← The Watch Floor with Sarah Adams
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Welcome to the watch floor. I'm Sarah Adams. There's a phrase circulating right now in the media, across NGO channels and even within policy circles when it comes to Syria. And it's spun in a way that's compassionate, responsible and even hopeful. It's the phrase ISIS children are being freed. What that phrase suggests is closure. It suggests that there's a resolution solution to this problem. Right? No, the problem has not ended. This phrase is not a description of reality. It's basically a coping mechanism, because what's actually happening is not the dismantling of the indoctrination systems these children were in. It's a physical dispersal of the children before de radicalizing them and taking the ideology away from them. So in today's episode, we're going to talk about, yes, children are leaving camps in Syria, that's true. But they're not leaving behind what they've been taught. You know, this episode is about the Cubs of the caliphate. It's not a slogan or a propaganda tool. It's a strategic system that was developed by isis. You know, it was to fully indoctrinate children. We're going to talk about where the model comes from historically, how it was used differently if you were in Syria or Iraq or even Afghanistan, and how other terrorist groups have taken this model and run with it. To understand why this matters, we have to start with intent. Terrorist organizations do not invest in children because they're desperate for fighters. They invest in children because they're patient. Children represent continuity, right? You know, you'll have a second or a third generation if you start with them. They represent control of the ideology, you know, long before their brains really fully develop. They represent future fighters, facilitators, propagandists, and hopefully leaders. And none of these individuals are going to have to be persuaded later to take on these roles. Right? Because all that happened early on. So a 25 year old recruit comes with history, doubts, competing identities. A child that is raised in a closed system doesn't really know a lot outside of that universe. It's like if you think back to the Hitler Youth, right, The program in the 1930s and 40s under the Nazi regime, it was very systematic. They trained children for loyalty, obedience and ideological conformity. There are uniforms, physical training, regimented education. And it was created so you take on the stage states, worldview as fact. You don't question it and eventually your role is to also enforce it. You want people who are not going to question this universe they're a part of. And that's where we get to the cubs of the caliphate. So ISIS didn't treat children as they were like some bystanders, you know, when they control their caliphate, they treated them as. As strategic tools. When ISIS seized territory in Syria and Iraq, it actually started documenting and organizing child participation. It put people in different lists, fighters financing. They had their governing lists. When you recover these records, it showed that children were registered, categorized, and then they replaced in age specific programs. This was not some sort of informal system. It was planned from the top down. And these very young children, they often started around seven years old, were placed first into identity conditioning. They wore uniforms, they learned ISIS slogans, they sang songs daily about isis. They were taught who they are before they even understood what that meant. You know, at this stage, violence wasn't really emphasized. It was about making these children feel like they belonged in this structure.
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Many of the children appear to be extremely radical. They were all saying, one day I hope to kill you. One day I want to slit your throat. The longer we stayed, the more aggressive the children became. Here come the stones. All right, we're gonna move to another area.
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And then between roughly 8, 8 and 12 years old, the children went into kind of, you know, more of a ideological infrastructure. This is when religion was taught right, with no ambiguity. You know, loyalty to the caliphate was really elevated above everything else. It was above your family, your tribe, your nationality had. Children were encouraged to report on adults, right, who weren't living in the ways they were supposed to under the caliphate. They taught children that surveillance was a part of their religious duty. And then in these early adolescence programs, things shifted again. Weapons training came in. They got exposure to executions. It was, like, done deliberately because they wanted violence not to be viewed as, like, a cruelty, but as a responsibility that you need to own. This is a critical point that a lot of people misunderstand. ISIS didn't rush a bunch of children into combat from a strategic standpoint. They viewed it as a child isn't a valuable asset if they die at 15. They're a valuable asset if they're a commander at the age of 30. And this is how the system fully operated in Syria. You know, they luckily controlled entire cities. They had Raqqa, huge parts of Dar EZ Zor. They control a lot of the outer line rural areas. With this level of control, they were able to make indoctrination a piece of daily life. So schools were redesigned. The curriculum was written to follow, right, this ISIS thinking. Physical education classes incorporated military drills. Religious instruction reinforced, you know, the goals of ISIS and the way they Wanted you to live. Children didn't attend like ISIS camps as some sort of separate activity. They lived literally inside an entire ISIS system. Training camps then function more as like accelerators. So it would intensify what you're already learning at home from your parents and what you're already learning at your school. Now if you went over to Iraq though, it did look different. So ISIS never achieved like the level of territorial control in Iraq that they did in Syria, especially in those Sunni tribal areas where there is a lot of complex loyalties. So as a result, child recruitment relied heavily on coercion. Children were taking to pressure families. Orphans were absorbed into the ISIS system at scale. Children were used in active support roles. So they were doing message delivery, checkpoints, point observing. They were logistical assistance in the group. You know, this distinction matters. Iraqi children leaving ISIS systems had like deeper trauma alongside this indoctrination they were forced to go through. You know, many of them were victims of this violence and then they also were participants in the extremist activity. It was like both sides of the coin. That didn't just happen in Iraq. Boko Haram initially relied on mass abductions in Nigeria and neighboring countries to bring in these child recruits. Over time it realized, hey, we need to shift into embedding children into these more long term programs of focus on school and the structures around it. We need to create a generation of youth that's just customized every day to, here's the military activities we're always going to go through. Like make it normal. Don't make it seem like you have to force this on them. So it's not like ISIS invented child indoctrination. Heck, even if we go back to the first Taliban era under Mullah Omar, there were large indoctrination centers for children. A famous one is, was at the Daruta camp. So it wasn't just like a battlefield training facility. It also focused on ideology. And they would take, you know, Middle Eastern and Arab youth away from their family, you know, and bring them here. And they had a closed system of belief, discipline and identity. I mean, think about it. Now those trainers are in their late 30s and 40s and they're leaders across multiple terrorist organizations. You know, when we say these groups are coming together, it's not because of a lot of joint fighting, just in places like in Syria and Libya. But remember, they were in camps together as kids. Maybe you went on to be Al Qaeda and maybe you went on to be ISIS. You know, but when you were 12 years old, you were best friends at training camp you know, those long, you know, brother in arms relationships matter. Now when we talk about Hamas, they do things a lot differently and that difference is important. So Hamas didn't exactly decide to train children as fighters. They trained them as participants in a constant struggle. So they used school, summer camps, youth programs, the media. And they normalize violence as duty. And it is an honor if you get to be a martyr. So of course there's things like weapons training that existed, but it really wasn't the focus. The centerpiece of it was your identity, your identity as the citizen of Gaza, because Hamas controlled this territory. So they could do all of this completely in the open. It was a very different situation. There's no secrecy around these programs. This was civic responsibility actually, rather than extremism. Right. The public supported these efforts. Hezbollah though, was on a whole and is on a whole nother level. They have the largest youth indoctrination of any terrorist group. These are called the Imam Al Mahdi Scouts. And the membership is placed somewhere between 40 and 50,000 thousand children. I mean, think of that number for a minute. Children as young as 6 and 7 basically enter this system and it's heavily structured. You go into an environment where you're wearing uniforms, there's camps, there's religious education, there's physical conditioning. And then of course, everything reinforces the ideology you're being taught. You know, weapons aren't always present. You're really first taught. Hierarchy matters and it's important. And then as children grow older, their pathways start to narrow and they get identified. Are they loyal? Are they capable? Should they focus on religious study? Could we move them into paramilitary operations? Do they fit better in an intelligence role or a logistics role, or maybe even a media role? Hezbollah did doesn't ever have to scramble to recruit adults. I don't know if you've noticed that, because they just graduate their youth and they already belong. They're already trusted members of Hezbollah. The system doesn't just produce fighters. It's compliance, legitimacy, and then of course a long term control. If you really want a clear analogy, think about this. ISIS is almost like an emergency militia. You know, it mobilized under pressure and is react. When you think of Hezbollah, it was like operates like a military academy. So one is scrambling to survive, the other plans to outlast all this nonsense. The difference really is like a massive generational impact. Now when we're talking about terrorist youth programs, obviously the most concerning is suicide bomber training. And the use of children as suicide bombers is not theoretical. We have isis, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, boko Haram, Al Shabaab, all have used child suicide bombers. When you use a child, they're kind of framed as pure and unquestioning. And if you can imagine, they move through places like checkpoints and very easily, like nobody's really questioning that they might have a nefarious role. Boko Haram, though, went a lot further than this. So from 2014 to 2018, Boko Haram used hundreds of children, including girls, in suicide attacks across Nigeria and surrounding areas. Some were as young as 7 and 8 years old. This wasn't random cruelty. It was like they were thinking of it as a cost benefit analysis. Groups under pressure use children as immediate shock value. And that's what Boko Haram had done. Right? They weren't strong and powerful, but groups planning for endurance invest in children to survive. That's why Hezbollah's program is so strong and enduring and lasting. Now there is a question then, do these programs produce actual leaders? And of course, it's very true. Osama bin Laden started his militant ideology young and then he spent his formative years kind of in jihadist networks. Abu Musab al Zarqawi was radicalized very early. And then he of course, went on to help design some of these ISIS programs. Abu Muhammad Al Masri, you know, joined this activity, activity early in his youth. And then we've all seen bin Laden's sons be groomed publicly, you know, to take on his role and show that symbol of, you know, bin Laden continuity, you know, leading the Al Qaeda organization. You know, when we go beyond the Middle east, there are other patterns, historic patterns. We see a really great example is the Chechen fighters from the 1990s. So they were indoctrinated during the first Chechen. A lot of people forgot about them. And then when ISIS and everything really kicked off in Syria and Iraq, all these Chechen leaders started showing up, you know, as trainers, ground commanders. And everyone realized, oh my gosh, they were from the Chechen war. They are still in the fight decades later. Right? This, these are not anomalies. It shows the system really does work. Now when we go back to Syria, when ISIS territory collapsed, there was no coordinated plan for these children, these cubs of the caliphate. There was no program or framework to de radicalize them. There was no long term monitoring system of these children. There was no sort of let's make a plan sharing intelligence, structure and framework as they come into adulthood and keep track of the activities they might join. The children were labeled as dependents and victims of the system. It was really a Humanitarian issue with no threat. Thought of the strategic threat picture these children pose. And there were a lot of arguments and choices about reparations and really even how that ended up. It was just wildly across the board. When there were programs for the children, they were short term, they got defunded. Some were just voluntary if like a mother wanted to put her child into the program. Remember, these terrorist groups invested years into these children and western governments kind of responded with half measures. There was no long term thinking and planning regarding this. So now these children are free. And that doesn't stop what the children were groomed for. So we have everybody discussing this as, oh, they're freed. And now these institutions are acting like, okay, we can disengage from this cause we're working on and all these ISIS children. But the terrorist groups aren't going to disengage. They're going to wait, they're going to invest and they trained and they're planning to use this next generation. So we can't pretend indoctrination didn't occur or it's gone away. With this compassion of the fact that children have been freed. You know, jihadist movements really understand the future and they prepare for it. And now we're behind again. Thanks for tuning into the Watch floor.
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