By Brett Daniel Shehadey
Special Contributor for In Homeland Security
Adding to the long list of war crimes which include genocide, human trafficking and others, the Islamic State is actively increasing its recruitment and training of children terrorists, known as “Cubs of the Islamic State.” Is this a sign of desperation, fear or a natural development of a depraved evolving caliphate?
At first, the worry was that the Islamic State would become a safe haven to train adult terrorists that would be an immediate threat to their surroundings and the region as well as a future threat to the civilized world. But the rapid exploitation of children recruited as jihadists was not explored in depth by Western analysts, perhaps as a cultural bias. While the age of children fighters in Africa and Central Asia can be very young—as young as six or eight in some cases—the Islamic State is literally building a “Cub Scouts Central” for international jihadists. What makes this particularly abominable is the process of watching the total destruction of any God-given innocence found in a child.
Syrian and Iraqi children are indoctrinated into acts of brutal terror in stages with apocalyptic jihadist recitations, small arms, martial drills, witnessing fresh slaughters and phased into violent acts. An Iraqi security official told NBC News: “They [ISIS leadership] use dolls to teach them how to behead people, then they make them watch a beheading, and sometimes they force them to carry the heads in order to cast the fear away from their hearts.”
Camps are being constructed in Syria and Iraq. After a few weeks or month, the children are sent off to the front lines to join older fighters or even relatives. The hands-on experience converts and condemns their souls to the fires of hell, where they face irreversible psychological harm and devotion to the jihadist cause if they should escape death.
“They have to get used to hearing the sounds of explosions and machine guns…they should get used to seeing blood,” one jihadist said.
U.S. Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, had this to say: “[The Islamic State] deliberately deny education to the people who are in the territory under their control, and not only that, they brainwash them. They engage in child abuse on an industrial scale. They brutalize and systematically dehumanize the young populations. This is going to make this a multigenerational problem.”
The training and sending of children into war is considered a war crime. A UN official called it a “dangerously successful” recruitment program. It goes way beyond simply exploiting the Syrian and Iraqi youth of 10 to 12 year olds to fight. Shelly Whitman, the executive director of the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, has said that the Islamic State use these children as human shields and blood donors to the jihadists on the front lines. In other words, as the weakest grunts, they are cannon fodder to protect the more experienced jihadists and the ones that do survive will grow up worse than the others.
Brainwashing of the youth to evil can be condemned from the offices of the UN or in Washington but it must be outflanked and eliminated on the ground to stop it. The process will inevitably continue under the areas of Islamic State control without ideological opposition. This next generation of terrorists will most likely go beyond what anyone can imagine if the process is not totally fought and in fact reversed through massive multinational psychological operations against it.
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