Oh dear!! Ahmed Aslef was just 10 years old
when he was lined up with hundreds of other
Yazidi children outside the Iraqi village of Kocho
in front of the heavily armed jihadi fighters of Islamic State (IsIS).
The IS (Daesh) militants ordered the children to
raise their arms and then killed those with armpit hair.
Ahmed's two young sisters were sold as slaves
along with other family members in the cities of Mosul and Raqqa, as IS spread across northern
Iraq at the end of 2014. Since the Kocho
massacre, survivors have claimed as many as
800 people were killed with boys as young as 12
among the dead. Ahmed was spared but was
recruited into the IS youth wing that has
become known as the Caliphate cubs.
A year on and Ahmed, now 11, is living in a safe
house in Stuttgart, Germany, along with around
70 Yazidi women and children. He travelled to
Germany as part of a refugee project run
specifically for women and children who have
escaped from IS. His mother has remained in
Iraq to await news of his father and older
brothers who remain missing and could still be
held by IS, but are more likely among the many
hundreds of dead whose remains have yet to be
identified.
"With Daesh, I didn't go to school with girls. I
didn't learn maths. I went to a place with lots of
other children. We learned how to use weapons.
We were around 60 or 70 boys, no girls were
allowed." He told IBTimes UK in an exclusive
interview.
"I was a very good boy. We learned to take
weapons apart and put them back together
again and how to load them. We learned how to
throw grenades very far away. And we ran a lot
for a long time."
Ahmed was kept in captivity with his family for
nine months in various locations inside Iraq and
Syria, as the family were sold multiple times.
While in captivity, he said his family were
confined to a single room and allowed to leave
only to go to the toilet.
He said his friends at the cub camps were from
many different countries, including Morocco,
Afghanistan, Algeria, Tunisia, Jordan and
Germany. "We were all together every day and
we all wore a special uniform like the older
men." He said.
IS has taken control of most of the schools
within its territory and has changed the
curriculum. Experts say that in terms of the way
terrorist groups use children and the techniques
of indoctrination, the methods of IS have been
unprecedented in their scale.
"I have been studying non-state terrorism for
20 years and I have never seen such a system
towards indoctrination that I have seen with
Isis," said John Horgan, at the Georgia State
University Global Studies Institute.
Ahmed said the first task of the young cubs was
the recitation and memorisation of the Quran,
followed by physical training and light weapons
training, and then by specialist training. He
proudly recalled how he knew how to a fire a
rifle and spoke fondly of his fellow pupils.
His main teacher, he said, was "an old man and
very cross all the time" and he described
witnessing a number of deaths. It appears the
most extreme violence he was forced to witness
was in Tal Afar, in Iraq, where he spent some
time in captivity.
"One man, from Tal Afar, he was a very bad
man. I was in Tal Afar, and there were lots of
boys from my village Kocho, but also other boys
and we were altogether. There were many Shiite
men there, as well as Turkmen and Daesh killed
all the men in Tal Afar," he said.
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