The children had all been shown
videos of beheadings and told by their trainers with the Islamic State
group that they would perform one someday. First, they had to practice
technique. The more than 120 boys were each given a doll and a sword and
told, cut off its head.
A
14-year-old who was among the boys, all abducted from Iraq's Yazidi
religious minority, said he couldn't cut it right. He chopped once,
twice, three times.
"Then
they taught me how to hold the sword, and they told me how to hit. They
told me it was the head of the infidels," the boy, renamed Yahya by his
IS captors, told The Associated Press last week in northern Iraq, where he fled after escaping the IS training camp.
When
Islamic State extremists overran Yazidi towns in northern Iraq last
year, they butchered older men and enslaved many of the women and girls.
Dozens of young Yazidi boys like Yahya had a different fate: The IS
sought to re-educate them. They forced them to convert to Islam from
their ancient faith and tried to turn them into jihadi fighters.
It is part of a concerted effort by the extremists to build a new generation of militants, according to AP
interviews with residents who fled or still live under IS in Syria and
Iraq. The group is recruiting teens and children using gifts, threats
and brainwashing. Boys have been turned into killers and suicide
bombers. An IS video issued last week showed a boy beheading a Syrian
soldier under an adult militant's supervision. Last month, a video
showed 25 children unflinchingly shooting 25 captured Syrian soldiers in
the head.
In schools and
mosques, militants infuse children with extremist doctrine, often
turning them against their own parents. Fighters in the street befriend
children with toys. IS training camps churn out the Ashbal, Arabic for
"lion cubs," child fighters for the "caliphate" that IS declared across
its territory. The caliphate is a historic form of Islamic rule that the
group claims to be reviving with its own radical interpretation, though
the vast majority of Muslims reject its claims.
"I
am terribly worried about future generations," said Abu Hafs
Naqshabandi, a Syrian sheikh who runs religion classes for refugees in
the Turkish city of Sanliurfa to counter IS ideology.
The
indoctrination mainly targets Sunni Muslim children. In IS-held towns,
militants show young people videos at street booths. They hold outdoor
events for children, distributing soft drinks and candy - and
propaganda.
They tell adults, "We have given
up on you, we care about the new generation," said an anti-IS activist
who fled the Syrian city of Raqqa, the extremists' de facto capital. He
spoke on condition of anonymity to preserve the safety of relatives
under IS rule.
With the
Yazidis, whom IS considers heretics ripe for slaughter, the group sought
to take another community's youth, erase their past and replace it with
radicalism.
Yahya, his
little brother, their mother and hundreds of Yazidis were captured when
IS seized the Iraqi town of Sulagh in August. They were taken to Raqqa,
where the brothers and other Yazidi boys aged 8 to 15 were put in the
Farouq training camp. They were given Muslim Arabic names to replace
their Kurdish names. Yahya asked that AP not use his real name for his and his family's safety.
He
spent nearly five months there, training eight to 10 hours a day,
including exercises, weapons drills and Quranic studies. They told him
Yazidis are "dirty" and should be killed, he said. They showed him how
to shoot someone from close range. The boys hit each other in some
exercises. Yahya punched his 10-year-old brother, knocking out a tooth.
The
trainer "said if I didn't do it, he'd shoot me," Yahya said. "They ...
told us it would make us tougher. They beat us everywhere."
In
an IS video of Farouq camp, boys in camouflage do calisthenics and
shout slogans. An IS fighter says the boys have studied jihad so "in the
coming days God Almighty can put them in the front lines to battle the
infidels."
Videos from other camps show
boys crawling under barbed wire and practicing shooting. One kid lies on
the ground and fires a machine gun; he's so small the recoil bounces
his whole body back a few inches. Boys undergoing endurance training
stand unmoving as a trainer hits their heads with a pole.
IS
claims to have hundreds of such camps. The Syrian Observatory for Human
Rights documented at least 1,100 Syrian children under 16 who joined IS
this year. At least 52 were killed in fighting, including eight suicide
bombers, it said.
Yahya
escaped in early March. Fighters left the camp to carry out an attack,
and as remaining guards slept he and his brother slipped away, he said.
He urged a friend to come too, but he refused, saying he was a Muslim
now and liked Islam.
Yahya's
mother was in a house nearby with other abducted Yazidis - he had
occasionally been allowed to visit her. So he and his brother went
there. They travelled to the Syrian city of Minbaj and stayed with a
Russian IS fighter, Yahya said. He contacted an uncle in Iraq, who
negotiated to pay the Russian for the two boys and their mother. A deal
struck, they met the uncle in Turkey then went to the Iraqi Kurdish city
of Dohuk.
Now in Dohuk,
Yahya and his brother spend much of their time watching TV. They appear
outgoing and social. But traces of their ordeal show. When his uncle
handed Yahya a pistol, the boy deftly assembled and loaded it.
And
he will never forget the videos of beheadings IS trainers showed the
boys. "I was scared when I saw that," he said. "I knew I wouldn't be
able to behead someone like that. Even as an adult."
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