The other factor, which deserves far more consideration than it has received to date: ISIS’ notoriously hardline and extreme views. In the past, when child soldiers were forced both to commit and to endure heinous acts of violence, they typically were not motivated by religious extremism; rather, they were involved in a political conflict. Bloom notes one exception: the child soldiers fighting for the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, in the Philippines, did so for evidently religious reasons. But the Islamic State has gone beyond simply training children, and forcing them to fight—the approach taken by the war criminals of, say, Sierra Leone—by also indoctrinating its youths with an extreme jihadist narrative based on distortions of the Islamic faith. According to Bloom, this represents a break with “the treatment of child soldiers in Africa, who generally [did] not receive any sort of education ... Liberian and Ugandan militias did not run schools to groom the next generation of fighters.” Instead, the African militias utilized child soldiers “as the cannon fodder, making education irrelevant. They were not interested in creating ideological agreement—they needed bodies to fight.” ISIS seems to
recognize it will need a cadre of young recruits to carry forward its grandiose vision of a lasting Caliphate. Thus it carefully has designed its system, which churns out not just mindless drones, but competent young militants who may truly embrace every aspect of its teachings.
surprised this not the fault of kim kardashian or some other poor female celeb whose 'let themselves go'
