French priest reveals IS child jihadist training

PARIS: Islamic State group may be teetering on the brink of collapse but the jihadists are creating an entire new generation of wouldbe terrorists, according to a book written by a French Catholic priest describing the daily lives of three young boys.

The Yazidi children — forced into training camps by IS — spend their days studying the Koran and learning to fire automatic weapons and even have their own custommade bomb belts.

“The Daesh (another term for IS) training camps are machines that crush children until they forget where they come from” and “feel close to their torturers, ready to fight for them with their lives”, said Patrick Desbois, who collected the testimonies of the children.

In his book, “The Making of Terrorists”, published in French, Desbois describes the ultraviolent daily lives of the three young boys, Jotiar, aged nine, Schvan, 14, and Diar, 15.

“They have to get up early, study the Koran and then they’re trained in pain resistance and a specialisation,” Desbois told AFP.

Those specialisations include using a Kalashnikov, sniper fire, laying bombs and becoming a suicide bomber.

The children “all have an explosive belt adapted to their size, a Kalashnikov and grenades”, he added.

Diar told him: “We didn’t feel anything. We felt we were Daesh.”

Some of the children even witnessed or, worse still, took part in executions. In school, even core subjects have been given a jihadist flavour.

“In the mathematics class, they would learn what is a bullet plus a bullet, or a rocket plus a rocket,” Salem Abdel Mohsen, a father who did not send his children to school under IS in the small Iraqi village of Jaraf, said recently. — AFP