Children as suicide bombers pose new challenges for security forces

WASHINGTON (Sinclair Broadcast Group) — Officials in Turkey are still working to determine whether the suicide bomber who killed more than 50 people at a wedding in Gaziantep Saturday was an adult or a child, but terrorism experts say the weaponization of children by ISIS and other terrorist groups is a growing concern regardless of the perpetrator of this attack.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had initially stated that the bomber was believed to be 12 to 14, but investigators walked that statement back on Monday and said they are unsure of the age. Nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack, but Erdogan said ISIS is the most likely possibility.

In a separate incident over the weekend, security forces in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk faced off with a boy wearing an explosive suicide belt. Local news footage showed officers holding the boy and cutting off the belt before taking him into custody.

According to CBS News, the boy told interrogators he had been kidnapped by masked men and forced to wear the explosives. His age is unknown, but he is believed to have been displaced from Mosul and arrived in Kirkuk a week ago.

The boy’s arrest came about an hour after a suicide bombing at a mosque that ISIS has claimed responsibility for, but the group has said nothing about the child.

ISIS has used child bombers before, though, with varying degrees of success.

A bomber believed to be a teenager killed 29 people and wounded 60 at a youth soccer game in March. But in 2014, a boy approached Baghdad police and asked them to remove his suicide vest because he did not want to die.

“They are mobilizing children at an unprecedented rate and they proudly showcase that via their online propaganda,” said John Horgan, a professor at Georgia State University and co-author of the upcoming book “Small Arms: Children & Terrorism.” “ISIS deployed over 80 child suicide bombers in 2015 alone.”

ISIS is one of many terrorist groups around the world that recruit or force children into service as bombers.

“It’s definitely the cutting edge for suicide bombing,” said Fr. John Sawicki, chair of the Center for International Relations at Duquesne University.

He noted that the Vietcong used children with hand grenades to target unsuspecting soldiers during the Vietnam War, but the practice has become much more common in recent decades as powerful explosives became lighter and more compact.

Boko Haram, in particular, has relied on children heavily in bombings in Africa. According to UNICEF, one in five suicide attacks in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Chad are perpetrated by children.

The Taliban used young boys to carry out 20 attacks between 2010 and 2014, according to the United Nations.

“The recruitment and use of children in most places, including in Afghanistan, has to be viewed in the context of widespread poverty, lack of opportunity, lack of access to education and employment, and a complete failure of the rule of law,” Charu Lata Hogg of the human rights group Child Soldiers International told Frontline last fall.

As a terrorist tactic, deploying children in suicide attacks has many advantages.

Children are important to their societies and they are often protected by the community, which means they may arouse less suspicion and have easier access to a target than an adult bomber would.

“That's certainly a reason why children are deployed -- to get through the normal defenses that are designed to prevent the ‘normal profile’ of a terrorist,” said John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. “It's also why women suicide bombers have had considerable success.”

As security forces and police become more vigilant against the potential threat of child and female bombers, the potential increases for a “trigger-happy” officer to shoot an innocent child, Sawicki said. The state killing women and children then becomes another propaganda tool for the terrorists.

Turkish security officials had said it appears the bomb in Gaziantep was set off remotely. It is not uncommon for suicide bombers to have backup triggers and remote detonation systems, but if the bomber was indeed a child, Sawicki observed it is also possible they were not a willing participant.

“Children are even more easily manipulated, particularly in some cultures, than women are,” he wrote in a recent article for the Catholic Health Association. “Their status is inferior, and there is considerable temptation for them to try to increase it.”

“Also, a child's understanding of death is at best fractional, and younger minds can be more susceptible to indoctrination if there is no competing narrative from family members or others.”

This is especially true with ISIS, according to Horgan, because the group is engaged in a strategic effort to groom and indoctrinate children.

“It is important to remember that children are victimized here Their aim is to utterly dehumanize the child, to remove all traces of identity and render the child subservient to the movement and to the whims of its adult commanders,” he said.

The children are not necessarily committed to the terrorist ideology. They may be drawn in by the promise of food, shelter, or camaraderie, Horgan said. They risk being severely beaten or executed if they exhibit signs of doubt.

“They parrot it because they are systematically reinforced for doing so, but they don’t understand it,” he explained. “Children’s involvement in ISIS is first and foremost shaped by blind conformity and obedience.”

The video from Kirkuk illustrates one of the disadvantages of enlisting children as bombers. If a child is coerced into action or is not devoted to the cause, they may not necessarily be reliable to carry it out.

“It's more appropriate to speak of these children as both victims and perpetrators -- much like the abducted children who serve as soldiers of the Lord's Resistance Army or Boko Haram,” Feffer said.

He noted that adult ISIS recruits sometimes attempt to defect as well, and recent data suggests many of the adults have a shaky understanding of Islam.

Interviews with children who were intended to be suicide bombers back up the belief that they are often misled or manipulated.

A young Afghan boy told the Telegraph in 2012 that insurgents who armed him promised him he would survive a bombing unharmed. He realized they had lied to him minutes before he was supposed to set off his explosive vest.

"They told us the bombs would not kill us, only the Americans would die and you can come back to us," another child who escaped a madrassa in Pakistan told the Telegraph.

A third child who spoke to Telegraph reporters, a 10-year-old girl, said her Taliban commander brother gave her a suicide vest and told her to attack a police station, insisting she would survive.

If one of the goals of suicide attacks is instilling shock and fear, employing children can be disturbingly effective even when the physical damage is not severe.

“The use of children is one of the most profound and effective forms of psychological warfare,” Horgan said. “Attacks by children generate a sense of utter hopelessness, and terrorist groups now increasingly use children to kill other children.”

“IS knows that the use of children will garner it more publicity,” Feffer said, using another acronym for the Islamic State. “It also demonstrates that IS will do whatever it takes to achieve its goals, thus striking fear into its adversaries.”

ISIS has utilized children heavily in propaganda in the past, promoting videos and photos of the “cubs of the caliphate” training and participating in executions.

“They have completely normalized child militancy via a highly elaborate and systematic effort to socialize, indoctrinate and train children,” Horgan said.

“In contrast to most terror groups for whom their use of children is usually a source of embarrassment, ISIS widely advertises its efforts to nurture what it views as its next generation of fighters,” he said. “They capture every single step of the indoctrination process on social media, and proudly display that to the world.”

The ones who are not sacrificed in suicide attacks will grow into adult terrorists and perpetuate their war. This is why thousands of young children have been abducted by ISIS in Iraq. According to UNICEF, the girls will likely be sold as sex slaves and the boys will be trained as combatants and bombers.

While communities may be outraged by this exploitation of their children as weapons, Sawicki said the parents are often powerless in those countries to do anything about the kidnappings and indoctrination that put children on the path to terrorism.

“One of the most important things is the ability to keep children physically safe, and in many societies, that’s just not possible,” he said.