An education in terror

Mutassim is not much a warrior. He is short and nervous. I meet him in the small German village where he is now living. He is smoking - something he's taken up since he left Syria, as it's forbidden by IS. And, even though it's early in the day, he offers me a can of lager.

He says he has stopped praying and has abandoned his beliefs. Previously, he had absorbed IS religious lessons, and followed its extremist path.

Mu’tassim speaks to Quentin:

He has filmed the aftermath of coalition airstrikes, he tells me, helped the wounded in hospital and witnessed public beheadings. He also received the pre-requisite military training. For Mutassim, it took just 15 days - for some it can be longer. The programme is rigorous, starting the day with 4am prayers. Physical exercise, combat training and lessons in Sharia law follow.

As part of their training, teenagers were required to jump through burning tyres and crawl under barbed wire while live rounds were shot over the their heads.

A friend - a 13-year-old boy from Eastern Ghouta, near Damascus - was struck in the head by a stray round and died. All this before Mutassim even turned 16.

Many armed groups across Africa, the Middle East and South America, have trained children for battle. Recruiting child soldiers is a war crime. But few have refined the process so efficiently as the Islamic State group.

War is brutalising, and IS have turned it into an art form. The mobile propaganda units that the group set up throughout its territory show punishments and battles. Children as young as five years old attend.

In footage secretly filmed in Raqqa and passed to the BBC, children gather excitedly around a cage in the city. Inside is one of their neighbours, a local shopkeeper called Samir.

Caged man:

They stare at the prisoner, who sits crouched with his head bowed in the centre of the cage. One of the children squirts him with something. According to the charge sheet, he sexually harassed a Muslim woman. His punishment is to provide the children with entertainment - like an animal in a zoo. But they, and children like them, are likely to have seen much worse - beheadings and executions.

The militants have been careful in how they recruited teenagers to their cause. They have tempted them with promises not just of salvation and paradise, but of more earthly desires.

Life with IS may be hard and dangerous, but it is not without its rewards.

For Mutassim, it was the promise of a wife. At the age of 14 and a half, he was keen to get married. When his family refused, IS stepped in. They allowed him to live with their men, gave him responsibilities, trained him to drive and pledged to find him a bride.

Mutassim was a willing recruit. He says that about 70% of the youngsters who joined the organization had family issues. “They would use it against their families, so either they fulfil their demands, or they would join the organization.”

As the tempo of war increased, life in Raqqa became harder.
“When the stadium attack in France happened, Raqqa couldn’t sleep,” he says. “The French bombed the entire city. I was angry because innocent civilians were killed.”

After another airstrike, he heard children crying and women screaming for help. “It was a scene that I would never ever forget. It felt like an action movie.”

But he eventually became disillusioned with IS. The fighters he had admired as fearless and powerful, were not true to their beliefs, he says.

Mutassim was reconciled with his family, who had always urged him to leave. They paid a people smuggler to help him escape.

On Turkey’s southern border, I met the people smuggler who had helped Mutassim. Abu Jasen is from Raqqa and knew the family well. He has smuggled hundreds of refugees and defectors out. But how did he know that Mutassim had left his IS sympathies behind?

It was the family connection that reassured him. “If he alone had got in touch with me, I wouldn’t have trusted it,” he says. “It could be a kid that the organization brainwashed and wanted to learn about my network. But I know the family.”

Abu Jasen speaks to Quentin:

Raqqa and its surrounding area is a battlefield with competing forces and dozens of checkpoints.

The stakes are high and so is the risk of capture.

Abu Jasen says the route is more difficult than it had been in
2014 and 2015. To reach the border, someone would have to first go through Syrian Democratic Forces - an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters opposed to IS - which has lists of names of IS recruits and are on the look out for them.

The next hurdle is to get smuggled through territory controlled by the Free Syrian Army - which is opposed to President Assad and IS.

Secretly filmed footage of a night-time crossing into Turkey, passed to the BBC, gives a taste of the type of desperate scramble Mutassim would have endured. Dodging watchtowers and floodlights, groups of Syrians make it past Turkish guard posts.

Syrians cross the border at night:

“They fired shots in the air above our heads,” Mutassim says. And even though guards are paid to let the Syrians past, it is no less terrifying.

Then it was on to Greece and a plane out of Athens with the fake passport. Today he lives in a refugee hostel in Germany. As we sat under a tree, he told me his stories, and the nightmares he cannot forget.

When your world is filled with violence, it is the strangest moments that can have the lasting effect.

For Mutassim, it was the time when he was working in the IS morgue in Raqqa, and a body sprung to life and grabbed his leg. An injured civilian who had been declared dead, was in fact, alive.

The German authorities don't know about his past, nor do they know the startling fact that he was able to travel from IS territory to Europe, largely undetected, in only one month.

And that is not all. Mutassim did not come alone.
Another teenager - one who served the caliphate in Syria and in Mosul, Iraq - made his way to Belgium.

Omar is 17 years old, but could easily pass for younger. Until, that is, you look into his eyes. They are weary, haunted. He plays the tough guy, and still has the swagger of someone sent to fight for the Islamic State group.

He is living in Belgium and has already been thrown out of three refugee hostels for being unruly. He strikes you as someone who is barely getting by. It has taken months for him to fully tell his story, and amid the exaggerations, a picture of abuse emerges.

Drinking a blueberry fruit beer, he begins to open up about IS. But his answers are crafted, careful. He is full of bravado, but it soon becomes apparent that his time in IS was mostly a failure.

He, too, is from Raqqa, where he worked in a garage. He joined IS in its early days.

After two weeks of training in Raqqa he was sent to Mosul, as part of an effort by IS to reinforce the city. There he stayed in a house for a week.

“We didn’t move from that house at all, they told us not to open the door to anyone.”

Mosul was disappointing. They met other Syrians who had been in the city for more than two years.

At that time, they hadn't been on leave, he says. They have been on the frontline and all they had to eat was yoghurt, bread and dates.

“They’d spend 24 hours without any meal,” he says.

“There was no good care for the mujahedeen. I was told that during the Sharia training, the food was boiled potatoes and egg for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and sometimes olive oil with Zaatar."

Omar never quite made into the warrior he was expected to become.

IS ‘cubs’ carry guns in the streets:

He was let go from Jaysh al Khilafa (the army of the caliphate) after failing to attend proper induction classes. He later reapplied, this time to join the IED (bomb-making) brigade, but was rejected.

He ended up working as an informant, a low-level street snitch, spying on Kurds, smokers, and people with unauthorized weapons. He was paid cash for every tip-off.

His days with the caliphate were coming to an end. The final straw was when an IS fighter from Algeria picked him up, accusing him of smoking. It was late at night, and the fighter forced Omar into the back of a car to rape him.

Afterwards, there was no-one for Omar to tell.

“I was so scared and he was in control, he could accuse me of anything and take me to the police station,” he says. It was then he decided it was time to leave.

Today, he keeps his past life hidden. He survives thanks to his “girlfriends” - older women who give him money.

He is not a threat to Europeans, he says, “They were my enemies and now I’m living among them, eating and drinking with them. They’ve received me and looked after me.

In the past few months, the BBC has learned of at least three other former IS child soldiers living in Europe. They would not agree to be interviewed. We approached the EU police force, Europol, regarding some of the cases, but they declined to comment.

IS not only concentrated its attention on recruits for the battlefield, it reached deeper into society, into the homes, classrooms, and minds of the youngest children.

As soon as they turn five, children are introduced to a vocabulary of strife and gore, school curriculum books reveal. They have become Cubs of the Caliphate and the process of turning them into holy warriors has just begun.

Its ministry of education instructed teachers to seed the “love of education” but suggested doing so by mentioning the virtues of the prophets and messengers such as “forgiveness, patience, courage, strength, reliance on Allah and the call for jihad in His name”. It also urged them to “inject zeal through fervent rhymes that terrorise the enemies of Islam”.

And so, the cubs would learn simple but violent rhymes glorifying jihad and death for the sake of Allah:

Just like the Hitler Youth movement indoctrinated children to serve the Nazis’ 1000-year Reich, IS developed a feeder apparatus to regularly inject new blood into its veins. By the time it took full control of Raqqa in the winter of 2014 and turned it into its de-facto capital, the plan to subvert the education system was set in motion.

The newly created education ministry issued its first decree – music classes were banned, so were civic education lessons, history, sports and even the Syrian state’s curriculum for Islamic education.

In their place were IS’s own “jihadi doctrine” and “Islamic Shari’ah” booklets.

As it still lacked its own printed curriculum, the organisation used existing Syrian education books, albeit heavily censored. The decree stated:

Teachers were told to plug the gap in deleted material by resorting to examples that “do not contradict Shariah or Islamic State policy”.

By July 2014, Mosul had fallen and the caliphate had been declared. The rich Iraqi city, six times bigger than Raqqa, had a lot more to offer in terms of human resources and infrastructure. Now, the Islamic State had both the expertise and the assets to take on the formidable task of drafting its own curriculum from scratch.

“They started in earnest during the fall of 2014, but the Diwan [ministry of education] had been recruiting loyal, ideologically aligned experts all throughout that summer,” Yousef, a Moslawi teacher who lived through that phase, told the BBC.

In primary school, religious material included texts “instigating against” non-Muslims, as well as propaganda leaflets designed for youngsters to view IS in a “positive” light.

The IS curriculum was finally rolled out for the 2015-2016 school year. Children would enrol at the age of five and graduate at 15, shaving four full years off the traditional school life. They would be educated in 12 various disciplines, but these would be steeped in Islamic State’s doctrine and its world vision. Jihad became institutionalised, the enemy was everyone beyond the borders of the caliphate.

Even though Mosul has fallen and Raqqa, the de-facto capital, is expected to capitulate in the coming months, IS is still teaching children its curriculum of hate in several localised territories under its control in Syria.

Soon, very soon, you'll be seeing wonders
.

In the school playground, or while at home, playing by themselves, the children sing IS songs of jihad and attacks on the West.

You'll be seeing an epic conflict

We'll be in your homeland
Our fighters will terrorise you.


IS has mostly gone from Mosul, but its songs remain for 12-year-olds Usma and Yabcoub.

There's no escape but death.
We're coming for you with death and slaughter,
We're going to tear through your squares,


The boys remember walking home and seeing corpses hanging from lampposts. And they remember the beheading videos.

We'll go through death and back,
marching as one,


But we'll die standing like lions

Boy sings an IS song:

Usma smiles when he tells me that his new haircut, shaved at the sides and long on top, with some sharp detailing, would have earned him 15 lashes under IS.

Yacoub does not smile, as he draws a finger over his own throat. “They weren’t nice, they chopped off heads,” he says.

IS lavished attention on boys of their age and younger. It was an insurance policy for the future, and a filtering process to allow potential young fighters to be identified and fast-tracked into military training.

“IS did not approach students violently,” says Yousef, the tutor. “They appealed to their emotional sides, saying, 'We are your family and we will help you to get your independence and freedom'.”

I first spoke to Yousef two years ago, via the Internet, when he would feed us information from IS-occupied Mosul. He handed me the entire IS curriculum on CD.

He watched as IS ideology took hold in classrooms, and some of his students disappeared. Their fathers either died for IS, or at the hands of the militants. Yousef says:

In some cases, he told me, families would hand a child over to IS, to protect other family members.

It’s what Dr Mia Bloom of Georgia State University, an expert on child radicalization, calls a “perverse reversal” of the parental role.

“Kids are sacrificed, maybe for a greater good, helping the family,” she says. “IS has ensured that what worked for other child soldiers can’t work here. Children can’t be put back with their families if their families were the ones that handed them over.”

Qais is from Latakia, Syria. His war started when he was 15 and he joined a rebel group fighting the regime. His battalion commander defected with all of his men to IS. Qais was probably more of a willing defector than he cares to admit, but his story of disillusionment with IS is familiar.

Eventually, he escaped and made it to Turkey, where he lives today. He was once an excited child, learning to fire a weapon, willing to join the jihad, ready to fight the Syrian regime, and then to fight infidels. All of that is behind him now. When I met him in Gaziantep, he is a husk - an empty space containing disappointment and hopelessness.

Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but at least 2,000 children became Lion Cubs of the Caliphate - child soldiers for the IS war machine, and many thousands more were manipulated and turned towards jihad in IS classrooms.

They are victims, and some are a threat. Almost all are left at the very edges of whatever society they now inhabit.

And there is a danger of them re-offending, says Dr Mia Bloom. “It’s not the recidivism one would expect. These kids can be funnelled into criminality, they have all the skills for it. They end up in criminal gangs, not terrorist groups."

When you stand in the baking heat of Mosul’s Old City, it's easy to be overwhelmed by the spectacle of utter devastation.

Comparisons have been made to the ruins of earlier wars - Dresden, Stalingrad, etc. That is overstating the damage, and looking through the rubble, it misses the point. Physical damage is the easiest to perceive, but also the easiest to repair. Cities get rebuilt.

In its short life, the so-called Islamic State did a more lasting harm, by grooming and corrupting young men. Sit with those boys, hear their tales and you will struggle to steady yourself.

Identifying the worst affected is difficult enough. Treating them, stopping the nightmares and repairing the trauma will be costly and time-consuming. They have missed so much proper schooling that finding them jobs will be hard. And returning them to their faith, one that isn’t polluted by jihadist ideology, needs perseverance.

That might be enough to save them, to bring them back into their societies, to help Iraq and Syria rebuild. Treating those who have suffered and escaped to the West might stop them becoming criminals, or worse.

But all of that will be difficult and unpopular. And perhaps those experts of division and destruction, IS, always knew this.
After all, who would want to help a boy who wanted to be a suicide bomber?