Ennobling Child Abuse

"Everyone at NATO headquarters is worried about the use of children by ISIS."
"If we [Canada] send boots on the ground, we're going to see this face to face."
Shelley Whitman, executive director, Romeo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, Halifax

For terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and now the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham, it's a natural fit. Boys adore playing war games. Since they're just boys and they'll play their games of pretend-war under any and all circumstances, why not capitalize on it? Since they're boys they hardly recognize the brutality of war, they just love the fidelity of actions emulating those of their heroes; anyone on the winning side of a noisy, bumptiously violent conflict.

For some utterly peculiar reason no doubt hearking back to a brutalized, pre-civilization era, some parents consider it just too cute to pass up the opportunity to dress their infants in pint-sized military uniforms. To do so seems to melt their parental hearts with love. And placing a faux pistol in a child's hands, delights the child as well as his proud parents. Then photographs are taken and treasured, and the child matures in an atmosphere that sees violent conflict as perfectly natural and admirable.

Such terrorist groups are infamous within civilized society as using the bravado and incomprehension of the young to persuade them that their duty lies in aspiring to sacrifice themselves for a higher calling than merely living out ordinary lives. To become a hero, a shaheed, a martyr to the cause and in so doing pleasing the Almighty, and causing the family name to become celebrated in the annals of heroic deeds by a teen with a suicide belt succeeding in taking other lives along with his own.

A child wearing military fatigues and holding a mock weapon takes part in a rally gathering supporters of the Hamas Islamist movement, three days after a deal between Israel and Hamas over the 50-day war, Aug. 29, 2014 in the West Bank city of Nablus. Thousands of militants paraded in the besieged Gaza Strip, defiantly saying they would re-arm as prospects of a final deal on a long-term Israel-Hamas truce looked shaky. (Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images)

That ISIS has gone one step beyond this, in grooming young children reputed to be in the range of twelve and thirteen as junior fighters in the battle to establish and enlarge their caliphate, shouldn't be surprising. That children have been encouraged to hold up the severed heads of 'enemies' who have been beheaded, as a jubilant symbol of the fearlessness and righteousness of Islamofascism's battle against its detractors, where anyone qualifies who refuses to submit to Islam, goes beyond loathsome.

But there are always brave new parameters to be crossed and tried, and the introduction of a ten-year-old boy as a 'Cub' of ISIS alongside his 'Lion' of a father engaged in battle against the enemies of the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham reveals the shallowness of the humanity of the group that extolls the virtues of crucifixions and beheadings as a cure for the hapless who refuse to acknowledge the celebration befitting the warrior-culture of ISIS.

Twitter   A Twitter account linked to the Islamic State posted this photo of a boy said to have been killed fighting for ISIS in Syria.

A United Nations report on Iraq revealed that children conduct patrols for ISIS, arrest and guard prisoners. They carry weapons, and are used as a blood-bank to help injured fighters. Child soldiers with ISIS, according to the UN, tend to be as young as 12 and 13 years. ISIS propaganda photographs highlight children in "uniform and parading alongside adults being frequently posted on social media."