Terrorists,
Victims, or Both? The Children of ISIS Return
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
November 20, 2017
|
|
|
|
Share:  
|
  Be the
first of your friends to like this.
 They learn to count
by attending public lashings. By the age of 9, they know how to use a gun,
make a bomb, and torture prisoners. They have been raised to know that
Allah hates the infidel, and rewards those who kill unbelievers, the men
and women living in the West. They are the children of ISIS. And now Europe
prepares for their arrival.
With the fall of the Islamic State, countries across the globe
anticipate the return of so-called "foreign fighters," those who
joined ISIS and its jihad from outside its strongholds in Syria and Iraq – about 6,000 of them from Europe, America, Australia,
and elsewhere in the West, according to 2015 figures. And among them are an
unknown number of young children, some of whom traveled there with their
parents, others who were born there.
Because the Islamic State prohibits birth control, and because birth
certificates issued there are not recognized in the rest of the world, it
is impossible to know how many children might now try to enter European and
other countries, and whether they are legitimate citizens by birth. The
first task, then, will be for governments to do DNA testing to ensure that
these children are in fact the progeny of the men and women who travel with
them. Only then will the children be allowed entry.
This, however, is the easy part. The bigger question is, what happens
next?
No one seems to know. Across Europe, officials and child care workers
debate the best options for handling children who have been traumatized by
war, children who may have committed acts of war themselves. Should they be
punished as hardened terrorists, or counseled, as the victims of trauma?
These are children who have witnessed beheadings, and have even taken part in them. They have watched men and women
die, and they have killed them. Their friends may have blown themselves up, child suicide bombers for Allah.
Girls may have been raped; in the Caliphate, 9-year-old girls are
considered ready to marry, and can therefore be forced into marriages to
much older men.
How difficult their transition will be can be found even in their
drawings and their dreams, as reporters for RTL France discovered. One child RTL interviewed described one of
his drawings: "someone who slaughters a Daesh [Islamic State] man, but
also an Islamic State fighter who beheads someone and then crucifies him. A
helicopter with the Syrian flag flies over the war scene." The boy
then added, "I dream of decapitated people."
Hence many Europeans argue that most, if not all, of these young
children are terrorists. Others insist they are merely victims. In truth,
like other child soldiers, they essentially are both. But unlike other
child soldiers, they enter a world that they have been trained to see as
not as home, but as their enemy. They are the injured animals in the wild,
needing care and nurturing, but dangerous and capable of attack.
Most of the adults returning from the Islamic State to Western countries
are arrested at the border, leaving many of the children without a parent
who can provide the nurturing or discipline they need. Government officials
hope extended family members will take in these children.
But what if nobody is willing? Already, they have been taught that
Westerners are the embodiment of evil. Now Western adults have taken away
their mothers, their fathers, leaving them abandoned.
Psychiatrists generally agree that the sense of rejection this induces can
increase a child's likelihood of aggression. Moreover, according to a Dutch
government report "these minors have undergone a program of
deliberate desensitization to atrocities.... As a result, [they] may be
more willing to engage in violence."
One Belgian mother who returned from Syria with her child told RTL France: "These children are no longer
children. They have lost their innocence. In their eyes, they have only
hate."
Yet Omar Ramadan, director of the Dutch Radicalization Awareness Network
(RAN), and a consultant to the European Commission, cautioned in a recent
e-mail, "There is no one-size-fits-all solution to this complex issue.
We have to be flexible and adapt our approach depending on the
situation." While some of these children may have committed terrorist
acts, others simply were born to parents who were members of ISIS
themselves. In those cases, he said, "we must acknowledge that
children cannot be held accountable for the crimes of their parents."
While some, like Daniel Koehler, a family counselor in Stuttgart who
serves on the George Washington University Program on Extremism, call for gentle treatment of these youth through social
work interventions and deradicalization programs, others, such as Belgian
Minister of Justice Koen Geens, view
them as a danger to be dealt with forcefully by law. "Minors who
decided on their own to fight in Syria and Iraq will be treated as terror
suspects on their return," he told the Belgian press. "Children
who went with their mothers and are not radicalized will be seen as minors
in danger." But 60 percent of the Belgian children in the Caliphate
were born there. And these, he said, represent a danger to the state,
"for they have been indoctrinated with the ISIS doctrine."
But the parents, Ramadan told Dutch NOS TV, are not capable of properly raising
these children. That means the Dutch government should intervene, even if
the parents are not imprisoned. Children should then be placed in therapy
and deradicalization programs as needed, thereby potentially heading off
their further radicalization. Such a solution, he warned, would neither be
easy nor foolproof. "But is there an alternative?" he said.
"Not really."
Some question whether it will succeed at all. A recent report
from the Soufan
Center, which advises governments on intelligence and security issues,
suggests serious challenges, particularly in the case of
"rehabilitation and reintegration" programs, since "most
returnees were never integrated in the first place... and the majority of
early efforts have stuttered or come to a halt." Working with these
children is likely to run into similar, if not more difficult challenges:
many do not speak the language of their parents' home countries. According
to the values with which they have been raised, women walking the streets
without a full veil must face beatings.
Moreover, none of this addresses the future potential threat of children
who do not return (or enter) through official channels, or who may try to
reach Europe later, once the focus has waned and governments are no longer
as attentive. "Not arranging the return and re-socialization of
[these] kids now may mean that they return unnoticed in due time,"
Ramadan warned. He fears that there will be no way to monitor and
deradicalize them once they do. They ultimately could forge the greatest
terror threat Europe has ever faced.
Consequently, "this is something that needs to be addressed now,
immediately," Ramadan said. But the West seems only to be stumbling
through the dark. It is, after all, a situation we have never seen before.
There are no templates. There is no history. We can only search for answers
somewhere in a place between compassion and fear, lost in the haze of all
we do not know. And time is running out.
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in
the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New
York and the Netherlands. Follow her at @radicalstates.
Related Topics: Abigail
R. Esman, ISIS,
foreign
fighters, treatment
vs. punishment, European
terror threats, child
fighters, psychological
trauma, Omar
Ramadan, Dutch
Radicalization Awareness Network, Daniel
Koehler, Koen
Geens
|
Print
Send
RSS
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment