When more than 3.5 million Syrian students took exams this week, the first since the fall of longtime ruler Bashar Assad, they didn't have to answer questions on "Syrian nationalism" anymore.

The transitional education minister, Nazir al-Qadri, annulled the exam subject on short notice. The subject was based in large part on the glorification of Assad and his regime.

"For my older son this was good news, but for us, it rang a lot of [alarm] bells. We'll have to wait for the next semester to see what will be taught instead," Anas Joudeh, the founder of the Damascus-based civil society initiative Nation Building Movement, told DW.

As a father of a son in seventh grade and a son in second grade, Joudeh increasingly fears that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that ousted the Assad regime and set up an interim government in Damascus, "wants to put their fingerprint on the curriculum, just as Assad had changed the curriculum according to his ideology.

"This is a problem. Actually, this is a disaster."

Al-Qadri had previously worked for the education ministry in Idlib, the province in northwest Syria that had ben under HTS control for five years.

Cutting the exam subject was part of a nine-page list of changes for school curriculums the education ministry published on its official Facebook page in January.

For example, "defending the nation" was replaced by "defending Allah" or "those who are damned and have gone astray" to "Jews and Christians."........

© Deutsche Welle