The Sunday Times –
Maryam, a former Isis captive, with her five-year-old son Hassan, who has been traumatised by their time with an Isis commander. He now barely speaks, clinging to his mother or staring into space, by John Beck
By the time he was 11, Ahmed could use an AK-47, move like a soldier in battle and — most importantly — build a suicide vest that could make him a martyr.
In the Isis training camp where the Yazidi boy spent two months, he was taught the only path to glory was to maim, kill and die in the name of the caliphate.
Ahmed never believed it. Sitting on the floor of the two-room concrete shelter in northern Iraq where his family have lived since escaping from the Islamist militants a year ago, the former child soldier, now 12, stared straight ahead as he described how Isis had tried to indoctrinate him to kill and be killed.
“They told us our families were infidels and that they would teach us how to get to paradise,” he said, voice clear but thin as he crossed his skinny legs in the sweltering heat. “But they were not telling the truth.”
Ahmed is one of hundreds of children that Isis has attempted to turn into a new generation of jihadists.
As the group’s strongholds in Iraq and Syria face a sustained military assault, it is increasingly resorting to child soldiers and suicide bombers. Only a handful such as Ahmed have survived to tell their story.
It was in August 2014 when Isis invaded Ahmed’s home town of Sinjar, northern Iraq, that he and his family, who are Yazidis — a non-Muslim ethnic group considered by the Islamists to be devil worshippers — were brought by militants to the Syrian city of Raqqa.
Hako, Ahmed’s father, escaped but other members of the family were taken to the slave market. The boy, his mother, Sara, and younger siblings were bought by an Egyptian militant living in al-Mayadin, about 100 miles southeast of Raqqa. Others ended up elsewhere.
Each morning a bus would come and take Ahmed and the other Yazidi boys to a nearby camp where they would be forced to pray, chant religious slogans and read from the Koran. Anyone speaking their native Kurdish would be savagely beaten.
“They told us Arabic was the language of the prophet,” Ahmed said last week, brown eyes soft under his neatly combed hair. “We told them we didn’t know how to pray, and they said they would teach us.”
Fighters from Lebanon, India and Iraq taught the 150 boys at the camp — almost all of whom were Yazidis aged between 10 and 15 — how to murder in the name of the caliphate.
Using each other as models, the militants demonstrated the best knife-handling technique when carrying out a beheading and where to place a gun to kill. The boys began to copy them.
“They taught us how to use weapons and how to kill the infidels and protect the state,” Ahmed said. “They said that when our training was finished we would be sent to the front line.”
Often they were told by their instructors of the great honour bestowed on suicide bombers in heaven. They spent hours learning to construct and detonate suicide belts.
The brainwashing worked: some of the children yearned to be martyrs.
Others, such as Ahmed, were terrified: “Sometimes I was scared but when we spoke to them they said: ‘Don’t worry, you’ll go to heaven.’ ”
After a few months of training, the time had come for one of his neighbours from Sinjar. The boy, who was 10, was strapped with explosives and sent to the front line.
Ahmed later saw a video that showed him detonating his suicide vest amid fighting in Iraq. “They forced him to do it,” Ahmed said. “He never wanted to.”
In A sweltering shanty town a dozen miles to the west of Ahmed’s home, Maryam — herself a former Isis captive — was cradling her five-year-old son, Hassan.
The child was freed along with his mother in late 2014 when the wife of an Isis militant took pity on them and helped them escape. They had spent four months living in Syria with a Saudi Isis emir — commander — who had bought them at a market. Their room was stuffed with guns and suicide vests.
“Every day the emir would take Hassan with him,” said Maryam, stroking the boy’s head as he lay almost unresponsive in her lap. “He would teach Hassan to hit me and other people. Once, he took a dagger and tried to stab me in the back.”
Hassan, then aged three, quickly began to forget Kurdish and instead answer his mother in Arabic. Everything would drive him into a state of unrestrained fury.
“Whatever the emir did, he copied,” said Maryam, wiping her eyes with the edge of her black scarf.
“He would shout at me to go away and make signs with his fingers like he was shooting me.
We were only there for a few months but he really started to love the emir. When we were escaping he was asking: ‘Why are we going? It’s nice here.’ ”
Hassan now barely speaks; instead he clings constantly to his mother as his eyes stare blindly into space. The only time he reacts is when Maryam asks him to show us what the emir taught him.
Smiling awkwardly, he pulls his finger under his chin in a throat-slitting gesture, then gets down on his hands and knees to show how he prayed.
Bahaa Ilyas, a logistics officer at Samaritan’s Purse, a charity that helps children who have returned from Isis captivity, said trauma is common among those liberated.
“The boys have been taught to sing songs and repeat Koranic verses. They hit the other children and call their family kafir [unbeliever]. The girls keep to themselves.”
Many of the children, Ilyas said, have cigarette burns all over their bodies.
“They’re often taken from their mothers, who are then enslaved,” he said. “It’s easier to indoctrinate them if they’re away from their family.”
Ahmed owes his freedom to his father, who after almost a year scraped together £40,000 to buy back 10 of the 24 members of his extended family in Isis captivity.
Ahmed and his mother were among them but the couple have other sons and daughters who remain captives. Hako does not have enough money to buy them back, although the family remains hopeful they will all be reunited eventually.
As the territory controlled by Isis shrinks under attack from the Kurds, Iraqi militias and western air forces, it has become easier to secure the freedom of slaves kept by the group’s commanders and their cronies.
Hard-up Isis fighters are looking to raise cash and are increasingly likely to sell slaves back to their families for extortionate sums.
These trades are conducted with a great deal of subterfuge and frequently behind the back of the Islamists’ leaders.
Once a deal is made, the slaves must often make their way out of Isis territory through underground networks. Others manage to get away in the confusion of fighting.
However, families still face the agony of not knowing if their relatives will return.
Maryam is caught in just such a plight. More than six months ago she received a video message on her phone that shook her to her core.
It showed her oldest son, now 13, dressed in full Isis uniform, standing alone in a field and reading from a phone.
“They are offering me for sale for $28,000 [£21,000],” he said tonelessly. “Pay it and I’ll come back.”
Maryam borrowed from everyone she knew but could not raise anywhere near the amount needed. Soon, the sellers broke off all contact.
“Isis are always buying people and selling them at a higher price,” she said. “But I just don’t have the money. Two of my daughters have been taken by Isis, too. I haven’t heard from them.
“I don’t know where they are. I think about my children all the time and I want them to come back, but I can’t do it.”
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By Louise Callaghan, from Dohuk, Iraq.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/my-boy-3-was-brainwashed-to-kill-for-isis-rbj3t8wkk
