(THE COUNTER JIHAD REPORT) — By Brian Fairchild
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
The Islamic State regards its child-fighters as central to its grand strategy because they constitute the caliphate’s next generation, and it operates an extensive educational/training infrastructure that routinely produces them. Child-fighters are deployed as equals to adult fighters and assigned missions as suicide bombers, combatants, and as cold-blooded executioners. Their participation in violent operations is accelerating, and they will increasingly confront coalition forces on the battlefield, as well as on American soil in terrorist operations. They constitute one of America’s least understood strategic threats, but the U.S. is currently ill-prepared to deal with them.
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On February 9, 2016, the US Director of National Intelligence testified before congress that the number of foreign fighters flocking to Syria and Iraq in the past few years is “without precedent”, reaching over 38,200 from 120 nations, including, at least, 6,900 from Western countries. This explosion is both alarming and historic. Western European leaders in particular were stunned by the November 2015 attacks in Paris, and they fear the worst is yet to come – intelligence indicates that the Islamic State is currently planning simultaneous attacks against several European cities.
But the explosion of foreign fighters tells only part of the story. There has also been a qualitative change in their character – they are more ideologically extreme, and much more brutal than the jihadists of al Qaeda. Because of the Islamic State’s (IS) widely disseminated propaganda of beheadings, crucifixions, rape, torture, the revival of slavery, and the inhumane execution of prisoners, there can be no doubt that, even before they leave home, the thousands of radicalized Western Muslims that continue to flood into the Islamic State do so fully understanding and embracing its barbaric ideology and actions.
Of particular note, and the subject of this analysis, is that the Islamic State has intentionally and strategically focused its barbaric ideology on the most impressionable and vulnerable segments of its ever expanding population – its children, who constitute one of America’s least understood strategic threats. The evidence indicates that the number of pre-teen and early-teen child-fighters involved in combat and violent attacks is increasing.
NOTE: This report uses the time-tested intelligence analysis format of Facts, Findings, and Forecast. It will provide relevant facts from primary sources and then make general findings from those facts. Finally, it will forecast likely future strategic developments based on these facts and findings.
FACTS:
Islamic State strategy regarding child-fighters:
The Islamic State uses child-fighters as a fundamental part of its grand strategy. In the 12th issue of its official Dabiq magazine, the Islamic State revealed, for the first time, that a strategic document titled Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage through Which the Umma Will Pass “describes very precisely the overall strategy” that it has followed for over a decade. Indeed, it gives this strategic guide high praise stating that when its revered leader, Abu Musab az-Zarqawi read it, he commented – “It is as if the author knows what I’m planning.”[1]
Management of Savagery, published in 2004 specifically to provide salafi jihadis with a strategic guide on how to successfully create a new Islamic caliphate, emphasizes that training Muslim youth in sharia law and military skill is one of the most important strategic goals for the jihad. So important, in fact, that it ranks fifth out of 12 key requirements it must accomplish to establish the caliphate. Indeed, the fifth requirement emphasizes the importance of:
“Raising the level of faith and combat efficiency during the training of the youth of the region…and establishing a fighting society at all levels and among all individuals by means of making them aware of its importance.”
Management of Savagery insists that brutal violence against enemies must be constantly used, and that the education of Muslim youth must not be confined to the classroom, but that the caliphate’s next generation of leaders and fighters must be taught in the furnace and brutality of war, declaring:
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