By Quentin Sommerville and Riam Dalati
August 2017
On the streets of Europe, we meet teenage boys
trained by IS.
Their testimony reveals wide-ranging plans to turn children into killers.
Warning: Disturbing content
Mutassim is nervous. The 16-year-old has never flown in a plane before. He is looking around at the other passengers waiting at the departure gate in Athens airport.
He is unsure of himself, so he mimics their actions, placing his boarding pass inside his passport, and queuing to board.
As the flight is called, the Syrian boy runs through the few phrases of Spanish he's learned. The authorities may ask him questions, and he's travelling on a fake Spanish passport. It's cost more than €3000, bought from a chain of people smugglers who helped him escape from Syria, to Turkey and now into Europe.
Only a month earlier he had been in Raqqa, a member of the so-called Islamic State. The teenager had been assigned to a city hospital, tending to IS fighters and helping the sick. Before that, he was with one of the propaganda units.
But that was another life, one he wants to forget. The airstrikes, the screams, the beheadings, are behind him now. They must remain a secret, as a new start awaits in Germany - but only if the authorities don't discover that he had trained and served as a Lion Cub for the caliphate.
The so-called Islamic State is collapsing. In Syria, Iraq and Libya, it is losing territory. Its ambitions of a global caliphate are unrealised. But perhaps this was predicted, even anticipated. There was a back-up plan, an insurance policy aimed at prolonging its survival long after Raqqa, Sirte and Mosul slipped from its grasp.
First came the grooming, then the recruitment and training to create a new army of child jihadists, who might grow into adult militants. The Islamic State’s next generation of hate.
Still from IS propaganda video
Turkish/Syrian border
“They were my enemies -
now I’m living among them.”
Curriculum of hate
IS textbook: Reading - Year 5
IS not only concentrated its attention on recruits for the battlefield, it reached deeper into society, into the homes, classrooms, and minds of the youngest children.
As soon as they turn five, children are introduced to a vocabulary of strife and gore, school curriculum books reveal. They have become Cubs of the Caliphate and the process of turning them into Holy Warriors has just begun.
Its ministry of education instructed teachers to seed the “love of education” but suggested doing so by mentioning the virtues of the prophets and messengers such as “forgiveness, patience, courage, strength, reliance on Allah and the call for jihad in His name”. It also urged them to “inject zeal through fervent rhymes that terrorise the enemies of Islam”.
And so, the cubs would learn simple but violent rhymes glorifying jihad and death for the sake of Allah:
O nation, Allah is our Lord, Be generous with your blood… Victory can only be achieved through the blood of the martyrs.”
Just like the Hitler Youth movement indoctrinated children to serve the Nazis’ 1000-year Reich, IS developed a feeder apparatus to regularly inject new blood into its veins. By the time it took full control of Raqqa in the winter of 2014 and turned it into its de-facto capital, the plan to subvert the education system was set in motion.
The newly created education ministry issued its first decree – music classes were banned, so were civic education lessons, history, sports and even the Syrian state’s curriculum for Islamic education.
In their place were IS’s own “jihadi doctrine” and “Islamic Shariah” booklets.
As it still lacked its own printed curriculum, the organisation still used existing Syrian education books, albeit heavily censored. The decree stated:
Examples mentioning bank interest, democracy, elections… or Darwinism are to be deleted.”
Teachers were told to plug the gap in deleted material by resorting to examples that “do not contradict Shari’ah or Islamic State policy”.
By July 2014, Mosul had fallen and the caliphate had been declared. The rich Iraqi city, six times bigger than Raqqa, had a lot more to offer in terms of human resources and infrastructure. Now, IS had both the expertise and the assets to take on the formidable task of drafting its own curriculum from scratch.
“They started in earnest during the fall of 2014, but the Diwan [ministry of education] had been recruiting loyal, ideologically aligned experts all throughout that summer,” Yousef, a Moslawi teacher who lived through that phase, told the BBC.
In primary schools, religious material included texts “instigating against” non-Muslims, as well as propaganda leaflets designed for youngsters to view IS in a “positive” light.
The IS curriculum was finally rolled out for the 2015-2016 school year. Children would enrol at the age of five and graduate at 15, shaving four full years off the traditional school life. They would be educated in 12 various disciplines but these would be steeped in Islamic State’s doctrine and its world vision. Jihad became institutionalised, the enemy was everyone beyond the borders of the caliphate.
Even though Mosul has fallen and Raqqa, the de-facto capital, is expected to capitulate in the forthcoming months, IS is still teaching children its curriculum of hate in several localised territories under its control in Syria.
IS textbook: Reading - Year One
Throughout their primary years, and mainly through their Arabic reading lessons, children are reminded of a stream of foes bent on “defiling” the dignity of Muslims - the Rawafidh (Shi’as), the Murtaddeen (apostates, Sunnis who do not follow IS doctrine), the Safavids (Iranians), the Crusaders (The West), The Judeo-Christian alliance (the Coalition), the UN and the Tawaghit (rulers who don’t follow Shari’ah). From an early age, the Islamic State indoctrinates its youth in the imperative of jihad against infidels and apostates. They are to be vanquished.
But first, the organisation makes its priorities clear. The Prophet’s Hadeeth (sayings and habits) book for Year One students features a photo of IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi superimposed over one of IS fighters in a circle, their weapons raised – a known set-up for the pledge of allegiance to the caliph.
In Islamic Doctrine books, IS reminds teachers of what’s at stake:
Our enemies aim to bury our identity and pillage our assets. We’ve tried, as much as we could, to infuse the students with a doctrine leading to the right kind of action that would preserve our identity and render us victorious in the ongoing fight.”
These books are also laced with the controversial teachings of Ibn Taymiyah and Ibn Al-Qayyim, medieval scholars whose writings became the foundation of contemporary ultra-conservative Islam and Salafi Jihadi ideology. Texts reveal that children from six to 11 were being repeatedly subjected to concepts such as Al-Wala and Al-Bara – loving those who love Allah and hating those who don’t – and the necessity to wage jihad.
But perhaps, the most Machiavellian of the Islamic State’s subversions can be seen in its teaching of the Koran. IS instructs its teachers to link verses to the non-mainstream jihadi concepts being taught in its classes, in many cases even providing them with page numbers and exact references. “Prepare for teaching this verse by teaching your students that a believer’s aim of jihad for the sake of Allah is either victory over the Kuffar (infidels) or death for the sake of Allah,” one instruction says.
By the time their primary studies are over, it is possible that this systematic practice made children correlate, maybe even confuse, between the doctrine and the Koran, the universal Holy Book of all Muslims. As a result, children would have seen any other Muslim not following the same doctrine as an apostate.
The effect of such a curriculum on children can be seen in Training Future Lions, an IS propaganda video.
“Who’s your emir?” asks the narrator.
“Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” answers Abdullah, a handsome Kazakh child, perhaps no more than 10 years old.
“What do you want to be in the future, inshaallah?”
“I will be the one who slaughters you, O Kuffar. I will be a mujahid, inshaallah”.
Three months later, Abdullah returned in another video, brandishing a handgun and executing two alleged spies.
An indoctrinated innocence has now been weaponised, and has become an even easier victim of recruitment.
Further reading material was meant to entice young readers to become soldiers of the caliphate. In one example, a child asks his father about the armed fighters he saw at the local mosque.
“They came from all over the world… to protect the caliphate and fight Kuffar, Murtaddeen and Rawafidh,” the father says.
“I want to be one of them father,” a beaming child answers.
“And you shall. We will wait until you grow up to become a fighter, spreading the religion of Allah and defending Muslims,” the father replies.
And so the journey of an Islamic State cub in primary learning comes to an end. His future status is perhaps best depicted on the cover of a reading book for 11-year-olds. It features a child with a rifle slung over his shoulder, embarking on a grey, foggy journey, which is most likely leading to the furnace of war, where his resolve will either forge or shatter.
Frightening
legacy
Still from an IS propaganda video
Soon, very soon, you'll be seeing wonders .
In the school playground, or while at home, playing by themselves, the children sing IS songs of jihad and attacks on the West.
You'll be seeing an epic conflict
We'll be in your homeland…
Our fighters will terrorise you.
IS is mostly gone from Mosul, but its songs remain for 12-year-olds Usma and Yabcoub.
There's no escape but death.
We're coming for you with death and slaughter,
We're going to tear through your squares.
The boys remember walking home and seeing corpses hanging from lampposts. And they remember the beheading videos.
We'll go through death and back,
marching as one,
But we'll die standing like lions
Boy sings an IS song:
Usma smiles when he tells me that his new haircut, shaved at the sides and long on top, with some sharp detailing, would have earned him 15 lashes under IS.
Yacoub does not smile, as he draws a finger over his own throat. “They weren’t nice, they chopped off heads,” he says.
IS lavished attention on boys of their age and younger. It was an insurance policy for the future, and a filtering process to allow potential young fighters to be identified and fast-tracked into military training.
“IS did not approach students violently,” says Yousef, the tutor. “They appealed to their emotional sides, saying, 'We are your family and we will help you to get your independence and freedom'.”
I first spoke to Yousef two years ago, via the Internet, when he would feed us information from IS-occupied Mosul. He handed me the entire IS curriculum on CD.
He watched as IS ideology took hold in classrooms, and some of his students disappeared. Their fathers either died for IS, or at the hands of the militants. Yousef says:
Children are fertile ground. It is easier for IS to brain wash them and prepare them to be recruited with IS at a young age, unlike adults.”
In some cases, he told me, families would hand a child over to IS, to protect other family members.
It’s what Dr Mia Bloom of Georgia State University, an expert on child radicalization, calls a “perverse reversal” of the parental role.
“Kids are sacrificed, maybe for a greater good, helping the family,” she says. “IS has ensured that what worked for other child soldiers can’t work here. Children can’t be put back with their families if their families were they ones that handed them over.”
Still from an IS propaganda video
Qais is from Latakia. His war started when he was 15 and he joined a rebel group, fighting the regime in Syria. His battalion commander defected with all of his men to IS. Qais was probably more of a willing defector than he cares to admit, but his story of disillusionment IS is familiar.
Eventually he escaped and made it to Turkey, where he lives today. He was once an excited child, learning to fire a weapon, willing to join jihad, ready to battle the Syrian regime, and then to fight infidels. All of that is behind him now. When I met him in Gaziantep in Turkey, he is a husk - an empty space containing disappointment and hopelessness.
When I returned someone said to me, 'You’re a loser and if I were you I wouldn’t have done what you’ve done, no human being would. This is called failure.'
I can’t forget the word 'loser'."
Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but at least 2,000 children became Lion Cubs of the Caliphate - child soldiers for the IS war machine, and many thousands more were manipulated and turned towards jihad in IS classrooms.
Certainly, they are victims, and some are a threat. Almost all are left at the very edges of whatever society they now inhabit.
And there is a danger of them re-offending, says Dr Mia Bloom. “It’s not the recidivism one would expect. These kids can be funnelled into criminality, they have all the skills for it. They end up in criminal gangs, not terrorist groups."
When you stand in the baking heat of the Mosul’s Old City, it's easy to be overwhelmed. The spectacle of utter devastation surrounding you is so complete it causes you to reach for something to steady yourself.
Comparisons have been made to the ruins of earlier wars - Dresden, Stalingrad, etc. That is overstating the damage, and looking through the rubble, it misses the point. Physical damage is the easiest to perceive, but also the easiest to repair. Cities get rebuilt.
In its short life, the so-called Islamic State did much greater lasting harm, by grooming and corrupting young men.
Sit with those boys, hear their tales and you will struggle to steady yourself.
Identifying the worst affected is difficult enough. Treating them, stopping the nightmares and repairing the trauma will be costly and time-consuming. They have missed so much proper schooling that finding them jobs will be hard. And returning them to their faith, one that isn’t polluted by jihadist ideology, needs perseverance.
That might be enough to save them, to bring them back into their societies, to help Iraq and Syria rebuild. Treating those who have suffered and escaped to the West might stop them becoming criminals, or worse.
But all of that will be difficult and unpopular. And perhaps those experts of division and destruction, IS, always knew this.
After all, who would want to help a boy who wanted to be a suicide bomber?