She told Agence France-Presse: “This is additional discrimination against Syrian women who already suffer from discrimination and persecution, and this must not be tolerated.”
Student Israa Salloum, who is preparing to apply for selection, said: “No one has the right to force me to choose a specific major or exclude me from a specific major.”
On the other hand, users of social media platforms defended the conditions, pointing out that there are other options available to females.
The controversy comes after the decision of the prestigious “Al-Hurriya Institute” school in Damascus to separate male and female students in the middle and high school levels last month. Its management denied that there was an official directive behind it.
Since the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, measures taken by the new authorities, including dress codes on beaches, have raised concerns about personal freedoms.
Four Syrian feminist and civil organizations said in August that some of the authorities’ decisions “restricted personal and public freedoms, imposed patterns of social guardianship, and affected women in particular.”
