The Islamic State group has weaponized children

According to a report on children and armed conflict, “In rural Aleppo, Dayr al-Zawr and rural Raqqa, the U.N. found military training of at least 124 boys between 10 and 15 years of age. The use of children as child executioners was reported and appeared in video footage in Palmyra and specific executions.”

IS has used children as young as four to execute prisoners using a remote control, and recently disseminated a video of a four-year-old shooting a prisoner in the head.

One cannot emphasize enough that there is no childhood in IS. The terrorists do not recognize the innocence of the victims at the Ariana Grande concert. The terrorists likewise do not subscribe to the notion that children have, need or deserve an idyllic period of their life in which they are to be protected and cherished.

In fact, Ali Akhbar Mahdi, a professor of religion at California State University at Northridge, argues that the word “teen” has no equivalent in Middle Eastern languages. Instead, they refer to pre-puberty, pre-youth or pre-adult. In most contexts, childhood is simply understood to be a period of time characterized by the absence of reason (‘aql”).

Killing children: New norm
Terrorist targeting of children has been more common than most people realize.

For example, from 1 to 3 September 2004, Chechen terrorists held School Number One in Beslan, Russia hostage for three days. There were 1,100 hostages in the school, including 777 children. By the end of the crisis, 384 people were dead, among them the terrorists and more than 350 civilians.

This is not exclusively a Jihadi tactic. The Oklahoma City bombing of the FBI Murrah building included a day care center. “Of the 21 children who were inside the day-care center on the morning of April 19, the morning of the bombing, 15 died, including all four of the infants by the window.”

While IS has opportunistically taken credit for the attack, we do not yet have evidence to determine whether it was a directed or inspired attack. We do know, however, that the terrorist group has manipulated, brainwashed and exploited children for their own purposes and will continue to do so.

The average age for IS suicide bombers and executioners is skewing younger and younger, and they appear to be normalizing the use of children across its affiliates. For example, the terrorist group Boko Haram has used children against soft targets, civilians and marketplaces.

IS has gone from using children to inspire adults, to manipulating children and their parents to fight alongside adults, to targeting children instead of adults. They do not consider what they have done to be truly evil, although we know it to be.

Mia Bloom is Professor of Communication, Georgia State University. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution / No derivative).