When the Australian terrorist Khaled Sharrouf proudly posted a photo of his young son holding the severed head of a murdered Syrian solider in 2014, it seemed to confirm the world’s worst fears about the children of Islamic State.
Along with the caption “That’s my boy!”, Sharrouf’s photo demonstrated – in the most shocking way possible – how children living with Isis were being exposed to a world of almost unimaginable barbarity.
That world has largely crumbled. Isis has lost its territory and thousands of foreign fighters and their families have fled, landing in displacement camps run by Kurdish authorities. Governments of these nationals are scrambling to deal with them – how to get them home, if they even should, and what to do about them when it happens.
The picture of Sharrouf’s son was part of an image the regime cultivated. Beyond the use of children as frontline soldiers and suicide bombers, sleek propaganda produced during the height of its power put religious violence at the centre of what it called its education system.
Textbooks produced by the regime showed chemistry lessons detailing the different ways gases can be consumed, arithmetic was taught by counting bullets, and children played games of “hide and seek” in which they searched for and killed Isis prisoners in the ruins of buildings.
“This was a cult, in our view,” Robert Van Aalst, a lawyer and friend of the Sharrouf children’s maternal grandmother, Karen Nettleton, tells Guardian Australia. “And this cult was very adept at convincing people to join them on religious grounds.”
The extent to which the regime operated a functioning education system has been called into question. In 2017 Foreign Affairs magazine interviewed dozens of teachers from former Isis-controlled territories who painted a picture of a far less coherent operation.
According to FA, the textbooks produced online for global consumption were, in reality, much harder to get hold of. School infrastructure was viewed as a low priority by the regime, and class attendance was low.
Still, though, the crude ways in which children were exposed by to fundamentalist Islam and extreme violence has created a perplexing problem since the regime crumbled: what to do with those children now?
It’s estimated Australia has at least 50 young citizens living in camps like al-Hawl in northern Syria, populated by former Isis foreign fighters and their families. Last week the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, announced that a group of Australian children caught up in the Syrian war after their parents joined Isis have been spirited out of the country.
The group includes six members of Sharrouf’s family: his 17-year-old daughter, Zaynab, her three children – including a baby born just days ago – her younger teenage sister, Hoda, and their brother, Hamzeh – who is under 10.
Three others are the children of the foreign fighter Yasin Rizvic and his wife, Fauzia Khamal Bacha, who joined Isis in 2014.
It is the first instance of Australian children of foreign fighters being rescued from the northern Syrian camps, and Morrison said the decision to repatriate the children had not been made “lightly”.
“As I have said repeatedly, my government would not allow any Australian to be put at risk,” he said. “The fact that parents put their children into harm’s way by taking them into a war zone was a despicable act. However, children should not be punished for the crimes of their parents.”
But the question of how to reintegrate the children of Isis fighters into mainstream society will loom large upon their return, possibly as early as next week.
Over the last decade, deradicalisation programs have become a stable part of counter-terrorism measures in western countries. But identifying and dealing with potential radicalisation – particularly for young people who may have been exposed to extreme trauma – is challenging.
The federal MP and counter-terrorism expert Anne Aly says deradicalisation is mishandled in the way it is discussed, as though it is a “magical pill” to re-educate someone – when really it is helping someone reintegrate into society, helping kids to be kids again.
“Things like getting them schooling, psychological counselling for the trauma of being taken over there, doing PTSD assessments,” she says. “Think of all the things children learn from zero to 13 years old. It’s not just your ABCs and your maths. They also learn how to be. They learn how to love, how to have relationships.”
Aly says Australia will have to bring together a range of experts in different fields to assess and support the children. “The fact is we haven’t really been tested on this.”
Prof Geoff Dean, a criminologist who focuses on terrorism and extremism from Griffith University in Queensland, says part of the challenge is unpicking to what extent children may have bought into a radical ideology. “You’re trying to assess the extent to which those ideas have been indoctrinated,” he says.
“Because all the propaganda, the materials produced by IS portrayed it as a heavenly state run by sharia law where everything was thing wonderful and blah, blah, blah.
“We know that was just rubbish – the reality was it was brutal and nasty. It doesn’t take much for a relatively normal child to see that what the propaganda says and what the reality is, is very different.”
Dr Clarke Jones, a criminologist from the Australian National University’s school of psychology, says while re-educating children returning from conflict zones is necessary it has to be delivered in a “nurturing” environment.
“The deradicalisation path can actually contribute to or compound issues for kids who might be already down that path if it isn’t delivered intelligently,” he says. Jones says the better option is to use normal support services placed within a circle of care that is nurturing, which is sensitive and is delivered with religious and cultural sensitivities in mind.
According to Van Aalst, the worry about deradicalising families returning from former Isis territory is “blown out of proportion”.
The primary concern for the children and their mothers will be post-traumatic stress disorder counselling, he says. In the case of the Sharrouf children, he says, none of them have ever expressed anything to suggest they’ve been radicalised.
“A lot of these kids had no choice in this,” he tells Guardian Australia. “Their father was radical. But people have to understand how [the radicals] operated. Sharrouf and his cohort would never include the women in what they discussed.”
After the five years he has spent helping Nettleton get her family home, Van Aalst suggests the women who travelled with their husbands to Isis territories are victims almost as much as the children.
“They were brought over with a view to having children,” he says. “A prime example is poor Zaynab, brought over there and pregnant by the age of 13. When her husband was killed her father found a new husband for her and she became pregnant to that person.
“I don’t necessarily expect the young women to realise this until they’re home and have counselling – that it is not the norm what those young women have gone through.”
