Suffer the children

Sending children to war is as old as war itself. The fictional Johnny Tremain at age 14 was no anomaly in the American Revolution. But recent investigations highlight the grisly, barbaric use of youth—including boys as young as 8—by Islamic State (or ISIS) and others in Iraq and Syria.

“It was like learning to chop an onion,” reported 17-year-old Jomah after sitting in on a lesson by ISIS in beheading. “You grab him by the forehead and then slowly slice across the neck.”

The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 26 reported on the underage training session, where teachers brought in three captured Syrian soldiers, asked for volunteers, and even recruits under age 10, aided and desensitized by watching beheading videos, practiced their skills on the frightened men. “Afterward, the teachers ordered the students to pass around the severed heads,” Jomah, who has since defected, told the paper.

The Journal rightly noted the enrollment of hundreds of such youth in militant training camps “could trouble the Middle East for years to come.”

The same day The New York Times relayed the story of Usaid Barho, a 14-year-old ISIS recruit. He spent over a month learning to fight and became so desperate to defect that, given the choice to be a fighter or a suicide bomber, he strapped on a vest of explosives. At the gate of a Baghdad mosque for Shiites where he was supposed to blow himself up, he surrendered to guards instead, saying the Islamic State “seduced us to join the caliphate.”

Defectors like Usaid and Jomah are teaching authorities a lot—about how ISIS moves young recruits from Syria to Iraq and elsewhere; about the ideology and tactics used to indoctrinate them; and about ISIS strategy, including its use of captured schools, mosques, and churches for religious and military training under the guise of “free schooling.”

‘ISIS prioritizes children as … a cadre of devoted fighters that will see violence as a way of life.’

But perhaps the lessons come too late. Human Rights Watch and other groups report hundreds, if not thousands, of boys and teenagers recruited to fight infidels who include Shiite Muslims, Christians, Yazidis, and others. Further complicating the picture, they have documented efforts to abuse children not only by Islamic State and its affiliates but by the Free Syrian Army, one of the rebel groups the United States has supported in Syria.

ISIS and its related militants, in effect, are deploying a generation the authorities in Iraq and Syria—along with the United States and other Western and Arab allies—have been willing to ignore. Plus, the ability of ISIS to control territory about the size of New England leaves families to choose between a radical Islamist education that includes target practice (and head chopping) or no schooling at all.

School-age youth are used in other ways too, kidnapped for ransom payments, tortured, and in some cases raped into submission to serve the militants. One video from a camp near Mosul in Iraq calls the inductees “cubs of the caliphate.”

“ISIS 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,” reads a November UN report on “living under ISIS.”

You have only to look to Somalia, Sudan, and Congo to see the devastating effect of decimating a generation. Once prominent, stable countries like Iraq and Syria in a season can be reduced to failed states for lifetimes to come. The United States plays a complicit role for its involvement in Iraq and its support for Arab Spring uprisings.

In that vein, foreign policy elites are having an agitated debate about whether a “broken windows” policy to restore global order is needed. Even Georgetown’s Jeffrey Gedmin argues in favor of U.S. policing: Too much of the world “is starting to look a lot like the crime-ridden New York of the 1970s” because “the Obama administration and our European allies have woefully neglected the small things.” Besides looking to areas in chaos, we should look to the future, and the children forever changed by it.

Email mbelz@wng.org