Did the two boys who were recently sent by the Islamic group ISIS to kill Shiite believers in Kirkuk actually have a choice? Strapped in their suicide vests, they were sent to kill those they were told were kaffirs, or unbelievers.
One of them did, the other one was caught, which led to dramatic scenes that captured the world’s attention.
Two policemen holding the arms of a crying boy, were preventing him from pulling the thread visibly hanging from the belt he wore under his Barcelona T-shirt.
His scared, teary face has been glued to the back of my eyes for days, triggering questions like: was he more scared of the police than of his minders who would be angry that he botched his task? Would he really have pulled the trigger, had the police released his arms?
I have spoken to kids like him, who were lucky enough to get out in time. They had been in the ISIS schools and training camps for months, but were rescued through Yezidi networks operating from the Kurdistan Region.
These were kidnapped Yezidis, some of whom had been under daily indoctrination for nine months and told me they would have done anything the ISIS teachers told them to do, out of fear of punishment.
From day one, ISIS had put the fear into them, beating and bullying them into not only learning the Quran by heart but also praying and using guns. Mistakes led to beatings, and the boys were led to believe they could even get killed for it.
They had practiced walking outside with a suicide belt strapped around their waist, and not knowing it contained no explosives they had pulled the trigger.
Yes, they would have done that again, they said, because a refusal would get them killed just as the mission would. There was no way they could win.
With ISIS not only loosing over half of its territories in Iraq, but also as many as 45,000 men in battle in the past two years and their fighters defecting by the dozens, the group has started using the youth it has trained in the past two years.
Not only for suicide missions – recently in the Turkish city of Gaziantep and in March at a youth football match in the South of Iraq – but even more on the front lines.
Some sources say that over half of the ISIS soldiers now are boys of under eighteen, and from the pictures the group posts it is clear that many driving trucks loaded with explosives towards the Peshmerga at the front lines are teenagers.
ISIS called them the Lion Cubs, and they were seen as the future generation for the Caliphate. Trained to follow orders, they were supposed to be the most loyal part of the new Islamic state.
That ISIS uses them now, shows the desperation of the leadership, that sees the state crumble and is looking for ways to stem the haemorrhaging.
They are trying to use them for propaganda, trying to scare us with this cruel young generation, for instance with the more recent video of five kids shooting and executing five prisoners.
Yet by using the probably thousands of trained and indoctrinated youths – kids of their fighters, locals and kidnapped Yezidi boys – ISIS is at the same time killing its own future.
The use of these youngsters – which is against international law – brings up the question if these kids are fighting, killing and dying from their own free will.
When I talked to the Yezidi boys, I found that the prospect of the Paradise hardly played a role in their consent to conduct a mission, while that is a major factor for most grown up recruits.
Yet the idea that everybody who is not a Muslim, is an unbeliever and should be killed, had been beaten into them. For them, the most important trigger is the fear, that disobeying orders will be punished.
Most young kids cannot make the intellectual exercise of analyzing what is happening to them.
Grown-ups are giving them orders, and have placed them in an environment where there is no space for questioning those, let alone refusing.
If the boys felt uneasy with the orders, they would never admit, the Yezidi boys told me. And they, with their background outside the Islam, had the best chance to rebel – and if they did it was mainly in their heads and hearts for fear of punishment when speaking out.
But boys that have been brought up in the radical Islam ISIS adheres to, have little incentive to rebel.
ISIS removed their capabilities to think outside the limits offered to them. The indoctrination of kids is easier, because they are like a blank computer disk that is ready to be filled.
Which makes the boys with the suicide vests in Kirkuk not only perpetrators, but just as much victims. Driven by fear and controlled by their peers, they simply had no choice. It was kill, or be killed.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
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