Generation ISIS: When Children Are Taught to Be Terrorists
(Isil has released propaganda videos showing children, some of them British, being trained and indoctrinated in the town of Manbij)
Abu Shahed first realized his 11-year-old son was being brainwashed by ISIS when he saw the fourth-grader's textbooks.
They were filled with images of "bombs, guns, machine guns, tanks, warplanes and other war symbols,” the father of four recalled.
The militant group's black flag also featured in materials given to children at the ISIS-run school that Abu Shahed's son was forced to attend after the militants captured the Syrian town of Al Bukamal in 2014.
“My son changed a lot at school and became very pro-ISIS,” said Abu Shahed, who now lives in Turkey with his family and like others interviewed by NBC News did not want to give his full name out of concern for relatives sill living in Syria.
“Me and my wife knew that we had a little spy at home," he said.
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As ISIS continues to lose territory across Syria , families are grappling with the effect the militants’ education system has had on their children and the reality of what could be a generation of radicalized youngsters.
ISIS has invested heavily in ensuring that children become jihadis, in an attempt to outlive the impending collapse of its so-called caliphate, said Rachel Bryson, an expert in the radicalization of children under ISIS at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in London.
The man provided a copy of a math textbook to NBC News that showed images of guns, bullets and tanks in explaining basic arithmetic. An ISIS English language workbook used the positioning of military vehicles to teach the use of prepositions and illustrations of bombs to how to read the time.