The children of Islamic State
A couple of questions had taken me to that cold austere corner of war with its concrete, mesh and bars. The broken man seated before me had been a child recruit of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Under Islamic State he had grown old, though it seemed somehow as if the shadow of a boy still loitered somewhere in the room.
“Did you ever, on any occasion before, during or after killing, have cause to regret or doubt your actions?” I wanted to ask him. “Did you ever have any suspicion that what you were doing might be wrong?”
If I knew the answer to those questions, if I knew whether at some point – when as a teenager he had cut the heads from five prisoners who were lying face down, side by side, shoulder to shoulder – he had felt a sense of doubt or wrongdoing or remorse or regret, then perhaps I could better understand what might happen to the children of the caliphate the day Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s edifice finally crumbles to dust.
Could they be somehow retrieved and rescued, or would they be for ever lost to the darkness of unquestioning, murderous intent?
Read more.