Mother of young boy in video left England to fight for Daesh

He would be cute — curly hair, bandanna, British accent — if, at age 6 or 7, he wasn’t wearing army fatigues and calling for slaughter.

But that is what a young boy is doing in a recently surfaced Daesh video that features a militant some are calling the ‘new Jihadi John’ executing five men.

Now, a man in London — the father of a woman known to have left England to fight for Daesh — has said the boy is his grandson.

“He’s my grandson,” Sunday Dare told Channel 4. “I can’t disown him. He’s my grandson. I know him very well.”

The boy was named by some news outlets — but not The Washington Post, which doesn’t identify juveniles allegedly involved in crimes unless they are ordered to be tried as adults. Nor was the identification confirmed by authorities. But, as always, the British press offered a memorable nickname: “Jihadi Junior.”

As the Guardian reported, Dare said Daesh is “just using a small boy.”

“He doesn’t know anything,” Dare said. “He’s a small boy. They are just using him as a shield.”

Of his grandson’s opinion of Daesh, Dare, who has spoken to him on the phone, said: “Well, he doesn’t like it over there.”

Dare is all-too-familiar with the toll Daesh takes on some families living in the United Kingdom.

A Christian migrant from Nigeria, he saw his daughter, Grace ‘Khadijah’ Dare, 24, radicalised while at university in London.

Her son was born in 2010; she joined Daesh in 2012, and was soon praising the beheading of American journalist James Foley, saying she wanted to be the first woman to behead a hostage, and posting photos of her young child holding an AK-47.

Talking to Britain’s Channel 4, Sunday Dare had harsh words for his daughter.

“She’s going to come back and face the music because she has let herself down,” he said.

The boy known as Jihadi Junior is far from the only young person in the service — as much as a child can be in the service — of Daesh. Last year, an Australian militant tweeted a photo of a 7-year-old boy thought to be his son holding a severed head in Syria.

“That’s my boy!” the photo’s caption said.

For children in a war zone, Daesh has an allure. The men in black are, at least, somewhat organised.

“When [Daesh] came to my town ... I liked what they are wearing, they were like one herd,” a child told the advocacy group Human Rights Watch in 2014.

“They had a lot of weapons. So I spoke to them, and decided to go to their training camp.”

Human Rights Watch, which reported on interviews with 25 children fighting in Syria, said that children growing up in militant groups grow up fast.

“One doctor described treating a boy between 10 and 12 years old whose job it was to whip prisoners held in an ISIS [Daesh] detention facility, according to the adult fighter who brought him,” it wrote.