Mexican Cartels' War on Farming Villages

"We find ourselves under siege. This is a public cry for help by a community that's been cornered."
"They've been trying to get assistance by federal and state government, unsuccessfully, so they're trying to escalate the language to try to negotiate and get help."
Falko Ernst, analyst, International Crisis Group 

"I don't know how they can get the government's attention aside by doing these sorts of things -- or by dying, and even that will only get the authorities' attention for a few days."
Chris Kyle, anthropologist, University of Alabama, Birmingham

Miguel Toribio, 11, puts a pistol belonging to his father into his belt, before demonstrating newly learnt skills from military-style weapons training, to a Reuters journalist in Ayahualtempa, Mexico, February 3, 2020.   REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini

The children wear uniforms with jackets emblazoned with "Community Police". They mask their faces with handkerchiefs. Thirteen-year-old Alex spoke of the training he received, how good it made him feel. He could feel the weight of the gun, fully loaded with ammunition. "There was no fear in his eyes. That's how I knew he was ready", his father Santos Martinez said. "I'm preparing to defend my village", Alex added.

Mexico's enormous problem with heroin production and drug cartels and gang killings is legendary. Not so well known is the plight of remote villages in areas where the drug gangs control everything, posing an existential threat to villagers' safety, controlling their comings and goings, exacting vengeance on those they believe betray them, and the ongoing siege of the villages leading to well-founded fears for the lives of village children.

Fathers of families see little option but to allow their children to be involved in military-type training, learning how to handle themselves in dangerous situations, arming them with deadly weapons to enable them to self-protect should/when the occasion arises. Venturing outside her community, a 56-year-old villager, a grandmother, was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by cartel members, a warning to others to remain in their villages, silent, obedient.

The ten-year-old granddaughter of the murdered woman was given her father's permission to obtain training. "They do this to prepare themselves to defend the family, their siblings and defend the village", corn farmer Sanchez Luna explained of the "community police" his rugged region was required to form in self-defence. Arms training is offered to school-age children, seen as a matter of forced necessity.

Children walk in a single file, holding toy and real guns, as they demonstrate newly learnt skills from military-style weapons training, to a Reuters journalist, in Ayahualtempa, Mexico, February 3, 2020. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini

Children as young as six years of age are seen carrying guns, demonstrating their military manoeuvres with ease. "They are killing children. We have to arm children", said 25-year-old Isabel Marquez, mother of two. The Indigenous community elders near the city of Chilapa add that young children would not be allowed to fight cartel gunmen; the situation is being used to attract help from far-off officials in Mexico City.

Last month suspected Los Ardillos Cartel members ambushed and killed ten area musicians after they had exited the territory their self-defence militias guard. Their bodies were  later found charred. The cartel dominates Guerrero state, their specialty the trafficking of heroin. A number of murders in the area preceded the attack on the musicians. One murder was a beheading, frightening the 6,500 residents whose land sits surrounded by poppy-growing farmland.

In Mexico, constant violence led by heroin-trafficking cartels threatens the population. President Manuel Andres Lopez Obrador has focused on the method, not the message: Those who arm children "should be ashamed of themselves", he pronounced, denouncing the use of children to grab the attention of an inattentive government. It worked. The government noticed."Giving children weapons and taking videos is an act of cruelty", he added and doesn't seem ashamed that its citizens must resort to such methods.

A community police agent poses for a photo as he guards a check point in Ayahualtempa, Mexico, January 30, 2020. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini

Residents, for seemingly good reasons, are suspicious of regional authorities, much less the few local police in their villages. They accuse them of being in league with the Los Ardillos cartel, whose presence forces their children to stop formal education at age twelve, since the middle schools are located in territory the cartel controls.So, from that age forward, the boys become men, carrying weapons as part of their own local "police patrol".

"We are surrounded by the bad guys, so we have to prepare ourselves to defend our town and our families", said Louis 'Gustavo Morales, 13,  holding a 20-gauge shotgun. The self-defence militia is known as CRAC-PF. Last year they managed to repel a major attack by Los Ardillos, leaving residents in fear of the warning siren going off again.

Children with toy and real guns demonstrate newly learnt skills from military-style weapons training, to a Reuters journalist in Ayahualtempa, Mexico, February 3, 2020. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini

One Great Big Misunderstanding

"The event coincides with the International Day Against the Use of Child Soldiers Red Hand Day on February 12. This year also marks the 10th anniversary of the Dallaire Initiative’s partnership with Dalhousie University."
"[Omar Khadr and Ishmael Beah will] highlight their experience in conflict and why they are passionate about the protection of children."
Dalhousie University event promotional material

Omar Khadr, 2019  sentence was declared expired.Ian Kucerak/Postmedia

Omar Khadr, scion of Canada's al-Qaeda family of distinction succeeded in persuading sympathizers to his purported plight as a 'child-soldier' that he is innocent of the charges brought against him as an enemy combatant when he took part in an Islamist jihadi attack near Khost, Afghanistan, killing a U.S. Army medic, and injuring and causing blindness to a U.S. Special Forces soldier when he tossed a grenade during an ensuing firefight.

Now 33, back then nearing his 16th birthday, Khadr's claims of childhood negating responsibility for his actions resonates with many who are more than pleased to support his denial of a war crime in his claim that the confession he made to the killing of U.S. Sgt.Christopher Speer and the wounding of Special Forces member Layne Morris on the five charges laid against him was merely a ploy for his release from Guantanamo where he was being held, in the hope that he would be sent back to Canada where he obviously counted on special treatment.

And special treatment he got. From lawyers who were eager to take up the case of a child soldier grievously wounded in a firefight he had little option but to take part in, and a court system wedded to the concept of Canadian universality, equality and the upholding of his constitutional rights inherent in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, neglected in this unfortunate case where an innocent child was being prosecuted after having been subjected to imprisonment and torture.

Omar Khadr suffered grievous body wounds in that firefight where he now denies he took active part; he was just simply actively there with little recourse but to participate with the group his loyal Canadian father sent him to, so he could learn how a dedicated Islamist jihadi confronts, challenges and defeats the kuffars represented by the U.S. military. When he was found, injured and unconscious under rubble after the firefight it was U.S. army medics who tended to him and whose ministrations resulted in his escaping death.

The second featured speaker at the special event of protest against the use of child soldiers in honour of the Romeo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, Ishmael Beah, 39, formerly a child soldier in Sierra Leone, had an entirely different background experience. In his country of origin, as is done also in other African countries, the rebel Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone abducts and forces children to join its ranks and engage in combat.

Khadr senior was a notorious al-Qaeda supporter, personal friend of Osama bin Laden, and raised funds while living in Canada, among supporters of violent jihad to fund al-Qaeda. He and his wife, his daughter and his sons were all devout Islamists, devoted to jihad. Living in the West, in Canada, this family's children were raised in the nectar of hatred and violence. The family moved from Canada for the distinct purpose of ensuring their sons would be exposed to guerrilla warfare tactics and become skilled at manufacturing explosives.

Omar Khadr on his return to Canada, purportedly to serve out the remainder of his prison sentence where he could be close to his returned family, prepared to sue the Government of Canada for failing to represent his interests as a Canadian citizen. Somewhat like his mother and the rest of his family after his father's death in Pakistan hissing their ferocious contempt for Canada, but accepting Canadian social welfare and healthcare. He was given 'compensation' of $10.5 million on the basis of his 'rights' having been withheld.

"We respect the fact Mr. Khadr was interred for a decade in Guantanamo Bay, and the Canadian government has agreed to issue an apology and settle his claims."
"We also respect the fact you [lawyer] and Mr. Khadr’s other lawyers have invested substantial time and expense on Mr. Khadr’s behalf."
"However, Mr. Khadr’s actions, which led him to Guantanamo Bay, were the death of Christopher Speer, leaving Mrs. Speer a widow and [her two children] fatherless, and blinding Layne Morris in one eye."
"We ask Mr. Khadr [to] do the right thing and accept responsibility for his actions and the pain he caused the Speer family and Layne Morris."
U.S. attorney Donald Winder, Utah

Khadr was sued in a Utah court by Mr. Speer's window and children and Mr. Morris, ordered to pay his victims $134 million. Khadr effectively ignored the lawsuit. No money has been transferred to either Mrs. Speer nor Mr. Morris. Khadr did buy an Edmonton strip mall, presumably as an investment. No word whether he has invested any philanthropic donations to Senator Dallaire's child-soldier enterprise in support of his personal battle against child abuse about which he claims to be passionate.

Omar Khadr (right) speaks with his lawyer Dennis Edney in Edmonton on May 7, 2015. File photo by The Canadian Press

 

Lethally ISIL's Mistress of Recruits and Terror

"All the ISIL fighters have second wives. Junaid's wasn't a Yazidi or Christian slave like most of the others, though -- she was a local Muslim girl as he had requested."
Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently member

“The Crusaders think they win when they kill us. They don't we win.” (Tweet)

"Umm Hussain is respected. She was the reason ISIL was able to recruit a lot of Western girls to Raqqa; it's not easy to convince a Christian rock girl to become an extremist."
"They [recruits] are told lies and are shown fake pictures of massacres, which they say were carried out by Western countries against Muslims."
"By the time they leave [for Raqqa, Syria] they are completely brain-washed."
Syrian ISIL defector, Gaziantep, Turkey

Clearly, Sally Jones, an attractive, young single mother of two boys, living on welfare in Chatham, Britain, was bored with her life. She decided to look around online at prospects to enliven her life then studied who might conceivably benefit from her support as a terrorist-enabler. Thus began an online courtship with a 19-year-old talented hacker whose name was Junaid Hussain. Hussain invited his email partner to join him in Syria where he planned to travel, from Britain.

She did just that six months later, in 2013; leaving her older son, 18, in the United Kingdom, she packed up her nine-year-old and joined her distant lover to marry him in a small ceremony pleasing to Islam the day she arrived in Idlib, northern Syria. She converted to Islam, and converted her name from Jones to Sakinah Hussain. Her son Joe became Hamza.

Junaid Hussain, her former husband

Arriving in Raqqa, Sakinah Hussain settled into her new life in ISIL's capital city while her husband went off for jihadi training. She underwent a different kind of training, becoming fully conversant with the sharia and jihadism favoured by Islamic State. It took but several weeks for Hussain to marry a second wife, a 23-year-old Raqqa Syrian woman. By now well versed in Islamist sharia, the British Sally Jones was complacent with the new arrangement.

When Hussain was dispatched to Mosul last year to "install radar technology" she travelled with her husband. Who was considered one of ISIL's most professional hackers, a technologically skilled jihadist whom it was felt helped plan some of ISIL's most successful hacking attacks, along with online recruiting in the West; influencing jihadists abroad to carry out lone-wolf attacks in their home countries.

Hussain was killed in a targeted drone strike by the United States, in August of 2015 and following his death his first, British wife was placed in charge of training female recruits from Europe, a job she took seriously enough to be hugely successful. She was also instructed to lead the female wing of the Anwar al-Awlaki battalion, founded by Hussein, to attack the West.

Herself skilled, she teaches women the use of weapons, how to fight and carry out "suicide missions against Western targets".

British child 'Abu Abdullah Al-Britani' featured executing man in new ISIS video from Raqqa

She is also busy grooming her son, now eleven, as an ISIL tiger cub, an executioner for ISIL. Toward the end of August an ISIL propaganda video was released with young boys in uniform forming a death squad and shooting to death Kurdish prisoners. One of the boys was discerned as being of Western origin, and it was revealed that he could be the son of British jihadi Sally Jones who now uses the name UMM Hussain Britaniyah. Grooming him, the rumour is, to be the next "Jihadi John" executioner.

Three women were captured in France last week, accused of planning attacks, the women identified as members of an all-female cell, although their partners in the planned attack were two brothers. Their vehicle was found close to Notre Dame Cathedral, three full canisters of gas in the vehicle. One of the women arrested was discovered to be more involved in jihad than imagined. Sarah H. had been engaged to Larossi Abballa, the killer in Magnanville of two police officials. Betrothed as well to Adel Kermiche the jihadist who slit the throat during morning mass of an elderly French priest.

A woman is arrested in Boussy-Saint-Antoine south of Paris after a car was found containing gas cylinders near Notre Dame Cathedral.  (GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

Umm Hussain al-Britani is also popularly known as Mrs. Terror, who uses social media to crow about how wonderful life in the caliphate is for women, attracting dozens of female recruits to Islamic State. After her son turned 11 he was enrolled in the camp for boys under the age of 14 as a lion cub, taught in Arabic, English and French to absorb ISIL's sharia, and the use of weapons at training camps in Syria and Iraq.

This is the boy whom authorities believe to be the smiling child wearing army fatigues, holding a gun, standing over a kneeling prisoner, then shooting him in the head. Reportedly, the boy's grandparents recognized him in the video footage. A week later a posting on Umm Hussain al-Britani's Twitter account read: "By the way my son collects grenades now, not bugs. Alhamdulillah [praise God] for getting my beautiful boy to the Islamic State."

British Muslim convert Sally Jones -- Tim Stewart

Exploited, Threatened, Rejected

"As 'suicide' attacks involving children become commonplace, some communities are starting to see children as threats."
"Let us be clear: these children are victims, not perpetrators. Deceiving children and forcing them to carry out deadly acts has been one of the most horrific aspects of the violence in Nigeria and in neighbouring countries."
"This suspicion toward children can have destructive consequences: how can a community rebuild itself when it is casting out its own sisters, daughters and mothers?"
Manuel Fontaine, West and Central Africa director, UN Children's Agency

Women and children rescued from Islamist militant group Boko Haram in the Sambisa forest by the Nigerian military arrive at an internally displaced people's camp in Yola, Adamawa State, Nigeria, on May 2, 2015. There's been a ten-fold increase in child suicide bombers deployed by Boko Haram over the last year, UNICEF says. (Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters)

The abducted, terrorized and exploited children and women whom Boko Haram has spirited away from their communities in tandem with mass murder and the destruction of villages, is sundering familial and clan and tribal relations. When abducted children who have been threatened, starved, violated and abused in every conceivable way manage to escape and return to their home communities they have become ostracized, discovering that they no longer have a place among those who were once their family.

They are distrusted. They are regarded as being no different after their time with the Islamist jihadists than their captors. The fact that these terrified children were exposed to the commission of dreadful atrocities, of threats that they will die if they do not submit, of witnessing the deaths of their friends and comrades, subjected to violence themselves in the process learning to obey to preserve their lives elicits little sympathy from villagers who have themselves often been the subject of Boko Haram's deadly ravages.

All the more so as the jihadist group has embraced the utility of using children as suicide bombers in ever greater numbers. Little wonder that communities that have suffered death with the advent of child suicide bombers view those children as threats. Among the suicide bombers, 75 percent are girls, according to a new report issued by UNICEF. Even though these rejected children many of whom are believed to have been captives are "victims, not perpetrators".

"Nigeria's security forces have contributed to the problem by using schools as military bases, putting children at further risk of attack from the Islamist armed group."
"At least 611 teachers have been deliberately killed."
Human Rights Watch

"Boko Haram has exploited common desires of youth ... to get ahead economically. Many youth described either accepting loans prior to joining or joining with the hope of receiving loans or capital for their mostly small, informal businesses."
Mercy Corps

Rebecca Issac, a Chibok schoolgirl who had escaped from the Boko Haram, reacts during an event that marks the second anniversary of the Boko Haram abduction of Chibok schoolgirls, in Abuja, Nigeria April 11, 2016. (Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters)

Girls and women escaping Boko Haram clutches describe their agonized experiences with sexual abuse and forced 'marriages'. The mass of the over 200 schoolgirls abducted from their residential school in Chibok, Nigeria two years ago have never been recovered. And the Nigerian military has been treating children abducted by Boko Harm as representing threats equal to the manner in which they regard the adults.

The military have placed boys on "wanted posters" across northeastern Nigeria, along with the visages of dozens of elite Boko Haram suspects.

Reprehensibly Sacrificing Children Jihadis for Allah

"It is striking that children are being integrated into the ISIL war machine not as substitutes but as soldiers and suicide attackers fighting alongside adult [militants]."
"We know that there are a lot more [children] being recruited than eulogized. As the military situation becomes more difficult for ISIL in the months and years to come, we'll see more instances of youths being used on the battlefield."
Charlie Winter, senior research associate, Georgia State

"[ISIL, unlike other terrorist Islamist groups] is absolutely advertising it, [its use of child soldiers]  and making it routine."
"It's about changing what is considered right and wrong, and making children almost immune to the horrific nature of what they're seeing [by exposure to atrocities; witnessing beheadings, watching ISIL videos]."
"It hardens these children and makes them more ready and psychologically available for things they'll do in the future."
Mia Bloom, professor, Georgia State

Child suicide bomber en route to fulfilling his mission - still from ISIL video

With the release of yet another atrocious video from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the question might be how it is possible for religious fervour to drain a father of love and the normal nature of parenthood to protect their offspring, in favour of sending that child off on a suicide mission from which it is well known by both father and child that the boy will never return, his body spewed in a multitude of unrecognizable parts as he detonates his suicide vest as he has been taught to do.

The boy in the video looks around twelve years of age. Boys look upon their fathers as their heroes, whom they make every effort to emulate in any conceivable way. This boy, knowing that he would never return from his mission, is confident that he is doing w hat he must for the honour of Islam. And he takes his leave of his father, to climb into an armoured vehicle that has been prepared for that mission that will produce a destructive fireball, killing all within direct distance.

He leans over to kiss his father's hand. This is no play-acting for the edification and titillation of ISIL's wide audience of would-be jihadis. The attack took place last month in Aleppo, and it represents one of an estimated 89 similar such events in the past year, where the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has dispatched children or teens, trained to execute their deadly missions to perfection. These are the 'cubs' that the 'lions' of ISIL prepare for martyrdom.



What young boy would hesitate to please his father and make him proud through his child's sacrificial prowess in war? The video was a propaganda piece posing as an eulogy to the courage of a child instructed to kill and to prepare himself for the honour of being recognized as a martyr. "The Islamic State is mobilizing children and youth at an increasing and unprecedented rate", states a report published by the Combating Terrorism Centre at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

This strategy embarked upon by ISIL is incorporated into a broader one meant to cultivate school-age militants who have been well seasoned in the Islamist jihadi ideology, inured by constant exposure through their indoctrination process, to the violence they help to perpetrate. While civilized onlookers are shocked, children exposed to videos like the one of a child wearing an ISIL headband pressing the button of a remote control device to detonate a bomb strapped to a car within which sit three accused spies, consider it an admirable example of military strategy.

One that excites fear and revulsion in the mind of the enemy, and resolve and envy in the mind of the children who aspire, in accord with what they are taught, to themselves become the star principal of such videos. And so, ISIL grooms children to take part in missions that they are aware they will never return from. Sixty percent of the victims who left to take part in these missions were "adolescent", between 12 to 16 years of age, with none older than 18, and some as young as 8 or 9.

In January, at least eleven children or adolescents died in ISIL strategic operations, according to the report, co-authored by researchers at Georgia State University, titled Depictions of Children and Youth in the Islamic State's 'Martyrdom' Propaganda. The report points out that ISIL considers young boys subordinate to the cause of e-establishing a universal "caliphate". The researchers anticipate that as the broader conflict goes increasingly against ISIL's aspirations, greater use of child militants will ensue.

Of 89 cases the report focuses on, 36 boys were killed carrying out operations where they drove vehicles packed with explosives; eighteen of the  youth took part in teams carrying out Kamikaze-type assaults on enemy positions firing weapons, and detonating suicide belts, while two cases reflected suicide attacks on civilian targets. Preparing the children for these killing sprees includes attendance at public beheadings and watching propaganda videos of children taking part in suicide missions.

Recruiting/Abducting Children as Soldiers

"There is no doubt in my military mind that the sustainment of that conflict [Syria] is based on the early recruitment and massive use of young people."
"The Americans are concerned because they have now finally captured the fact that child soldiers -- and the use of children -- in these conflicts is far more than a humanitarian problem."
"It is far more than a social-economic problem. It is a threat, and that is starting to sink in."
Retired Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire, Ottawa

A boy soldier waits at the Kpandroma transit center. The various warring factions of the country have used children as fighters, porters, cooks, spies and sex slaves. Time

From Joseph Kony's Lords Resistance Army in Central African Republic, to South Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo to Uganda, right across Africa, tens of thousands of children, some as young as eight, are abducted and pressed into service as suicide bombers, sex slaves, human shields and armed killers, trained and forced to kill their own companions to test their mettle, sometimes their own family members, before setting out to ravage and slaughter.

The Canadian head of the United Nations peacekeeping mission Rwanda who was unable to stop the 1994 bloody massacre of over three-quarters of  a million Tutsis by the ruling Hutus, witnessed bloodshed on an unimaginable scale, with neighbour turning against neighbour in an ethnic cleansing exercise that left him reeling and anguished. Now, as a witness to horror he has dedicated himself to trying to find a way to stop the enforced enlistment of children in both regular armies and irregular militias, the scourge of Africa and beyond.

'Beyond' takes in east Asia, Central America and the Middle East, where the world isn't much interested in the fact that the Palestinian Authority has designed a protocol whereby through school curricula, television programs, contests and other propaganda, Palestinian children are groomed to consider their future as potential 'martyrs' for the cause of the liberation of Palestine with the understanding that Palestine can only be 'liberated' with the destruction of Israel, which annoyingly sits on 'Palestinian' geography.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant goes a tad further in its early recruitment and training of what they call their 'cubs', born to the 'lions', proud members of ISIL who bear the distinction of never wincing when they behead a victim, or immolate one in a fiery cage, or drive over them, or explode a device wrapped around a victim's head. These are events which the cubs are given to witness, to familiarize them with their futures. They also on occasion are blessed with the honour of setting off a remote-controlled explosive to kill captives.

In this photo released on April 25, 2015, by a militant website, which has been verified and is consistent with other AP reporting, young boys known as the "lion cubs" hold rifles and Islamic State group flags as they exercise at a training camp in Tal Afar, near Mosul, northern Iraq. Militant website via AP

A report from the United Nations verifies that ISIL children, in their isolated enclave called their caliphate, are tasked with hauling weapons, acting as human shields and groomed to become suicide bombers. Those online videos featuring gruesome atrocities are notorious for their shock value to civilized people, but for the primitive barbarians led by Islamist jihad, they display children watching beheadings for the purpose of being exposed to what they are to become, jihadists.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, in a six month period in 2015, 1,100 children under age sixteen were recruited by ISIL. Romeo Dallaire now seeks a solution; he has conceived of a program to enlist military veterans' assistance in training and rendering instructions to military forces in the avoidance of recruiting child soldiers. A nod given to culture and to tribal practices which condones military training for children, concedes that such a program could take decades to bear fruit.

But he has high hopes for the efficacy of the program he has named Veteran Trainers to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers. Their task, once trained, would be to educate officers and instructors who recruit and train footsoldiers.

"We are two decades behind on child soldiering already." We need to change the "ethos and patterns" of the forces we work with, stated Mr. Dallaire. "This is not Hitler Youth or young Canadian boys lying about their age to fight in the trenches. Those were specific problems -- mainly because countries were running out of military-aged men. In the conflicts of today, the leaders prefer child soldiers. They're easier to indoctrinate. And we haven't found a way to make them less effective [as killers]."

When Western forces are deployed into battle, faced with children who are armed, trained and able to kill, there is scant choice but to respond as though they are mature men prepared to kill or be killed, because this, in essence, is what they will do. Children fighting with Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram and ISIL, have little choice but to obey what is demanded of them, or face the deadly consequences. So they defer death by going out armed onto the battlefield, where death will meet them eventually.

And if they meet death at the business end of a weapon held and  used by someone born, educated and trained with Western values, standards and ideals, the result will be anguish and stricken demoralization on the part of a soldier who knows he or she must respond in kind without responding with kindness in mind when faced with a child wielding a deadly weapon.

 Hamas Training and graduation at the Al-Futuwa program. (Photo: Tazpit News Agency/ Paldf.net)