Future fighters of the Islamic State

History

At the peak of its power 9 years ago, in 2014, the Islamic State ruled over approximately 9 million people & was able to rule a swath of land approximately the size of the United Kingdom.

In 2014, the Islamic State (IS) abducted over 150 schoolboys in Syria & forced them to take lessons in violent extremist ideology. IS use of child soldiers is a hallmark of the terror group. Whether on the battlefield or the Internet, IS young combatants horrify audiences near & far, sending a chilling message that a new generation of violent extremists have arrived.

To understand child soldiering, one must consider how the benefits of this practice outweigh the costs of the operational effectiveness gap. An operational effectiveness gap means that since children are weaker, smaller, less disciplined & not trained militarily, the group has to spend extra time & effort transforming children into soldiers, instead of recruiting adult combatants who are likely to?be stronger, larger, more disciplined, & therefore more ready to fight effectively right away.

IS decided to recruit child soldiers to build the next generation of jihadi fighters, for which it needs impressionable & malleable youth. Personal views & values in young children have not yet been fully formed, rendering them vulnerable to blindly accepting the ideology IS bestows upon them. In recruiting child soldiers, IS is able to effectively intervene during a child’s formative years & indoctrinate him/her with the group’s violent extremist ideology. In short, this helps to guarantee the group’s permanent existence. The breeding of a new generation of loyal & lasting IS fighters is more appealing to the leadership than immediate success on the battlefield with operationally effective adult combatants.

Based on statements from IS leaders, the group’s goals are to gain, control & retain territory in the immediate term, & in the long term, to establish a caliphate & a permanent presence. A popular ISIS slogan, “baqiyya wa tatamaddad,” translates to “remaining & expanding”.

As any rational organization would, IS is investing to promote its long-term interests. IS is not using child soldiers because it is constrained & has no other choice. Rather, this is a tactical investment. As a relatively weak group compared to the countries allied against it, IS is making every effort to guarantee that even if its current leadership & fighters are defeated, killed or imprisoned, the group will not die out. A new generation will live to fight another day. Indoctrinating & training youth makes it more likely that the next generation will rise up against any conquerors. These young people will be carrying the IS message & will be primed to wage jihad all over again.

As IS continues to broadcast propaganda depicting its use of young combatants, the international community is increasingly recognizing that IS's practice of child soldiering is a significant problem. There has not been much talk, however, about solutions or strategies to help these children escape captivity, rehabilitate or reintegrate into society. IS use of child soldiers is part of what makes the group so dangerous & part of its strategy is to remain that way.

Present Day - Defeated & detained, IS still poses extremism threat.

The dream of a pure & just Islamic Caliphate is not over.?While many believe that IS has floundered, its appeal still resonates among the youth for a few key reasons:-

• Young people are more likely to identify themselves as citizens of Islam. Conflict in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) & structural racism in the West, keeps Muslims disproportionately unemployed & incarcerated. Many governments are increasingly stigmatizing outward signs of Muslim identity by banning the veil & by putting Muslim groups under counterterrorism surveillance.?
• The promise of martyrdom & an afterlife is very appealing given the grim reality in many states across MENA.

Note - The activities of IS supporters have never stopped & the threat remains. On 15 Aug 2023, Indonesia's elite counter-terrorism police unit, Densus 88, announced the arrest of an alleged IS loyalist suspected of planning an attack on the headquarters of the police's security division. The man was detained in a raid on his house outside the capital Jakarta where 18 weapons & thousands of rounds of ammunition of various calibres were discovered. The threat posed by IS is still very much alive although we might not hear of it that often nowadays.

Years after defeating IS on the battlefield, world governments are now grappling with what to do with the thousands of war-related detainees in Syria. Detained IS fighters in northeastern Syria reportedly constitute the world’s largest concentration of terrorists & tens of thousands of people with suspected links to the terror group are languishing in Syrian displacement camps. With governments reluctant to repatriate remnants of the terrorist group, the situation raises dire security, legal & human rights concerns.

Today, the IS threat has been overshadowed by that of its affiliates in Afghanistan & parts of Africa. Nonetheless, IS aims to rebuild by liberating the large numbers of its members detained in Syria & radicalizing residents of SDF-run facilities for refugees & internally displaced persons. Its?most notable attempt at the Al-Sina prison in Jan 2022, freed dozens of prisoners before the combined forces of the US, UK & the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) secured the facility.

As of Jan 2023, some 65,000 people thought to have direct or indirect links to IS were being held?in an array of facilities run by the SDF. Over 50,000 of them, the vast majority of them women & children, are crowded into the?most infamous displacement camp, Al-Hol.

Most experts see these displacement camps as targets for IS raids, incubators for future extremists & an overall untenable detention system, particularly given the SDF’s limited resources for operating them.

The Al-Hol displacement camp is a breeding ground for IS resurgence. Future IS fighters are adolescents being smuggled out of Al-Hol by their mothers & ISIS aligned financial networks. The displaced detainees are a mix of those who profess loyalty to IS, those who unwillingly encountered the organization when their husbands & fathers joined, & those who happened to live in areas seized by IS. The number who actually subscribe to the group’s ideology is?unclear but certainly not small. Counterterrorism experts say extremist leanings remain strongest among residents who are not from Iraq or Syria.

The tough security regime & the robust monitoring & surveillance efforts undertaken by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) over the years has facilitated the camp administration in maintaining a semblance of relative security & stability. However, the ideological influence of IS & its reign of terror is still spreading gradually through the group's foreign female stalwarts who are passing on the IS's extremist ideology to the next generation.

The International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE) has documented how women detainees, considered to be the most die-hard supporters of IS have ruled the annex part of camp with an iron rod mainly by radicalizing children whose countries are reluctant to repatriate them with some pro-IS women refusing their own voluntary repatriation.

SDF-run facilities are?notoriously insecure, poorly resourced, prone to disease outbreaks & ill-equipped for the area’s extreme temperatures. Many children have missed years of school & young boys are?often separated from their mothers. SDF officials say they do this because mothers try to radicalize their sons & force them to have sex with IS women to grow the group’s numbers.

While most of the women in the camps claimed to have severed their ties with the group or even renounced its ideology, some women clinging onto the ideology of IS not only continue to indoctrinate children towards violence, but also engage in sexual abuse & exploitation. Some IS women allegedly coerce pubescent males as young as 13 into having sexual relations with multiple older women at a time to foster the population of the new IS supporters hoping to revive its "utopian caliphate" or simply take them as youthful lovers given the ages of many of these women are not so far from the blossoming teen boys.

Of the pregnancies that result, some may have also been via illicit relationships with guards & others working in the camps. As per some media reports, the practice of authorizing teenage boys to marry these women for the purpose of procreation has been legitimized in the camps by the fatwa issued by an IS Sharia judge.

IS believes that the more people they can create in their image the better & those born into violent ideology are usually the most committed.

Within these detention camps, the influence of IS ideology remains a critical concern. Grooming youth as future militants under the leadership of the pro-IS mothers also includes looking after their physical strength & pushing them towards adopting violence. Children from the camps have often exhibited extremist tendencies as reflected in the ICSVE's monitoring of discourse of the anti-IS women & interviews with security professionals working in the camps who share that these children are involved in patrolling, hurting animals, burning of tents, attacking of NGOs' infrastructure operating in camps, & in some cases used by IS cells for getting information about their targets.

An United Nations Security Council (UNSC) report further highlights the children are being recruited within the camp by IS's cells for possibly conducting suicide operations. This underlines that they are now more operationally experienced, more extreme & more organized, which poses a heightened threat in the near future to the security of these detention camps & also to regional & international stability when these children are smuggled out.

Additionally, there is footage from inside Al-Hol showing tents in the remote/secluded corners of the immigrant section of the camp not only serving as training centers for these teenage boys where they undergo combat training & practice martial arts, but also learn to build & store primitive tools. Footage of some children tampering with the surveillance cameras within the camps, ostensibly to erase any traces of violent incidents, & setting fire to schools or educational centers, serve as even stronger indications of their growing propensity towards violence under the influence of specific IS mothers.

The significance of the role mothers assume in their children's indoctrination cannot be underestimated. Children are highly impressionable. The beliefs introduced by their mothers will be inculcated as irrefutable truth. Unlike studies of math, sciences & humanities which are based on rigorous logic, testing & analysis, religion is based on faith alone. Religion by its very nature, cannot be tested or analyzed. Children taught about religion & gods by their parents as truth will simply accept it at the same level of scientific truth, without questioning it.

ICSVE's recent monitoring of the pro-IS Russian & German internal channels of women from the camps on Telegram reveal discourses revolving around the permissibility under Sharia of killings the roaming cats & dogs in the camps, decrying women for their unIslamic western behavior, imparting weekly lessons of IS's creed & methodology to children & also discussing the ways to enhance their physical strength so they are prepared for fighting their enemies.

For this, children as young as 8-years-old are compelled to brutally slaughter sheep for distributing Aqiqah meat as aid & consume a steady diet of IS propaganda videos. Visuals in a recently surfaced IS styled propaganda video obtained by ICSVE showed teenage boys performing martial arts & undergoing combat training. Moreover, the existence of IS-associated propaganda videos featuring child soldiers found on illicit mobile devices confiscated from foreign IS women during recent SDF security operations underscores the group's escalating ideological influence amongst women & children.

Male & female IS cadres still loyal to the group have long awaited jailbreaks, like the one attempted in Jan 2022 at the Al-Sina prison in NE Syria to reunite them with their group.

Media reports indicate that human smuggling networks within & outside Al-Hol are primarily operated by IS sleeper cells, allegedly aided by the group's female loyalists. Few have also unabashedly admitted to facilitating illicit weapons smuggling & carrying out killings on behalf of the group.

-----------------------------

Endro Sunarso is an expert in Security Management, Physical Security & Counter Terrorism. He is regularly consulted on matters pertaining to transportation security, off-shore security, critical infrastructure protection, security & threat assessments, & blast mitigation.

Besides being a Certified Protection Professional (CPP?), a Certified Identity & Access Manager (CIAM?), a Project Management Professional (PMP?) & a Certified Scrum Master (CSM?), Endro is also a Fellow of the Security Institute (FSyl) & the Institute of Strategic Risk Management (F.ISRM).

Endro has spent about 2 decades in Corporate Security (executive protection, crisis management, critical infrastructure protection, governance, business continuity, loss mitigation, due diligence, counter corporate espionage, etc). He also has more than a decade of experience in Security & Blast Consultancy work, initially in the Gulf Region & later in South East Asia.