Young people within the caliphate are being trained to fight. They are isolated from their parents, taught to shoot rifles and throw grenades, and encouraged to volunteer as suicide bombers, a role extolled by their instructors as the highest calling for any pious Muslim youth. (McKenna Ewen/The Washington Post)
For the ‘children of ISIS,’ target practice starts at age 6. By their teens, they’re ready to be suicide bombers.
The interview had gone on for nearly an hour when Taim, a slim, dark-eyed boy, started to fidget. The 8-year-old asked for paper and settled back in an oversize hotel chair to draw a memory.
His picture, in a child’s bold scrawl, was a scene from the small park near his house, a place where he used to play in the days before the bearded men with guns took over the city. A crowd in the park had gathered around two figures, and Taim remembered them vividly: A man with one eye, and a bald man who seemed upset about something.
“He was looking very angry,” Taim said, narrating his drawing of the bald man. “He is holding the other man and he is also holding something in his right hand.
“The other man has no eye — they had already taken his eye, you see?” he said, pointing to the second figure. “And then the other men stood behind him, and the head of the man with one eye just fell.”
The boy’s slender finger touched the page to show the severed head he had drawn.
“His head just fell,” Taim repeated.
The boy closed his eyes, as if to make the image go away.
“No,” he said finally. “I don’t want to remember it.”
During the two years since the founding of the self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria, an estimated 6 million people have lived under the rule of the Islamic State. At least a third of them — about 2 million souls — are younger than 15.
These are, in a real sense, children of the caliphate. Collectively, say experts who have studied them, they are a profoundly traumatized population: impressionable young brains exposed not only to the ravages of war but also to countless acts of unspeakable cruelty, from public floggings and amputations to executions — the crucifixions and beheadings that have contributed to the Islamic State’s global notoriety.
The Washington Post interviewed five boys whose families escaped from Islamic State territory, including Taim, a Syrian refugee interviewed near his temporary home in Europe. The location of the refugee facility is being withheld by The Post at the family’s request. The newspaper also reviewed videos, reports and transcripts containing the stories of dozens of other boys and girls whose experiences are broadly similar to those interviewed.
Some, such as Taim, also ended up in the terrorist group’s schools and training camps, where they were force-fed a diet of Islamic State ideology and gory videos. Isolated from their families, they were taught to shoot rifles and throw grenades, and were encouraged to volunteer as suicide bombers, a role extolled by their instructors as the highest calling for any pious Muslim youth. Several described being made to witness — and even participate in — the executions of prisoners.
Aid workers who interact regularly with such youths describe deep psychological wounds that may be among the Islamic State’s most enduring legacies, setting the stage for new cycles of violence and extremism many years after the caliphate itself is wiped away. But relief organizations are straining to offer even limited counseling to children in the region’s overflowing refugee camps, and officials said even fewer resources are available for those living in shattered Iraqi and Syrian towns that were recently liberated from terrorist rule.
“Everyone has been traumatized,” said Chris Seiple, president emeritus of the Institute for Global Engagement, a charity that works with families fleeing the Islamic State. In counseling sessions set up by his organization in northern Iraq, he said, “you can watch how these kids try to begin working through this stuff,” sometimes with words but often in drawings that seem to conjure up the same recurring nightmare.
“We see kids drawing pictures of watching ISIS chopping off heads,” said Seiple, using a common acronym for the Islamic State. “What do you do with that, besides weep?”
A video of propaganda by the Islamic State is seen online Nov. 18, 2015. It shows children being trained in sports, weapons and Koran recitation in an undisclosed area somewhere between Syria and Iraq. (Balkis Press/Sipa USA via AP)
Boys into warriors
Taim was 6 when the militants with their black flags rolled into Raqqa, a city in north-central Syria. The streets of the Islamic State’s future capital had already witnessed sporadic battles between rival factions since the start of country’s civil war in late 2011. Now, with the terrorists in charge, the fighting would ease, but the bloodshed would grow steadily worse.
Taim, among the youths interviewed, was exposed to an unusually wide range of experiences during the nearly two years his family lived in the caliphate, from attending a school supervised by Islamic State instructors to undergoing military training in a camp intended to turn young boys into warriors and suicide bombers. In other respects, his story is strikingly similar to that of the four other boys, all of whom described harsh conditions and the brutal treatment of ordinary citizens, including family members…
Bright and alert with a shy smile, Taim turns wistful when asked about his memories of the early weeks after the jihadists took control. Before the Islamic State, daily life revolved around family, play time and his local school, which he adored. “I loved school,” he said with a grin, listing math, art and sports as favorite subjects.
Initially, the town’s new occupiers closed his school, turning the building into a military base, Taim’s family members said. When students were finally allowed to return months later, the fighters were still there, a physical presence in the classroom. They gave out trinkets and prizes and personally oversaw the introduction of a new curriculum, developed and approved by the Islamic State.
“They would give us toys at the beginning,” he said, “but when the lessons began, they were very serious. They would mainly teach us about Islam.”
Taim remembered how his new teachers gave special emphasis to a particular story from the life of the prophet Muhammad. In it, Islam’s founder punishes a group of camel thieves by plucking out their eyes and chopping off their limbs. For Raqqa youths, the lesson about harsh justice appeared to serve as both a warning and a justification for the cruel punishments the militants were beginning to inflict on the city’s residents for violations ranging from suspecting spying to smoking cigarettes.
Over time, the Islamic State replaced traditional classroom textbooks with new ones, written and published by the terrorists themselves. Many of the books have been collected and studied over the past two years by Western analysts, who describe the group’s educational literature as thinly disguised propaganda.
For very young children, lessons on arithmetic and handwriting are illustrated with pictures of guns, grenades and tanks. For older pupils, books on science and history glorify martyrdom and portray the creation of the Islamic State as humanity’s crowning achievement.
Jacob Olidort, an expert on Islamic militant literature who has analyzed dozens of such texts, said the literature is a serious and systematic attempt at shaping young minds, with the aim of producing not just believers but fighters.
“What we learn is that education is not only part of their arsenal, but an entire theater of conflict,” said Olidort, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “They’re trying to create a jihadi generation. It’s not just believing the right creed, but being able to fight. It’s about convincing young people that only their perspective on the world is right and everyone else’s is wrong.”
For Taim, some of the most memorable lessons were not contained in books. Often, he recalled, the Islamic State’s teachers admonished the children to act as informants, promptly reporting any behavior by their parents that violated religious laws or suggested opposition to the group’s rule.
One day, he said, the teachers marched the class into a nearby park and made the children stand around an open pit — a future grave, one of the instructors said, for any child who failed to speak up if his parents were resisting or hiding from the Islamic State.
“If we did not tell them,” he said, “they would throw us into the hole.”…
Children in Cuba, North Korea and other dictatorships are still taught to inform on their patents if they speaks against the state and it's leaders. In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels both called for the destruction of the family and the raising of children by the state:
Abolition of the family! ... The bourgeois family will disappear, in the course [of history] as its supplement [private property] disappears, and both will vanish with the destruction of capital.
In this instance we have children being raised by a quasi-state entity to be suicide bombers for a movement. Think it's impossible for children to be like that. I suggest you read the book or watch the movie American Sniper, where Chris Kyle has to shot a child getting ready to attack an American patrol. What kind of mother would send her son into certain death like this:
A sobering look at threats overseas and at home.
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