SANLIURFA, Turkey — The children were each given a doll and a sword. Then they were lined up, more than 120 of them, and given their next lesson by their Islamic State group instructors: Behead the doll.
A 14-year-old — in the line of abducted boys from Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority — said at first he couldn’t cut it right. He chopped once, twice, three times.
“Then they taught me how to hold the sword, and they told me how to hit. They told me it was the head of the infidels,” the boy, renamed Yahya by his Islamic State terrorist captors, recalled in a recent interview with The Associated Press in northern Iraq, where he fled after escaping the group’s training camp.
When Islamic State terrorists overran Yazidi towns and villages in northern Iraq last year, they butchered older men. Many of the women and girls they captured were given to group loyalists as sex slaves. But dozens of young Yazidi boys such as Yahya had a different fate: The group sought to re-educate them. They forced them to convert to Islam from their ancient faith and then tried to turn them into jihadi terrorist fighters.
It is part of a concerted effort by the terrorists to build a new generation of militants, according to a series of AP interviews with residents who fled or still live under the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The group is recruiting teens and children, using cash, gifts, intimidation and brainwashing. As a result, children have been plunged into the group’s atrocities. Young boys have been turned into executioners, shooting captives in the head in videos issued by the group. For the first time, a recent video showed a child involved in a beheading: a boy who appeared younger than 13 decapitating a Syrian army captain. Kids have also been used as suicide bombers.
In schools and mosques, the terrorists infuse children with their terrorist doctrine, often turning them against their own parents. Fighters in the street befriend children with toys. Training camps for children churn out the Ashbal, Arabic for “lion cubs,” young fighters for the “caliphate” that the Islamic State has declared across the regions its controls. The caliphate is a historic form of Islamic rule that the group claims to be reviving, although the vast majority of Muslims reject its claim.
“They are planting extremism and terrorism in young people’s minds,” said Abu Hafs Naqshabandi, a Syrian sheikh in the Turkish city of Sanliurfa, where he runs religion classes for refugees to counter Islamic State ideology. “I am terribly worried about future generations.”
The indoctrination mainly targets the Sunni Muslim children living under Islamic State rule. But the abduction of the Yazidis, whom Islamic State considers heretics ripe for slaughter, shows how the group sought even to take another community’s youths, erase its past and replace it with Islamic radicalism.
The camp where Yahya and other Yazidi boys were taken was the Farouq Institute for Cubs in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which serves as the caliphate’s de facto capital. The boys were given Muslim Arabic names to replace their Kurdish-language names. Yahya asked that the AP not use his real name because of fears of retaliation against himself or his family.
Yahya, his little brother, their mother and hundreds of Yazidis were captured when the terrorists overran the town of Sulagh in northern Iraq last year. They were taken to Syria, where the brothers were separated from their mother and put in the Farouq camp, along with other Yazidi boys ages 8 to 15, Yahya told the AP.
He spent nearly five months there, undergoing eight to 10 hours a day of training, including running, exercising, weapons training and studying the Koran. The boys hit one another in some exercises, and Yahya said he punched his 10-year-old brother, knocking out his tooth.
“I was forced to do that. (The trainer) said that if I didn’t do it, he’d shoot me,” he said. “They … told us it would make us tougher. They beat us everywhere with their fists.”
In an online Islamic State video of the Farouq camp, boys in camouflage do calisthenics. Some repeat back religious interpretation texts they have memorized justifying the killing of prisoners and infidels. A terrorist sitting with a line of boys says they have studied the principles of jihad “so that in the coming days, God Almighty can put them in the front lines to battle the infidels.”
