Dar El Salam

Dar El Salam, Arabic for the abode of peace, is a small Upper Egyptian city near Akhmim, on the east bank of the Nile in the Sohag Governorate. The city used to be two separate villages, Naga el Daba and El Galaila, and it had a population of 39,500 in 2001. A 2008 report by the local authorities found an illiteracy rate of 35 percent among men and 48 percent among women, and in 2011 the United Nations Development Programme's Egypt Human Development Report named Dar El Salam as one of the five poorest districts in Egypt on the Human Development Index for the second year in a row. Sectarian clashes in 2000 in the village of Kosheh, in the Dar El Salam region, left 22 Copts and one Muslim dead, and in 2003 a vendetta between two families in the town of Beit Alim left 22 members of one family dead.