ISIS: Children are fuel for terrorist organization’s future battle (Part 6)

Children are the hope of peoples and nations; they are the future generation and its leaders. Therefore, ISIS realizes their importance and works to educate and nurture them through a number of means in order to inculcate its ideas and toxins in their minds.

ISIS does not hesitate to recruit children to re-pump blood into the arteries of the bloody group after their self-claimed state in Iraq and Syria disintegrated.

Camps for refugees and internally displaced persons have played a major role in child recruitment, especially in Syria, the most important of which is the Al-Hol camp, which houses the children and relatives of ISIS militants and is currently the most prominent arena for attempts to recruit a new generation of extremists, and these attempts target children and minors, according to senior US military officials.

According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Al-Hol camp includes more than 31,000 children of different nationalities, which raises concerns about their future, especially the children of Syrian and Iraqi fighters, as integrating them into their societies represents a major problem after terrorist and extremist ideas were planted in their minds.

ISIS focused on education, so it established the Ministry of Education in 2015 and made education compulsory for boys between the ages of 6 and 18 years old and girls between the ages of 6 and 15. The number of ISIS schools reached 1,350, with 100,423 students and 2,540 teachers. Students were chosen on the basis of several steps, starting with the recruitment and education departments, ISIS's intelligence service, the media, and mosques, which confirms the importance of children to the organization.

Despite the terrorist organization’s interest in education, it is always keen to train males militarily, and its core is the orphan children who are called the caliphate cubs and foreigners betting on the organization upon their return to their country of origin. Students of these schools receive subjects that enhance their desire for revenge, and they also receive training in the use of various explosive devices, as this category of students is employed in suicide operations.

ISIS separates the children from their families at the age of 9, and they enter training camps to establish a belonging to the organization instead of individual identity, which makes it easy for ISIS to mold them in line with the values and practices of ISIS. The terrorist organization is keen to achieve this by using the strategy of education by example and imitating adult fighters, as children in these camps wear the same adult camouflage uniform and can use automatic weapons just like adults.

After the fall of ISIS’s caliphate and the loss of its main strongholds, talk about the future of these children is now the talk of the day. Despite international sympathy for them as victims, the size of the expected threats cannot be overlooked.

Security experts confirmed that children from 6 to 12 years old who went to conflict areas with their families and imbibed ISIS ideology are a time bomb, as they may be a new generation of recruits for ISIS. The most dangerous of them is the age group from 12 to 18 years old who may have become involved in ISIS battles and have already been subjected to a process of brainwashing. Security services should give them some kind of specialized rehabilitative care and take into account their psychological and social conditions, and governments should not apply the same adult standards to them.

In this context, the head of Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, warned of children and youth who received extremist education returning from combat zones to Germany, saying that there are children and youth who have undergone brainwashing in schools affiliated with ISIS and are strongly radicalized.

The intelligence chief explained that the children appear in ISIS propaganda as a new generation of violent and ruthless fighters, and therefore they may pose a danger upon their return and will grow up as second-generation jihadists.