An education in terror

BBC ^ | August 17, 2017 | By Quentin Sommerville and Riam Dalati

[Oldeconomybuyer]

On the streets of Europe, we meet teenage boys trained by IS. Their testimony reveals wide-ranging plans to turn children into killers.

Mutassim is nervous. The 16-year-old has never flown in a plane before. He is looking around at the other passengers waiting at the departure gate in Athens airport.

As the flight is called, the Syrian boy runs through the few phrases of Spanish he's learned. The authorities may ask him questions, and he's travelling on a fake Spanish passport. It's cost more than €3000, bought from a chain of people smugglers who helped him escape from Syria, to Turkey and now into Europe.

Only a month earlier he had been in Raqqa, a member of the so-called Islamic State. The teenager had been assigned to a city hospital, tending to IS fighters and helping the sick. Before that, he was with one of the propaganda units.

The so-called Islamic State is collapsing. In Syria, Iraq and Libya, it is losing territory. Its ambitions of a global caliphate are unrealised. But perhaps this was predicted, even anticipated. There was a back-up plan, an insurance policy aimed at prolonging its survival long after Raqqa, Sirte and Mosul slipped from its grasp.

First came the grooming, then the recruitment and training to create a new army of child jihadists, who might grow into adult militants. The Islamic State’s next generation of hate.

Many armed groups across Africa, the Middle East and South America, have trained children for battle. Recruiting child soldiers is a war crime. But few have refined the process so efficiently as the Islamic State group.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Build the Wall.

[upchuck]

Damned autostart videos!