The following conversation took place between a Belgian father of Moroccan origin and his nine-year-old son in Al-Raqqa, a Syrian city on the Euphrates. The father had brought his son with him to live in an area controlled by the Islamic State (IS). The conversation was filmed as part of a documentary shot secretly and then smuggled out of IS-controlled Syria. Father: Do you want to go back to Belgium? Son: No, I don't want to go back there. Belgium is a land of atheism, where the infidels live. But Syria is the land where there is the State of Islam. Father: Would you like to be a jihadist, or would you rather carry out a martyrdom operation? Son: A jihadist. Father: Why do you want to kill the infidels? Son: Because they kill the Muslims. (Brief pause). Are we going to kill all the infidels of Europe? Father (Addressing all Europeans): We will enslave your women as you enslaved ours. We will make your children orphans, as you made ours orphans. The exchange is typical of the manner in which children are brainwashed in territories controlled by IS. They are being groomed to become future jihadists, the hope being that they will take over all the land of Arabs and Muslims before marching on and subjugating Europe. Another conversation in the same documentary went like this: Child: “I am nine now, and will go to the camp after the month of Ramadan to learn how to use the Kalashnikov so that we fight against the Russians, the Americans and the atheists.” Someone asks: “Do you know how to fire a gun?” Child: “Yes, I do.” Fighters come into Syria and Iraq from all corners of the earth, and some of them bring their children along. Many of the local children have lost their families and homes during the current conflict. Some of these new arrivals and orphans are coaxed, and others are coerced, into joining IS training programmes. The IS sometimes abducts school children and enrols them by force into their ranks. In Aleppo, the IS abducted 250 children, releasing 100 of them within hours but keeping the rest in custody for a period of some time. While held by the IS, the children were reportedly subjected to beatings and made to watch videos glamorising the IS, including scenes of beheadings. For successfully memorising IS doctrine, children were rewarded with 150 Syrian pounds, just under one US dollar, given a videotape expounding the IS doctrine, and allowed to leave. Local children, as well as those of foreign fighters, are made to join what IS combatants refer to as “Quranic schools”. It is at these “schools” that children are taught the ultra-militant IS version of Islam. “Then they are sent to training camps to undergo combat training,” said an IS combatant. The training includes firing live ammunition and beheading dummies. The children do not receive lessons in science and the humanities, subjects that are scorned by the IS. “We hope that this generation will be the one to fight the apostates and infidels … This is the generation that will rule the Islamic State,” added the IS combatant. An IS spokesman pointed out that children under the age of 15 are sent to train in Sharia camps “where they learn about religion.” But those aged 16 and above undergo military training and “may participate in military operations,” he said. The IS spokesman noted that one of the Muslim generals who fought the Byzantines, Usama Ben Zayd, was only 18, if not younger. Blatantly, the IS rewrites Islamic tenets to justify its own brutality. The practice of misinterpreting or reinterpreting religious texts for political reasons is not new. The Umayyads, Abbassids and Ottomans all used religious texts to justify their wars of expansion, whereas the Quran mentions specifically that wars are only justified in self-defence, not self-interest. A recent statement by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OCHR) reports that IS has enrolled children as young as 12 or 13 in military training in Mosul. Eyewitnesses quoted by Foreign Policy magazine say they saw young children in Mosul donning the black outfits of IS, bearing arms and participating in security patrols. Children were also sent to the battlefront to be used as human shields. They are also made to donate blood to the wounded, according to reports by non-governmental groups caring for children. The Islamic State is unlikely to have difficulty recruiting children. Amid the devastation of war, most children now play war games, simulating battles between IS and Kurdish fighters, known as the Peshmerga, using plastic guns and home-fashioned swords. Occasionally, they re-enact beheadings. Iran did the same in the past. During the Iraq-Iran war, Khomeini placed necklaces bearing “keys of paradise” around the necks of teenagers and dispatched them to the front to detonate mines. In Africa, the practice of using child soldiers is commonplace. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood used orphanage children in its protests, parading them in shrouds bearing the words “future martyr.” In Tunisia, militant groups brainwash children with extremist ideas in institutions that are not supervised by the government. Even though the doctrines propagated by these groups do not follow the tenets of Islam, the deception is persistent and its subjects are too young to know the difference. The writer is a novelist and socio-political researcher.
