Children Brutalized by IS Will Need Urgent Help, Experts Say

The chilling image of five children staring into the camera with guns in their upraised arms as five grown men dressed in orange jumpsuits kneel in front of them, about to be executed, was posted by Islamic State (IS) extremists almost as a badge of honor.

According to the SITE counterterrorism website where the image was released Friday, the young boys were British, Egyptian, Kurdish, Tunisian and Uzbek — and featured in an IS video from Raqqa, Syria.

IS has increasingly featured children in its constant barrage of propaganda, a deeply disturbing sign of the extremist group’s profound level of psychological warfare.

The exact number of children who have been put through the Islamic State’s child soldier boot camp is unknown. The German magazine Der Spiegel quoted experts as saying about 1,500 boys were serving the militant group in Iraq and Syria.

One of the experts VOA, a sister entity of BenarNews, talked with suspects there are that many in Iraq alone.

As the Iraqi Security Forces, with Kurdish troops and U.S.-led coalition support, converge on the IS stronghold of Mosul, there are growing concerns about what will happen to the children who have been forced to live under IS.

“There is no way we are prepared to manage the scale of what we see in front of us,” John Horgan, a professor at Georgia State University and an expert on terrorism and political violence, said. “We are looking at a level of [child] mobilization that is unprecedented and increasing.”

Snipers and suicide bombers

According to Farah Dakhlallah, UNICEF’s Middle East and North Africa spokeswoman, child recruitment has increased across the Middle East, and the roles that children are recruited into are changing.

“In previous years, children were in support roles,” Dakhlallah said by phone from Jordan. “But in the past two years, they are taking on much more active roles, carrying weapons, manning checkpoints, being used as snipers and as suicide bombers.”

In Syria, children are increasingly being used in armed and combat roles by different parties to the conflict, at times recruited as young as seven years old, Dakhlallah said.

“Often we think this is happening without parental consent,” she said. But there may be instances where the parents have been complicit, further complicating the psychological picture.

“I’ve been studying terrorism for 20 years; I have seen nothing like this,” Horgan said. “This is altogether different.”

Full story: BenarNews