Hostage's insight into terrorists' MO: brainwash Western children to take the jihad home
Date November 3, 2014 - 3:22PM
Rachel Olding
Reporter
They are not looking for footsoldiers.
Rather, terrorist groups in the Middle East are recruiting Westerners because they're looking for people who will indoctrinate their young children to bring the messages of hate back home and carve out mini-Islamic empires.
In a chilling insight into the modus operandi of terrorist groups in Syria, American hostage Theo Padnos said he observed eight-year-old children being trained to torture prisoners, wear suicide belts and chant anti-Western anthems.
Padnos, a journalist who penetrated Islamic circles in Yemen, was kidnapped by the Al-Qaeda offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra, or Nusra Front, in Syria in October 2012 and tortured for 22 months before being released.
"Over the last 22 months, I had stopped being surprised when Nusra Front commanders introduced their eight-year-old sons to me by saying, 'He will be a suicide martyr someday, by the will of God,' Padnos wrote in The New York Times last week.
"Around the prisons, they wore large pouches with red wires sticking out of them - apparently suicide belts - and sang their 'destroy the Jews, death to America' anthems in the hallways".
And, he added, it would be a mistake to think this was only occurring in Syria.
His observations are proving eerily true in Australia, where children as young as six are being drawn into overseas conflicts and brainwashed to support the jihad.
Wanted terrorist Khaled Sharrouf has his two young sons with him in Syria, posting images online of the boys holding severed heads with the caption "that's my boy!".
The four children of wanted terrorist Mohamed Elomar were also recently stopped boarding a plane in Sydney with their mother, Fatima, allegedly bound for the Middle East with terrorist-related materials.
Bankstown teenager Abdullah Elmir, 17, has become the latest poster boy for ISIS in Iraq, after he escaped Australia with a 16 year-old friend, telling his family he was going fishing.
It followed the emergence of a video depicting children aged six to 13 chanting violent and racist slogans at an event in western Sydney organised by fringe group Hizb-ut Tahrir.
"It would be a mistake to assume that only Syrians are educating their children in this manner," Padnos wrote.
"The Nusra Front higher-ups were inviting Westerners to the jihad in Syria not so much because they needed more foot soldiers - they didn't - but because they want the Westerners to take the struggle into every neighbourhood and subway station back home.
"They want these Westerners to train their eight-year-olds to do the same. Over time, they said, the jihadists would carve mini-Islamic emirates out of the Western countries, as the Islamic State had done in Syria and Iraq."
Nusra Front were the dominant rebel group fighting the Syrian regime until Islamic State in Syria and the Levant, now known as Islamic State, took over and spread into Iraq.
Recent reports suggest the two groups have joined forces.
Last month, NSW Minister for Citizenship and Communities Victor Dominello vowed to expose those "who seek to import overseas conflict onto our streets" following the discovery of the Hizb-ut Tahrir video from an event in Lakemba in 2013.
In the video, the children promise to die fighting to end democracy in Australia and call for American President Barack Obama to go to hell.
"For adults to be manipulating young Australian children and indoctrinating them with violent ideologies is deplorable," Mr Dominello said.
He said the police and Department of Family and Community Services were involved.
The Australian Federal Police are also reportedly working with NSW school teachers to help identify brainwashed children.
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