BEIRUT — Teenagers carrying weapons stand at checkpoints and busy intersections in Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul.
In Raqqa, the Islamic State group’s de facto capital in Syria, boys attend training camp and religious courses before heading off to fight. Others serve as cooks or guards at the extremists’ headquarters or as spies, informing on people in their neighborhoods.
Across the vast region under Islamic State control, the group is conscripting children for battle and committing abuses against the most vulnerable at a young age, according to a growing body of evidence assembled from residents, activists, independent experts and human rights groups.
In the northern Syrian town of Kobani, where ethnic Kurds have been resisting an Islamic State onslaught for weeks, several activists said they observed children fighting alongside the militants.
Mustafa Bali, a Kobani-based activist, said he saw the bodies of four boys, two of them younger than 14.
In Syria’s Aleppo province, an activist affiliated with the rebel Free Syrian Army said its fighters encountered children in their late teens “fairly often” in battles against the Islamic State group.
It is difficult to determine just how widespread the exploitation of children is in the closed world of Islamic State-controlled territory. There are no reliable figures on the number of minors the group employs.
A U.N. panel investigating war crimes in the Syrian conflict concluded that in its enlistment of children for active combat roles, the Islamic State group is perpetrating abuses and war crimes on a massive scale “in a systematic and organized manner.”
The group “prioritizes children as a vehicle for ensuring long-term loyalty, adherence to their ideology and a cadre of devoted fighters that will see violence as a way of life,” it said in a recent report.
The panel of experts, known as the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, conducted more than 300 interviews with people who fled or are living in Islamic State-controlled areas, and examined video and photographic evidence.
The use of children in conflict is not new. In the Syrian civil war, the Free Syrian Army and Nusra Front rebel groups also recruit children, said Leila Zerrougui, the U.N. secretary-general’s special representative for children and armed conflict.
But no other group comes close to the Islamic State in its use of children. And the effect is that much greater because the Islamic State commands large areas in which the militants inculcate the children with their radical interpretation of Shariah law.
“What is new is that ISIS seems to be quite transparent and vocal about their intention and their practice of recruiting children,” said Laurent Chapuis, UNICEF regional child protection adviser for the Middle East and North Africa, using an alternate acronym for the group.
She said some children join voluntarily but others are targeted. “They are abducting children and forcing them to join, they are brainwashing children and indoctrinating them to join their group. All the tools used to attract and recruit children are used by this group,” she said.
