When the Islamic State conquered large portions of Iraq in 2014, one of its strategies to entrench its radical ideology was to focus on the kids, like reported by vocativ.com.
Donya Ali, 13, had not gone to school in two and a half years, instead receiving instruction at a mosque. While she could enthusiastically rattle off prayer after prayer, her general lessons didn’t get far past studying the alphabet, she said at an overflowing refugee camp at Hamam al-Alil where her family had fled from the west of Mosul.
“By the name of God we go out, by the name of God we come in, by the name of God we sleep,” she said, as much reciting a prayer as she was describing her life for the past two and a half years.
ISIS fighters in Mosul and the surrounding villages took over the schools, forcing teachers to continue lessons while also introducing Islamist changes to the curriculum, according to interviews with children, families and school staff. Many parents eventually pulled their children from the schools, effectively halting their education.
“There were two kinds of damage,” said Mohammed Ali Tahan, the director of Mosul education at the Iraqi Ministry of Education, currently based in Baghdad. “To the school buildings and also to the psychology [of the students.] The damage was planted in their minds.”
At the same time, the militants approached children at mandatory daily mosque services and in marketplaces, grooming selected children to adopt their ideology and become informants, disciples and, occasionally, child soldiers.
Inside Schools
There are 412 public schools in Mosul and the surrounding towns, according to Tahan – 190 of those schools are in Eastern Mosul – 120 primary and 70 secondary and preparatory schools.
About 50 of the eastern schools have not been able to reopen because they are near the Tigris river, where they were in range of ISIS mortars and drone strikes from the west side. Vocativ heard and saw the aftermath of a drone strike just two blocks from a primary school while conducting interviews inside.
Some of these schools closed due to attrition during ISIS rule while others continued working after the militants took over. In many schools, over 90 percent of students dropped out. In others, more students remained behind, depending on the will of their parents.
Teachers and students said that lesson plan changes were introduced gradually. Militants phased out subjects like science and inserted religious instruction. Teachers who attempted to skip over the new material were rebuked or threatened. Some of them were thrown out of the schools and replaced with more compliant staff members.
“Many of the subjects were deleted,” said Mariam Hamid Mahmood, 16, speaking at an impromptu classroom at Dibaga refugee camp. “There was no chemistry, no physics, nothing like that. They put in religious instruction and body practice.”
She referred to a new form of physical education, which general education teacher Nada Mohammed of eastern Mosul called “jihadi sports.” The new gym regimen loosely resembled military camp training, with kids being taught to overcome opponents.
“They would put their foot on their stomachs and tell them ‘you are lions’,” she said.
Four children from villages around Mosul, aged 14 through 17, said that the militants taught them the proper way to carry and shoot weapons, including blades and guns, though mostly through demonstrations, with no live training.
More insidiously, ISIS printed new textbooks for subjects like mathematics and grammar studies, filled with pictures of and references to guns, assault vehicles and jihad. Children were taught arithmetic by counting bullets for example. Some exercises asked children to draw lines between weapons like assault rifles and RPGs and vehicles that these weapons could presumably neutralize.
Mohammed said that all these changes had a visible effect on her pupils’ behavior.
“After these lessons, they became like monsters,” she said. “They had such savage behavior. They were constantly fighting with one another.”
Those students whose parents pulled them out of schools also suffered, as their education failed to progress for two and a half years during a very formative age, according to Issam Mohsen, the administrator of a secondary school in eastern Mosul.
“The students’ minds stopped,” he said. “We need to rebuild their minds.”
Outside Schools
Even kids and teens who did not attend schools had plenty of opportunity to run into jihadi influence elsewhere.
Mosul is mainly a Sunni Arab city. Sunnis are a minority in Iraq compared to the Shiites. During the fall of Saddam Hussein, Sunnis lost control over the government as Shiite militias asserted themselves, conducting widespread executions. Some of the Sunni population in Northern Iraq felt threatened enough by this to see ISIS militants as freedom fighters when they first conquered the region.
The militants played on these fears, as well as many Mosul residents’ regular mosque attendance to spread propaganda. In many places under ISIS rule, regular mosque attendance became mandatory, with those who did not attend falling under suspicion. At the mosques, the fighters tried to approach and indoctrinate kids and teens, according to the parents and some teens themselves.
“They were inviting us to study in mosques,” said Mustafa Adnan, 18, outside a recently-reopened secondary school in Eastern Mosul. We saw on social media that ISIS took over the schools, so we dropped out. They wanted us to kill people.”
“When the kids are at the mosque, some Daesh fighters come to them say you look brave, come join the jihad with us,” said Abd al Haq Abdelkader, who lived in western Mosul under ISIS until his escape in January. “[My son] Ayman went to the mosque and they told him that. They started brainwashing him.”
Abdelkader said that a ISIS fighter came to his home to question him about why he did not want to let his 15-year-old son join up as a fighter. He said while the militants ultimately left his family alone, some of his neighbors were beaten and threatened for not allowing their kids to enlist.
His brother, 27-year-old Saif el din, who escaped with him, said that the child soldiers, the so-called Cubs of the Caliphate, usually train for five to six months before being given an opportunity to execute people condemned by ISIS of breaking their laws. He said he personally saw one such execution – a young boy using a glock pistol to kill a condemned man.
Other children, some as young as 10 years old were used as informants, passing on information about violators of rules such as the prohibition on smoking, according to several refugees from the west side.
U.S. Air Force Col. John Dorrian said that the US-led international coalition supporting the Iraqi army’s offensive against ISIS is aware of the practice of child soldier recruitment. Some ISIS fighter corpses, surrounded by ammunition during the eastern half of the offensive looked to be in their teens.
Going Forward
With the battle to liberate western Mosul still ongoing and the east still plagued by violence and infrastructural problems, the city has struggled to resume providing education.
Teachers, students and administrators complained about insufficient textbooks, electricity and running water. Students told Vocativ that they were making extensive use of the internet to fill in the gaps in existing school material.
Teachers added that they are not receiving paychecks and many have to offer their services for free while working other side jobs to earn money.
“I have to work as a taxi driver,” said Arkan Ghamin, a secondary school general education teacher.
Tahan, from the Ministry of Education, said that teachers will have to go through checks by the National Security Service before they can be reintegrated as government employees. He said he does not know how long the process will take.
With regard to books, Baghdad recently sent 75 truckloads of textbooks across most subjects to Mosul, where over 125,000 kids have since returned to regular school attendance as of late February.
Power and running water will be more difficult to restore, he said. More difficult still will be to repair the gap in the students’ education.
“I lost over two years of my life,” said Adnan. “But it’s funny to be back here.”
