Sound The Trumpet : ISIS Abducting and Indoctrinating Children for Active Combat

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“ISIS Abducting and Indoctrinating Children for Active Combat ”
by The Vancouver Sun
November 25th, 2014

BEIRUT — Teenagers carrying weapons stand at checkpoints and busy intersections in Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul. Patched onto the left arms of their black uniforms are the logos of the Islamic Police.

In Raqqa, the de facto Syrian capital of the Islamic State of Iraq & Al-Sham (ISIS), boys attend training camp and religious courses before heading off to fight. Others serve as cooks or guards at the extremists’ headquarters or as spies, informing on locals.

Across the vast region under ISIS control, the group is conscripting children for battle and committing abuses against the most vulnerable, according to a growing body of evidence assembled from residents, activists, independent experts and human rights groups.

In the northern Syrian town of Kobani, where ethnic Kurds have been resisting an ISIS onslaught for weeks, children have been seen fighting alongside the jihadists. One man said he saw the bodies of four boys, two of them younger than 14. At least one 18-year-old is said to have carried out a suicide attack.

In Syria’s Aleppo province, an activist affiliated with the rebel Free Syrian Army said its fighters encountered children in their late teens “fairly often” in battles against ISIS.

It is difficult to determine just how widespread the exploitation of children is in the closed world of ISIS-controlled territory.

However, a video posted on jihadist websites Monday offered the most substantive evidence to date. It purportedly highlights the “Cubs of the Caliphate” class, showing young children dressed in black training to use different weapons, responding to staged ambushes and learning to manufacture explosives.

A United Nations panel investigating war crimes in Syria concluded ISIS is perpetrating abuses and war crimes on a massive scale “in a systematic and organized manner” in enlisting children for active combat.

The group “prioritizes children as a vehicle for ensuring long-term loyalty, adherence to their ideology and a cadre of devoted fighters that will see violence as a way of life,” the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria said in a recent report.

It interviewed more than 300 people who fled or are living in ISIS-controlled areas, and examined video and photographic evidence.

The use of children by armed groups in conflict is, of course, nothing new. But no other group comes close to ISIS in using them in such a systematic and organized way. And the effect is that much greater because the group commands large areas in which the jihadists inculcate the children with their radical and violent interpretation of Shariah law.

“What is new is that ISIS seems to be quite transparent and vocal about their intention and their practice of recruiting children,” said Laurent Chapuis, UNICEF regional child protection advisor for the Middle East and North Africa.

“Children as young as 10, 12 years old are being used in a variety of roles, as combatants as messengers, spies, guards, manning checkpoints but also for domestic purposes like cooking, cleaning, sometimes providing medical care to the wounded.”

“This is not a marginal phenomenon. This is something that is being observed and seems to be part of the strategy of the group,” said Leila Zerrougui, the UN secretary-general’s special representative for children and armed conflict.

“They are abducting children and forcing them to join, they are brainwashing children and indoctrinating them to join their group. All the tools used to attract and recruit children are used by this group.”

In areas of Syria and Iraq under their control, the Sunni extremists have closed schools or changed the curriculum to fit with their ideology. Their goal, according to the United Nations, is to use education as a tool of indoctrination to foster a new generation of supporters.

One man from Fallujah, Iraq, described seeing his six-year-old son playing with a water pistol, screaming, “I am a fighter for the Islamic State!”

He added he and his son were recently stopped at an ISIS checkpoint. The boy shouted, “We love the State!” and one of the fighters asked, “Which state?” When the son replied, “the Islamic State,” the fighter “told him, ‘Good boy,’ and let us through.”

The incident persuaded the man to move his family to Kirkuk, now in Kurdish hands.

ISIS has abducted Kurdish boys and attempted to indoctrinate them. It also runs youth training camps near Raqqa, one specifically for children under 16.

Residents in ISIS-controlled areas, such as Mosul and Fallujah, say it is not uncommon to see gun-toting boys in their late teens at checkpoints.

In a report this year, Human Rights Watch interviewed four former ISIS child fighters in Syria who described their military training. Bassem, who joined ISIS at 16, said he left after being seriously wounded by shrapnel in battle. A 17-year-old, Amr, said children in his unit signed up for suicide missions — and he reluctantly did so as well under pressure.

Thousands of foreign fighters have flocked to ISIS areas from all over the world, many of them with their families.

A video emerged this month showing two boys, both speaking perfect French, brandishing guns and claiming to be in Raqqa. The boys, who look much younger than 10, say they are from Strasbourg and Toulouse. French prosecutors have working to identify the children.

“Over there, you’re in a country of infidels. Here, we’re mujahedeen. We’re in Syria, we’re in Raqqa here,” one of the boys says. “It’s war here.”

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