The Islamic State Expands Its Ranks Of Child Soldiers

Maajid Nawaz, Daily Beast: The ISIS Army That’s Still Unborn

In ISIS-land, mothers are given books telling them how to raise their offspring for ‘jihad.’ This includes telling bedtime stories about ‘martyrdom.’

LONDON — There are roughly five million children living under the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. As such, it was only a matter of time before the worst terror group of our lifetime set its sights on them.
And now it has.

Working with Child Soldiers Initiative, and endorsed by UNICEF, my counter-extremism organization Quilliam has released a seminal report (PDF) documenting the use of child soldiers by ISIS. This report makes for cruel reading.

The United Nations has received credible but unverified reports suggesting that ISIS has created a youth wing called Fityan al-Islam, meaning boys of Islam. The precedent seems to have been set by the former Baathist regime of Saddam Hussain in Iraq, which in the late 1970s established the Futuwah (Youth Vanguard) movement with the most important Iraqi child soldier units known as Ashbal Saddam, or Saddam’s Lion Cubs.

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WNU Editor: With such a huge pool of children to draw from, there is going to be no shortage of recruits for the Islamic State.