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What Should Europe Do With the Children of ISIS?
BRUSSELS — The 9-year-old boy didn’t like school. He didn’t like the other children, because he knew what they really were: evil unbelievers who deserved to die. So he did what he was trained to do — he attacked them. He was removed from the building on his first day back.

The boy had spent two years away from his European homeland in a place where counting was taught by the strokes of a whip across a torture victim’s back; where watching public beheadings was part of the school curriculum; where his only role was to be molded into a future jihadi, or a “cub of the Caliphate.” His years in the Islamic State’s stronghold in Raqqa, Syria, had turned him into brutalized, radicalized and deeply confused young boy.
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The boy came home in early 2016 with his mother — a convert to Islam who is now on trial — and found himself in a world he had been trained to hate, where he trusted nothing and no one.

“He felt surrounded by evil people,” said Daniel Koehler, a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism and a family counselor based in Stuttgart, Germany. “These children are put under constant stress, being told you will burn, you will be tortured if you do not do this — if you do not kill this infidel, you will end up in hell, your mother will end up in hell. It is a constant psychological torture.”

The boy’s story was recounted to me by Mr. Koehler, who was asked to devise a reintegration strategy after that disastrous attempt to get him back into school. Mr. Koehler would not disclose the Western European country where the boy lives.

“It is a very hardened attitude against these individuals,” he said. “Most people would rather see them dead or prosecuted and put behind bars forever. It is an issue that most of the population are completely unaware of — that there are children and that they have no guilt whatsoever.”

Omar Ramadan, the head of the European Union’s Radicalization Awareness Network Center of Excellence, puts the number of European children in Islamic State territory at hundreds, though it is impossible to say for sure.
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From the age of 4, children start school where they are exposed to a brutal curriculum. “A common counting book would have oranges and apples and then military tanks and guns on the same pages,” said Nikita Malik, a senior research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based think tank where she has studied Islamic State education materials. “The level of their graduation — particularly with boys — depended on their ability to normalize themselves to violence. So to look at a hanging, a public execution, a whipping — the child would be told to count the number of whippings.”

School for girls ends at age 9, when they are considered old enough to marry. At the same age, boys start military training, although they are used even earlier in propaganda videos. One video clip shows a boy of around 4 firing a gun at a prisoner strung up in a children’s play pit.

Jan Kizilhan, a Kurdish-German psychologist, has seen firsthand the damage the Islamic State’s indoctrination can inflict. He treats child soldiers in Iraq and boys from the Yazidi minority who were taken as refugees to Germany after being conscripted by the Islamic State. These children have witnessed rape, torture, murder — in some cases forced to take part in the atrocities themselves.
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Dr. Kizilhan is convinced that it takes a minimum of two years of daily intervention by social workers, psychotherapists, teachers and other professionals to give these children a chance at a normal life. “Those children need security,” he said, “they need stability, and they need orientation.”
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Right now, those fleeing the Islamic State risk death or capture, then have to travel through militia-held territory to Turkey. Only when they enter a consulate or embassy of their home country will they receive any assistance. There, the nationality of any child born in Syria or Iraq needs to be confirmed, often through DNA testing. Many children will have mothers and fathers with different nationalities, raising potential custody issues. Once the child is home, one or both parents could be jailed, leaving questions about who should become that child’s guardian. Then the child must re-enter the education system.

These many complexities — and the potential for a surge in returnees as the Islamic State loses control of Raqqa and Mosul, Iraq — demand a nuanced approach and a Europe-wide strategy for dealing with the children. There must be training for teachers and social workers, and clear guidelines on issues like restarting school and who is best placed to care for a child. The policies need to be focused on protection of the child rather than the demonization of the family.

The alt-right was obscure until the summer of 2015. The first mention of the term in the New York Times came at the end of last year, around the same time as a long piece in BuzzFeed. The BuzzFeed article explored such aspects of alt-right culture as the Pepe the Frog character and the emergence of the resonant term “cuckservative.” With its etymological links to “cuckold” and “cuckoo bird,” “cuck” was a term for that kind of establishment conservative who, wittingly or not, devotes his resources and energy to nurturing other people’s children at the expense of his own. By December “cuckservative” had become sufficiently mainstream for Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan to use the term on the air.

What spurred this sudden emergence? It was not white-nationalist conferences or doctrine, which had been around forever, but events. Last year the West received a nasty high-voltage shock of political reality. The first jolt was the Charlie Hebdo attack in January. France had experienced jihadist murders before, but this time, the strike came in the center of Paris, and France was alarmed to find no small amount of support for the killing among its five million Muslim residents, many of them second- and third-generation citizens.

That spring and summer, European newspapers began to fill with reports of intensifying migrant and refugee flows, driven partially by the Syrian civil war and partially by the expansion and streamlining of people-smuggling routes from Africa. The rescue of boats overflowing with African and North African migrants in the Mediterranean became a regular feature of European news. Finally, in the last week of August, Angela Merkel announced that Germany was open to migrants and refugees, and soon television viewers the world over saw long columns of mostly young men—from Syria, from Pakistan, from Afghanistan—marching into Europe. Because of Merkel and generous social benefits, the liberal northern social democracies were the preferred destination, and they were initially welcoming.

By 2016 the welcome had grown cold. Hundreds of migrants sexually assaulted German women in and around the central train station of Cologne on New Year’s Eve, a mass assault that German authorities initially tried to cover up. It was subsequently reported that a similar assault had taken place at a music festival in Sweden in 2014. It became evident that Angela Merkel’s welcoming policies had thrown into sharp relief a cultural clash between European and Muslim social norms. Over a million new migrants entered Germany in 2015, and an equal number has done so this year—exceeding the number of German births by several hundred thousand.

If the sexual assaults could be seen as the cultural edge of the migrant surge, it was more difficult for even liberal “anti-racist” European leaders to ignore or explain away the terrorism aspect. The Charlie Hebdo attack was followed by the mass slaughters at the Bataclan theater in Paris, at the Brussels Airport, then on a seaside promenade in Nice, culminating in the execution by knife of an aging French priest by two “assimilated” Muslim migrants in his church outside of Rouen. In many of these cases it was reported that though the perpetrators were already on various terrorism watch lists, the French security service—a tough-minded and far from liberal organization—simply lacked sufficient manpower to monitor those who had shown signs of potentially being terrorists. There were too many of them.

One could interpret this alarming new reality in various ways: The Economist, probably the preeminent English-language voice of the European Davos class and political establishment, put Merkel on its cover as “the Indispensable European,” praising her for “boldly upholding European values” with her migrant policies in the fall of 2015. Voters, gradually shifting allegiance to the anti-immigrant parties of the far right, did not agree. Gilles Kepel—a highly respected, politically centrist French expert on Islam—raised the possibility that terrorism and the new migration would send the country into civil war. An aborted civil war formed the background to Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, a number-one bestseller in France. Richard Spencer may be incorrect about America, but one remark from his press conference in DC last month was arresting:

The refugee crisis in Europe is something like a world war. It is in many ways a race war. In terms of direct violence it does not resemble World War I or II. It is a demographic struggle, a struggle for identity, a struggle of who is going to define the continent, period. It is a new kind of war, a postmodern war, a war through immigration. There are no trenches, no guns. But it is a world war.