Children of the Caliphate: Jihadists increase use of kids as terrorists, bombers

While thousands of “Muslim refugees” are pouring into the United States thanks to President Barack Obama’s politically-correct agenda — and Hillary Clinton’s promise to carry on that agenda if she’s elected President — there is an Islamist program geared towards using children as young as ten-years-old to launch attacks including suicide bombings.

Islamic ChildrenA suicide bomber with suspected links to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) killed 54 people, including 22 children, at a Kurdish wedding in Turkey on Saturday.

The attack in the Turkish city of Gaziantep is said to be the deadliest this year, according to police officials. The suicide bomber in this attack is reported to be as young as 12-years-old, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Turkish television on Sunday. He also stated that the evidence collected by police and forensic specials points to ISIS.

News reports in the Middle East claim that the improvised explosive device (IED) used was the same as the IED employed in the July 2015 suicide attacks in the border town of Suruc and the October 2015 bombing of a rally in Ankara.

Then on Monday police officers in Iraq successfully arrested an 11-year-old boy wearing an explosive belt wrapped around his waist.  The child reportedly told the officers that ISIS terrorists had abducted him and forced him to carry out and attack.

According to intelligence analysts, the group controls an army of child jihadists, they call the “cubs of the caliphate.”  The Islamists seek to indoctrinate children at ISIS-run grade schools, “drugging some of them and indoctrinating them with the group’s own radical version of Islam,” according to analysts.

Besides the recruitment of Americans by Islamic terrorist groups — especially American teenagers and young adults — using advanced methods using the Internet’s social media websites, within the Middle East as well as parts of Africa and Asia there is an intense drive to indoctrinate and train local youths to carry out terrorist attacks and activities. Their youth program is best described as a cross between the Boy Scouts and the Chicago-based Vice Lords street gang.

For example, the powerful and deadly ISIS recently boasted about the success of its recruitment and training program that is increasing their numbers on a daily basis. These junior jihadists are not those traveling from the West, but local youngsters who are easily swayed to embrace radical Islam and to undergo intensive, sometimes dangerous, training at camps set up with young people in mind.

In January of this year, ISIS commanders bragged about their plans to expand their reach into Afghanistan and they are fulfilling their claim. Within three months of their message of expansion, they launched a suicide attack that killed at least 35 people in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, an attack believed to have been purposely downplayed by President Barack Obama and his national security team.

While ISIS is still less powerful than the Taliban, the fact that they are recruiting and expanding operations in the already fragile nation of Afghanistan has worried U.S. and NATO military commanders and intelligence agents.

But ISIS isn’t alone and it isn’t the first terrorist group to devote a lot of its resources to recruitment and training of children and teenagers. That distinction belongs to the Palestinian terrorist groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) who are inhabiting the Gaza Strip which borders Israel.

 

Jim-Kouri

Jim Kouri, CPP, is founder and CEO of Kouri Associates, a homeland security, public safety and political consulting firm. He's formerly Fifth Vice-President, now a Board Member of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, a columnist, and a contributor to the nationally syndicated talk-radio program, the Chuck Wilder Show.. He's former chief of police at a New York City housing project in Washington Heights nicknamed "Crack City" by reporters covering the drug war in the 1980s. In addition, he served as director of public safety at St. Peter's University and director of security for several major organizations. He's also served on the National Drug Task Force and trained police and security officers throughout the country.

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