The Wall Street Journal reports: Jomah, a 17-year-old Syrian who joined Islamic State last year, sat in a circle of trainees for a lesson in beheading, a course taught to boys as young as 8.

Teachers brought in three frightened Syrian soldiers, who were jeered and forced to their knees. “It was like learning to chop an onion,” Jomah said. “You grab him by the forehead and then slowly slice across the neck.”

A teacher asked for volunteers and said, “Those who behead the infidels will receive gifts from God,” recalled Jomah, who didn’t want his full name revealed. The youngest boys shot up their hands and several were chosen to participate. Afterward, the teachers ordered the students to pass around the severed heads.

“I’d become desensitized by that time,” said Jomah, who has since defected to Turkey with his family. “The beheading videos they’d shown us helped.”

The enrollment of hundreds of boys in such militant training camps is another tragic facet of Syria’s nearly four-year-long civil war — and its impact could trouble the Middle East for years to come. Parents worry their boys will be forever lost to the indoctrination of Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

A TSG IntelBrief concludes:
• Through systemic indoctrination, intimidation, and extermination, violent extremist groups such as the Islamic State, Boko Haram, and both Afghan and Pakistan Taliban, are targeting children with unprecedented ferocity

• Children are no longer accidental casualties in extremist conflicts but rather they are a primary target

• Extremists are trying to steal the future away from vulnerable regions by stealing the future generation through relentless messaging and violence that separates the youth from their society, government, and culture

• The damage already done by the Syrian civil war, the Islamic State, Boko Haram, and violent extremist groups in in Pakistan pales in comparison to what is yet to come if even a small percentage of their focus on youth pays off.

In the midst of pervasive war-weariness and deeply felt opposition to military intervention following the war in Iraq, social media has not only desensitized children living under ISIS’s rule, serving as a primer on brutality, but it has also desensitized opponents of war.

Images which provoke instinctive revulsion, trigger a desire not only to look away, but also turn away in every way possible, such that both ISIS and those who have become its victims can be cloaked in otherness.

When we see children in masks, it’s easier to see the masks than see the children.

Paradoxically, among the many who readily acknowledge that ISIS came into existence primarily as a result of the war in Iraq and that in this sense, ISIS is an American creation, far fewer are willing to admit that the U.S. has a huge responsibility in now trying to thwart the monster that it unwittingly released.

At the same time, even if we acknowledge that we are part-owners of the problem, no one will be served well by casting America in its traditional self-ascribed role as rescuer.

Now, as has long been the case, the U.S. needs to break out of its bipolar relationship with the rest of the world, neither seeking to dominate, nor retreat.

Reuters reports: The Islamic State jihadist group has killed 1,878 people in Syria during the past six months, the majority of them civilians, a British-based Syrian monitoring organization said on Sunday.

Islamic State also killed 120 of its own members, most of them foreign fighters trying to return home, in the last two months, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The jihadist group has taken vast parts of Iraq and Syria and declared a caliphate in territory under its control in June. Since then it has fought the Syrian and Iraqi governments, other insurgents and Kurdish forces. [Continue reading…]

Rudaw reports: Islamic State (ISIS) authorities executed two more doctors in the city of Mosul, the latest in a campaign against physicians who refuse to join field hospitals or treat wounded fighters, a top health official said.

“Elements of the organization (ISIS) executed physicians Tareq Jassim and Adil Ayham, working in the Department of Surgery of the Republican General Hospital in Mosul,” said Dr. Firas al-Hamdani, head of the hospital’s emergency section.

“The bodies of the doctors arrived at the hospital morgue this evening after being executed by ISIS firing squad,” he added.

The New York Times reports: Before war convulsed his hometown in Syria, Usaid Barho played soccer, loved Jackie Chan movies and adored the beautiful Lebanese pop singer Nancy Ajram. He dreamed of attending college and becoming a doctor.

His life, to say the least, took a detour.

On a recent evening in Baghdad, Usaid, who is 14, approached the gate of a Shiite mosque, unzipped his jacket to show a vest of explosives, and surrendered himself to the guards.

“They seduced us to join the caliphate,” he said several days later in an interview at a secret Iraqi intelligence site where he is being held.

Usaid described how he had been recruited by the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State from a mosque in his hometown, Manbij, near Aleppo. He said he joined the group willingly because “I believed in Islam.”

“They planted the idea in me that Shiites are infidels and we had to kill them,” he said in the interview, which took place in the presence of an Iraqi intelligence official.

If he did not fight, he was told, Shiites would come and rape his mother.

He soon found himself in Iraq, but he quickly had misgivings and wanted to escape. His best chance, he decided, was a risky deception: volunteer to be a suicide bomber so he could surrender to security forces. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: The Islamic State’s vaunted exercise in state-building appears to be crumbling as living conditions deteriorate across the territories under its control, exposing the shortcomings of a group that devotes most of its energies to fighting battles and enforcing strict rules.

Services are collapsing, prices are soaring, and medicines are scarce in towns and cities across the “caliphate” proclaimed in Iraq and Syria by the Islamic State, residents say, belying the group’s boasts that it is delivering a model form of governance for Muslims.

Slick Islamic State videos depicting functioning government offices and the distribution of aid do not match the reality of growing deprivation and disorganized, erratic leadership, the residents say. A trumpeted Islamic State currency has not materialized, nor have the passports the group promised. Schools barely function, doctors are few, and disease is on the rise.

In the Iraqi city of Mosul, the water has become undrinkable because supplies of chlorine have dried up, said a journalist living there, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his safety. Hepatitis is spreading, and flour is becoming scarce, he said. “Life in the city is nearly dead, and it is as though we are living in a giant prison,” he said.

In the Syrian city of Raqqa, the group’s self-styled capital, water and electricity are available for no more than three or four hours a day, garbage piles up uncollected, and the city’s poor scavenge for scraps on streets crowded with sellers hawking anything they can find, residents say. [Continue reading…]