BRAINWASHED: THE ARMY OF CHILD FANATICS

Of all the horrific images bombarding the West from the Islamic State propaganda machine, the five-second clip of a British child in army fatigues is as chilling as any. At the end of the most recent barbaric video, which shows the cold-blooded execution of five men accused of spying for Britain by their own side in Syria, the camera cuts to a small boy, no more than five or six years old.

While this video is horrifying, the terror group using children to further their brutal regime is nothing new.

What the West often fails to understand is that when the so-called Islamic State (IS) seized power in Syrian cities in 2013, they did not begin with military might. They simply colonised the schools.

Their emissaries were sent to schools in Aleppo, where they used money as well as forceful argument to persuade the staff to teach their extreme interpretation of the Koran. This was the first building block of their ‘state’.

At the same time, they set about building orphanages. Syria is a country full of orphans, where the remaining adults are often unable to feed and protect their own children, let alone anyone else’s. When IS commanders offered to look after these orphans, it was a tempting proposition.

But IS doesn’t care for children from any humanitarian impulse. They see these orphans as their new generation, who will grow up knowing nothing but propaganda and indoctrination.

One Syrian rebel, who has seen the colonisation of schools by IS at first hand, told me: ‘Syrian society is producing a new kind of extremist – an unpredictable kind. This is a new experience – and when some of them go to Europe and America and explode themselves, don’t ask us why.’

Some of the schools double as military training camps. It is never hard to get children interested in playing with guns, and their tutors take full advantage of this.

In 2014, in northern Syria, I was the first Western journalist to meet two Kurdish boys – aged 14 and 16 – who escaped from one of these training camps where they were held with 184 other youngsters. They said their teachers were not Syrian and could be brutal, sometimes beating them, but on the other hand the food was better than what their parents could give them.

ThE jihadis split the children into groups of about five and appointed a captain for each. This created a pecking order, a military hierarchy, which increases discipline. The Kurdish parents were suspicious of the changes in their children when they returned from these camps. Many thought the youngsters had swallowed some of the ideology. In some cases, however, it’s hard for parents to prevent their sons from being taken away, not least because the jihadis pay them – money that can mean survival for the rest of the family.

furthermore, the IS fighters believe what they preach so fiercely that they are ready to die for it – and it is difficult to argue against that intensity of commitment.

The children at these camps are usually aged between seven and 15, and their parents are told that they will not be sent to the front line. Instead, they will be used in safer roles such as guarding checkpoints, sentry duty and so on.

But this simply isn’t true. Especially as IS loses ground and personnel as it is doing at the moment, children are being rapidly promoted in all aspects of military operation. It seems they are made to feel comfortable around adult fighters and in military environments. This was highlighted to me two years ago when I was speaking on the phone with a British jihadi in Raqqa, Syria – a man named Kabir Ahmed.

Ahmed broke off, saying that a child – clearly relaxed enough to approach this adult soldier – had brought him a lollipop. It was not uncommon to see children around the men’s training bases, he told me. (five months after I interviewed him, Ahmed killed himself in a suicide bomb attack.)

The children are also brought to relaxation centres known as the ‘maqar’, where jihadis unwind before going into battle.

But it is not only the adult fighters who are sent to die. I talked to a Syrian rebel in Aleppo who said that after gunfights it was not a rare sight to find the corpses of young teenagers on the battlefield. There are also documented cases of children as young as 12 being used as suicide bombers.

WhAT is especially shocking is that some of these children come from Britain. It is incomprehensible for most people to imagine why anyone – however deluded – would want to take their child to a war zone. It’s especially difficult to fathom leaving a democratic, first World country such as our own.

There is no definite figure as to how many families have left Britain to join IS. My vague estimate would be several dozen. One such example was last July, when 12 members of the Mannan family from Luton confirmed they’d reached Syria to join IS – and urged other Muslims to do the same.

Another family of six – father Asif Malik, mother Sara Kiran and their four children aged from one to seven – were also thought to be travelling to Syria when they left their Berkshire home in April last year.

Adult British newcomers to the ‘caliphate’ are of little more than propaganda value. But children brought from the West are very different.

Volunteers are encouraged to bring their young families because IS are trying to build a generation of children without borders who know no nation and have no allegiance – not to Britain, not to Syria.

That’s a whole new kind of stateless human being. It brings us back to that image of Syria as a country filled with orphans. As they grow up, brainwashed, the plan is for them to be capable of anything for the global Islamist cause.

IS know the terrifying effect of that small boy in the video, stating that he wants to attack us. There is no more elemental fear to strike into Western hearts. That is why they are doing it.

James Harkin’s book Hunting Season, about the rise of IS and its campaign of kidnapping, is published by Little Brown.