An old jihadist tactic meant to deplete the ranks of non-Muslims while simultaneously augmenting its own recently received minor media coverage. According to the report, “an ISIS-affiliated armed group in northern Mozambique is recruiting boys as young as 13 to participate in [armed] raids against Mozambican authorities and villagers in the region.”
Not only is ISIS not “recruiting” children, but the brief report fails to explain the prevalence and mechanics of this phenomenon.
Luckily, older reports, closer to when ISIS was in its heyday in Syria and Iraq, shed more light on the specifics of this practice of enslaving and indoctrinating children into becoming jihadists. These practices are still widely in effect. Because the jihadists are not in a position to boast of it, as they were during their peak — when the media took any interest, unlike now — older reports clarify what is still happening, though clandestinely and therefore wholly ignored by Western media.
For example, one 2016 report told of how a small boy had blown himself up in a suicide attack that left at least 51 people—mostly fellow children—dead in Turkey.
This child was one of countless nameless, faceless children who had been seized, beaten, and indoctrinated in Islam. Known as the “cubs of the caliphate,” they were graduates from “schools [established by ISIS] to prepare hundreds of children and teenagers to conduct suicide attacks.”
At one point, ISIS posted a video of these “cubs,” most whom appeared to be about 10 years of age, walking around an abandoned amusement park, where they executed hostages tied to rides. One child, reportedly only four years old, shot five rounds into a tied-up victim while screaming “Allahu Akbar!” Another little boy slit the throat of his victim next to a kiddie train before planting the knife in his back. ISIS posted another video of four children — one Russian, one Uzbek, and two Iraqis — executing civilians.
One Christian clergyman explained ISIS’s strategy: “They dislocate the families, they take the newborn babies, and they put them in Islamist families.” There, they are indoctrinated in jihad and what is called in the West “terrorist activities.”
Children who managed to escape ISIS say they were repeatedly beaten and fed “endless propaganda,” including that they must kill their non-Muslim parents. “We weren’t allowed to cry but I would think about my mother, think about her worrying about me, and I’d try and cry quietly,” one little boy said.
Seizing and indoctrinating children for the jihad is hardly limited to ISIS and is especially prevalent in Africa — where, as seen, child soldiers were most recently deployed against Mozambique. By 2016 alone, Boko Haram, the Islamic jihadist group terrorizing Nigeria, had kidnapped, enslaved, beaten, and indoctrinated more than 10,000 boys — some as young as 5 years of age, and many from Christian backgrounds — into becoming jihadists/terrorists.
“They told us, ‘It’s all right for you to kill and slaughter even your parents,’” said a former captive who witnessed a beheading on the day he was enslaved. Other boys held down the victim and explained, “This is what you have to do to get to heaven.”
Girls were kept in a separate camp and raped, often by captive boys, as a way to show the latter the boons of becoming warriors of Allah (the deity that permits his slaves to enslave and rape “infidel” women). An escaped girl, Rachel, who was impregnated when she was 12, told of how dozens of boys from her village tied up a kidnapped man and beheaded him. They told the younger children watching not to “have feelings about it.” “If you go there [Boko Haram training camps], you can see 12-year-olds talking about burning down a village,” said another escaped girl, adding, “They have converted.”
A boy who had served as babysitter for infants and toddlers kidnapped or conceived by rape recalled that “The children, none older than 4, watched jihadist propaganda videos and rehearsed a game called ‘suicide bomber’ where they ripped open sacks of sand strapped to their torsos.”
By using children, ISIS hopes to pull on and exploit Western heartstrings to keep targets from fighting back. During a jihadist raid on neighboring Cameroon, for example, more than 100 screaming Nigerian boys suddenly appeared — barefoot, unarmed, or swinging only machetes — and ran toward a military unit, which gunned them down. As Col. Didier Badjeck explained, “It’s better to kill a boy than have 1,000 victims. It’s causing us problems with international organizations, but they’re not on the front lines. We are.”
Yet another older report from 2016 told of more experiences from abducted boys and girls, including how Boko Haram showed the former to “have fun” with the latter, including by “learning to subdue a struggling victim during sexual assault.” One escaped 16-year-old girl said, “I was raped almost on a daily basis by different men. When they became fed-up with me, they asked the little boy, who has often watched them do it, to take over.”
ISIS, of course, is not the only entity to employ this practice; it is taking place all throughout the Muslim world. For example, 300 Christian children were abducted and forcibly converted to Islam in Bangladesh in 2012, reported AsiaNews. After convincing impoverished Christian families to spend what little money they had to send their children to study at supposed “mission hostels,” Muslim conmen would “pocket the money” and “sell the children to Islamic schools elsewhere in the country ‘where imams force them to abjure Christianity.’” The children are then instructed in Islam and beaten. After being fully indoctrinated, the once-Christian children are asked if they are “ready to give their lives for Islam,” presumably by becoming suicide-bombers.
Why are Islamic jihad groups resorting to this tactic of enslaving and indoctrinating children into becoming jihadis? Most Western analysts believe it to be a reflection of weakened, desperate groups: “The growing trend for ISIS to use child soldiers as suicide bombers, particularly in Iraq, has been suggested as a sign of how stretched their resources are in the region,” noted one report.
Or it could suggest that ISIS, Boko Haram, et al., are simply following another page from the jihadist playbook (which Western “experts” do not even acknowledge exists). For over a millennium, Muslim caliphates specialized in seizing and enslaving tens if not hundreds of thousands of young non-Muslim boys, converting them to Islam, and then beating, indoctrinating, and training them into becoming jihadists extraordinaire.
The most famous of these were the Ottoman Empire’s janissaries — Christian boys who were seized from their homes, converted to and indoctrinated in Islam and jihad, and then unleashed on their former families. As the author of Balkan Wars explains, “Despite their Christian upbringing, they became fanatical Muslims and earnestly maintained their faith as warriors of Islam. This cruel practice of what today can be defined as the ‘brain cleansing’ of the Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire is perhaps the most inhuman Turkish legacy.”
Western analysts would not be oblivious to this “new” jihadist tactic — optimistically portraying the reliance on children as proof that terror groups have “stretched their resources” — if they had Islamic studies departments that actually disseminated facts instead of pro-Islamic myths and propaganda. As with all unsavory aspects of Islamic history, the institution of child slave soldiers has been thoroughly whitewashed. Although young, terrified boys were seized from the clutches of their devastated parents, the academic narrative is that poor Christian families were happy to see their boys taken to the caliphate where they would have a “bright future” as “soldiers and statesmen.”
The price of the modern West’s inability to comprehend Islam’s medieval tactics is not just ignorance concerning the nature of the enemy, but ignorance concerning his victims as well — in this case, countless nameless children. As Mausi Segun, a human rights activist discussing the plight of Boko Haram’s child jihadists, put it, “There’s almost an entire generation of boys missing. My guess is that a large majority of them will die [as forced jihadis] in the conflict.”
And they will die completely unknown in the West — just another victim group to be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness, lest Islam’s reputation be besmirched.
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