Past and present, Muslim militants continue relying on the same inhumane tactics to terrorize “infidels.” The devastating effects of one of these occurred last August in Turkey: a child “recruited” by the Islamic State blew himself up in a suicide attack that left at least 51 people — mostly fellow children — dead.
This child was one of countless, nameless, faceless children seized, beat, and indoctrinated in Islam, until they become willing “martyrs” and executioners. Known as the “cubs of the caliphate,” they are graduates from “schools [established by ISIS] to prepare hundreds of children and teenagers to conduct suicide attacks.” The Islamic State is fond of showcasing these abducted children turned criminals.
A few days ago, it posted a video of these “cubs,” most who appear to be about 10 years of age, walking around an abandoned amusement park, where they savagely execute hostages tied to rides. One child, reportedly only four years old, shoots five rounds into a tied up victim while screaming “Allahu Akbar!” (see image above). Another little boy slits the throat of his victim next to a kiddie train before planting the knife in his back. Last November, ISIS posted another video of four children — one Russian, one Uzbek, and two Iraqis — executing civilians.
One Christian clergyman explained the Islamic State’s strategy: “They dislocate the families, they take the newborn babies, and they put them in Islamist families,” where they are indoctrinated in jihad, or what is called in the West, “terrorist activities.”
Children who’ve managed to escape ISIS say they were repeatedly beat and fed “endless propaganda,” including that they must kill their non-Muslim parents: “We weren’t allowed to cry but I would think about my mother, think about her worrying about me and I’d try and cry quietly,” one little boy said.
Seizing and indoctrinating children for the jihad is hardly limited to ISIS. Over the last three years, Boko Haram, the Islamic jihadi group terrorizing Nigeria, has kidnapped, enslaved, beat and indoctrinated more than 10,000 boys — some as young as 5 years of age, and many from Christian backgrounds — into becoming jihadis/terrorists.
“They told us, ‘It’s all right for you to kill and slaughter even your parents,’” said a former captive who witnessed a beheading on the day he was enslaved. Other boys held down the victim and explained: “This is what you have to do to get to heaven.”
Girls were kept in a separate camp and raped, often by captive boys, as a way to show the latter the boons of becoming warriors for Allah (the deity that permits his slaves to enslave and rape “infidel” women). An escaped girl, Rachel, now 13 and pregnant by rape, told of how dozens of boys from her village tied up a kidnapped man and beheaded him. They told the younger children watching not to “have feelings about it.” “If you go there [Boko Haram training camps], you can see 12-year-olds talking about burning down a village,” said another escaped girl, adding “They have converted.”
A boy, now 10, served as babysitter for infants and toddlers kidnapped or conceived by rape: “The children, none older than 4, watched jihadist propaganda videos and rehearsed a game called ‘suicide bomber’ where they ripped open sacks of sand strapped to their torsos.”
These Nigerian children, some as young as 6, have been used to terrorize neighboring Cameroon, a Christian majority nation. During a jihadi raid, more than 100 screaming boys suddenly appeared—barefoot, unarmed, or swinging only machetes—and ran toward a military unit which gunned them down. As Col. Didier Badjeck explained, “It’s better to kill a boy than have 1,000 victims. It’s causing us problems with international organizations, but they’re not on the front lines. We are.”
Another report, published just days ago, tells of more experiences from abducted boys and girls, and how Boko Haram showed the former to “have fun” with the latter, including by “learning to subdue a struggling victim during sexual assault.” One escaped 16-year-old girl said, “I was raped almost on a daily basis by different men. When they became fed-up with me, they asked the little boy, who has often watched them do it, to take over.”
But it’s not just ISIS and Boko Haram who seize, enslave, beat and indoctrinate boys for jihad (and girls to “make it up” to the boys). This practice is also taking place in Yemen, Somalia and even “moderate” Mali. Indeed, a cursory Internet search reveals the extent of this phenomenon.
In 2012, 300 Christian children were abducted and forcibly converted to Islam in Bangladesh. After convincing impoverished Christian families in Bangladesh to spend what little money they had to send their children to study at supposed “mission hostels,” Muslim conmen would “pocket the money” and “sell the children to Islamic schools elsewhere in the country ‘where imams force them to abjure Christianity.’” The children are then instructed in Islam and beaten. After being fully indoctrinated, the once Christian children are asked if they are “ready to give their lives for Islam,” presumably by becoming jihadi suicide-bombers.
Why are Islamic jihad groups resorting to this tactic of enslaving and indoctrinating children into becoming jihadis? Most Western analysts believe this is a reflection of weakened, desperate groups: “The growing trend for ISIS to use child soldiers as suicide bombers, particularly in Iraq, has been suggested as a sign of how stretched their resources are in the region,” noted one report.
Or it could suggest that ISIS, Boko Haram, etc., are simply following another page of the jihadi playbook. For over a millennium, Muslim caliphates specialized in seizing and enslaving tens if not hundreds of thousands of young non-Muslim boys, converting them to Islam, and then beating, indoctrinating, and training them into becoming jihadis extraordinaire.
The most famous of these were the Ottoman Empire’s janissaries — Christian boys who were seized from their homes, converted to and indoctrinated in Islam and jihad, and then unleashed on their former families. As the author of Balkan Wars explains, “Despite their Christian upbringing, they became fanatical Muslims and earnestly maintained their faith as warriors of Islam. This cruel practice of what today can be defined as the ‘brain cleansing’ of the Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire is perhaps the most inhuman Turkish legacy.”
That Turkey is now suffering from the effects of this system — such as when a child suicide bomber killed 51 people in the name of jihad — may be called “ironic.”
Western analysts would not be oblivious to this “new” jihadi tactic — optimistically portraying the reliance on children as proof that jihadi groups have “stretched their resources” — if they had Islamic studies departments that actually disseminated facts instead of pro-Islamic myths and propaganda. As with all unsavory aspects of Islamic history, the institution of child slave soldiers has been thoroughly whitewashed. Although young, terrified boys were seized from the clutches of their devastated parents, the academic narrative is that poor Christian families were somewhat happy to see their boys taken to the caliphate where they would have a “bright future” as “soldiers and statesmen.”
The price of the modern West’s inability to comprehend Islam’s medieval tactics is not just ignorance concerning the nature of the enemy, but ignorance concerning his victims as well — in this case, countless, nameless children. As Mausi Segun, a human rights activist discussing the plight of Boko Haram’s child jihadis, put it: “There’s almost an entire generation of boys missing. My guess is that a large majority of them will die [as forced jihadis] in the conflict.” And they will die completely unknown in the West — just another victim group to be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness, lest Islam’s reputation be besmirched.

Lesley says
And this is why I am so enraged to hear leaders of the Catholic Church talking about”dialogue” and “peace.” There is no peace to be made with the devil.
Lesley says
Matthew 19:14 But Yeshua said to them, “Let the children come to me and do not forbid them, for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.”
-Aramaic Bible in Plain English
The Catholic Church should join with the Orthodox and clamor for the destruction of Islam, and offer comfort for those escaping oppression.
The crucial difference is that Islam should not be permitted to come to our shores and practiced. Islam is a poison that kills the host who harbors it.
This is much more compassionate than pretending Islam is a religion of peace.
girlgirl says
And this is why the “cubs of the caliphate” already look suicidal at only 8 years of age.
Angemon says
More so with Erdogan seemingly hellbent on re-islamizing Turkey and bringing back the Ottoman Empire.
Peggy says
It’s not as though there is no history of Islam to be learned from. Centuries of brutal oppression, murder, forced conversions and enslaving obviously wasn’t enough for people to take note.
Could this be because history is almost not taught any more? I know that at least in Australia, history is not a subject that many kids even think about but “safe schools” is the priority. We have given our kids to the state and not questioned the curriculum. More social engineering classes are put in and what is really important is left out.
Even English isn’t important enough so our kids enter universities not knowing how to spell.
What makes it even worse is that people just weren’t willing to listen to the ones who were trying to teach history to them. How many voices were dismissed and are still being dismissed?
This is the result of willing ignorance.
Children were always soldiers in Islam but to kill them is considered genocide. What do we do when we are confronted with a child determined to kill us?
Balkans is the best school of history. Everyone should learn what happened there because then they will be able to see that it’s repeating not only in the Balkans but all over Europe.
reyol says
It is well that Raymond Ibrahim mentions the Jannisaries. A lot of people have romanticized them saying that they were volunteers going to the Ottoman empire for better opportunities and that they were sincere converts to Islam. The ISIS have merely revived the forced enslavement and conversion of Christian children is this is what it looks like. It is not a pretty picture.
LB says
Trust me, the once-conquered European people of Ottoman Empire will NEVER forget or attempt to whitewash what monstrosities the muslims committed during their tyranny. I’m from the Balkans, so I’m speaking from first hand experience. Being a Christian under muslim rule is the absolute worst life one could have, and it is all described in detail in our elementary school history books. I’ll just give you an example of “muslim baseball” at that time — a game similar to today’s baseball in a lot of ways, except the ball was an unborn baby freshly ripped from its mother’s stomach and the bat was a scimitar.
The only ones in the West shocked by this are the ones who’ve never experienced muslim rule in the past and whose history books conveniently “left out” the part about muslim bloody conquests. And not only is there no mention of it, but it is even described as the Golden Age of technology, prosperity and social and cultural advancement (!!!) — which couldn’t be any further from the truth!
gravenimage says
Raymond Ibrahim: Enslaved, Tortured, and Sacrificed: Islam’s Child Soldiers Return
………………………..
Yes–either Jihadists abusing their own children and turning them into monsters, or kidnapped Jannisaries. An ugly, ugly Islamic history of this.
dumbledoresarmy says
Islam. A cult of soul-killing. Murdering souls. Rape, murder, murder, rape, robbery, rape, murder, rape, robbery…. Islam, unloosing and feeding and revelling in everything that is basest in the human psyche.
They snatch and program children, because the whole aim of Islam is to destroy empathy and turn the person into a zombie-like killer or (if female) breeder. Get a child young, break their soul to bits, program them with the cult.
It’s abominable.
Pol Pot did much the same thing, brutalising and programming children to become fiendish killers and torturers and rapists; and so did Chairman Mao. But not on anywhere the same scale, and for so long, as Islam has done and is doing.
Islamia delenda est.