Over the last few years, there has been a media frenzy over the use of children as fighters, executioners and suicide bombers by Daesh—also known as the Islamic State. These children are often now dubbed as the “Cubs of the Caliphate”, and child protection advocates are increasingly challenged regarding how to help them. While the use of children in war is of course nothing new, the deliberate use of very young children in propaganda videos and on social media is a shift from typical patterns of child recruitment that we’ve seen in the past. Not only does Daesh not hide its use of very young children, as other groups have often done, but the group’s propaganda machine promotes and glorifies it. Child protection strategies and negotiations that may have worked in the past —such as negotiating releases, creating demobilization programs, or naming and shaming—seem very unlikely to work here. Indeed, the UN Secretary General on Children and Armed Conflict noted in this year’s report that the regular use of social media to recruit children and young people is “a new and compounding challenge”.
While we might be appalled at these tactics, we certainly should not be surprised—defying the existing international order has been the Daesh strategy from the beginning; why should child protection norms be any different? Yet, even the most notorious child recruiters in recent memory, such as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), paid some lip service to international human rights law, such as hiding the level of children involved, claiming that their fighters were over fifteen, or negotiating with child protection agencies to release at least the youngest children. Indeed, the 2015 Annual Report from the United Nations Secretary General on Children in Armed Conflict notes that due to “strong engagement” with armed groups, over 8,000 children were released across Africa, Latin American and Asia in that year.
Daesh is deliberately using children as a tool of propaganda—quite an effective tool, judging by the extensive media coverage. Some of these groups have also changed their practices—or at least the appearance of their practices—when added to the UN’s “naming and shaming” list. Others have participated in demobilization programs, at the very least releasing some children into government or NGO custody. By doing this, they acknowledge that to have legitimacy in international circles, they must at least appear to be playing the human rights game. Indeed, as Amarnath Amarasingam pointed out, “Most of the previous rebel movements like the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] and so on had very strategic, often nationalist goals, which required them to acquire international recognition, respect, and support. They cared what the UN had to say.”
