The Front Page Cover
2016 The truth will set you free
Featuring:
The 'children of ISIS,' target practice
starts at age 6. By their teens, they're
ready to be suicide bombers
by Souad Mekhennet & Joby Warrick
~~~
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liar-Hillary's Supreme Court Vision
With so much media focus on Donald Trump's 11-year-old lewd comments it was easy to miss some of the more substantive issues discussed in Sunday night's debate. For example, both candidates were asked what priorities they consider as most important in selecting Supreme Court justices. The very real issue of the current vacancy on the Supreme Court has been perhaps the primary justification for supporting the admittedly flawed Trump.
liar-Hillary Clinton made her case: "I want to appoint Supreme Court justices who understand the way the world really works, who have real-life experience, who have not just been in a big law firm ... but ... they actually understand what people are up against." liar-Hillary made no mention of wanting to select judges who would be faithful to the Constitution and Rule of Law, instead focusing on pet leftist issues such as reversing Citizens United and ensuring that the rulings on same-sex marriage and Roe v. Wade would not be overturned.
The Supreme Court is clearly an issue that Trump should continue to campaign on as it is a strength for him. However, unless the poll numbers change, the prospect of a Trump election victory is looking slimmer by the day. In the event that liar-Clinton wins, in all likelihood Senate Republicans would move to confirm Barack nObama's nominee, Merrick Garland, during a lame-duck session as a means of preventing liar-Hillary from selecting an even more leftist judge. That is unless nObama plays a little political gamesmanship himself and withdraws his Garland nomination. In any case, with two flawed and compromised candidates campaigning for the highest office in the land, the primary outcome of this election will be the future balance of the Supreme Court. ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/digests/45307
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liar-Hillary Clinton made her case: "I want to appoint Supreme Court justices who understand the way the world really works, who have real-life experience, who have not just been in a big law firm ... but ... they actually understand what people are up against." liar-Hillary made no mention of wanting to select judges who would be faithful to the Constitution and Rule of Law, instead focusing on pet leftist issues such as reversing Citizens United and ensuring that the rulings on same-sex marriage and Roe v. Wade would not be overturned.
The Supreme Court is clearly an issue that Trump should continue to campaign on as it is a strength for him. However, unless the poll numbers change, the prospect of a Trump election victory is looking slimmer by the day. In the event that liar-Clinton wins, in all likelihood Senate Republicans would move to confirm Barack nObama's nominee, Merrick Garland, during a lame-duck session as a means of preventing liar-Hillary from selecting an even more leftist judge. That is unless nObama plays a little political gamesmanship himself and withdraws his Garland nomination. In any case, with two flawed and compromised candidates campaigning for the highest office in the land, the primary outcome of this election will be the future balance of the Supreme Court. ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/digests/45307
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CA Wants nObamaCare for Illegals
Joe Wilson was right. In 2009, the South Carolina representative interrupted Barack nObama's introduction of his nationalized health care scheme to a joint session of Congress: "You Lie! You LIE!" yelled Wilson. The nObama claim that prompted Wilson's outburst was the nObamaCare would not be extended to cover illegal aliens. Well, nObamaCare was built on a web of lies, so it's not surprising to see another one. In June 2016, California Democrat Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law allowing the state to request a waiver from this prohibition. On Sept. 30, California formally requested that exemption, meaning it's only a matter of time before 390,000 illegals in the Golden State can hop on the nObamaCare health care exchange. Those illegals would not immediately be eligible for direct subsidies, but how long does anyone think it will be before Democrats bemoan this second-class status and change that too? Furthermore, argues Austin Yack at National Review, "what Governor Brown and California's majority-Democratic legislature refuse to admit is that by opening the Exchange up to those who break U.S. immigration law, they are legitimizing and in effect encouraging further illegal immigration."
Meanwhile, in Sunday night's second debate, liar-Hillary Clinton vowed to "fix" nObamaCare, despite acknowledging, "Premiums have gotten too high," and so have "copays, deductibles [and] prescription drug costs." But then her proposals include more of the same. "Right now, we are at 90% health insurance coverage. That's the highest we've ever been in our country," she boasted. "So I want us to get to 100%, but get costs down and keep quality up." Those things are almost mutually exclusive. And California is about to exhibit yet another way that's true. Even liar-Hillary's own husband thinks nObamaCare is "crazy." It may be called nObamaCare, but it's liar-Hillary's brainchild. She should be held accountable for it. ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/digests/45307
.
Meanwhile, in Sunday night's second debate, liar-Hillary Clinton vowed to "fix" nObamaCare, despite acknowledging, "Premiums have gotten too high," and so have "copays, deductibles [and] prescription drug costs." But then her proposals include more of the same. "Right now, we are at 90% health insurance coverage. That's the highest we've ever been in our country," she boasted. "So I want us to get to 100%, but get costs down and keep quality up." Those things are almost mutually exclusive. And California is about to exhibit yet another way that's true. Even liar-Hillary's own husband thinks nObamaCare is "crazy." It may be called nObamaCare, but it's liar-Hillary's brainchild. She should be held accountable for it. ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/digests/45307
.
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Surrender? US schools
to REQUIRE Muslim indoctrination
by Lt. Col. Allen West
{aim.org} ~ I’m not an alarmist but I will present hypocrisy when I see it. There are many who’ve labeled a recent action in Kansas City as some sort of submission to Islamic supremacy... I don’t see it in such an alarmist fashion, but I am rather perplexed by the liberal progressive socialist hypocrisy. As reported by WND.com, “One of the nation’s largest school districts has adopted a resolution banning “hateful speech” against Muslim students while accusing America of having “a long history of racism and xenophobia.” The controversial resolution, unanimously approved by the Kansas City Board of Education on Sept. 28, states that there are 30,000 Muslims living in the greater Kansas City area, “making invaluable contributions to our economy, our social and political life, and our culture.” ...They live in American, not theirs. They should a simulate or get out.
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WikiLeaks Releases
Batch #10 John Podesta Emails…
{theconservativetreehouse.com} ~ Today WikiLeaks released another batch of emails from the account of life-long liar-Clinton family ‘fixer’ John Podesta... FYI – The date of the release is 10-17-2016 as noted in the upload/release date. However, there is not an accompanying announcement from WikiLeaks to alert of the release. Apparently John Podesta, and Karen Finney, were very disappointed the San Bernardino shooters were not white...
Release email: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/?q=&mfrom=&mto=&title=¬itle=&date_from=&date_to=&nofrom=¬o=&count=50&sort=6#searchresult
NBC reports a shooter's name: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/11500
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James O’Keefe Exposes Orchestrated
liar-Clinton “Violence Machine”
{theconservativetreehouse.com} ~ In this explosive new video from Project Veritas Action, a Democratic dirty tricks operative unwittingly provides a dark money trail to the DNC and liar-Clinton campaign... The video documents violence at Trump rallies that is traced to the liar-Clinton campaign and the DNC through a process called birddogging. A shady coordinated communications chain between the DNC, liar-Clinton Campaign, liar-Hillary Clinton’s Super PAC (Priorities) and other organizations are revealed. A key liar-Clinton operative is on camera saying, “It doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say, we need to win this mother***er.”... https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/10/17/james-okeefe-exposes-orchestrated-clinton-violence-machine-video-release-1/
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State Dept.'s Kennedy Offered FBI 'Quid Pro Quo' to Unclassify lar-Clinton Emails
by newsmax.com
{newsmax.com} ~According to the FBI notes, State Department Undersecretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy contacted an FBI official whose name was censored... Kennedy was a close aide to liar-Clinton during her tenure as the nation's top diplomat between 2009 and early 2013. In the FBI records, a bureau official said Kennedy "asked his assistance in altering the email's classification in exchange for a 'quid pro quo,'" and that in exchange "State would reciprocate by allowing the FBI to place more agents in countries where they are presently forbidden." Republicans quickly seized on the report as collusion within the nObama administration to protect liar-Clinton, now the Democratic presidential nominee. The FBI said Monday a now-retired FBI official it did not identify had fielded Kennedy's request to change the email classification and had said it would be considered if Kennedy "would address a pending, unaddressed FBI request for space for additional FBI employees assigned abroad." The bureau said the FBI subsequently investigated the proposed arrangement but did not describe the outcome of that review...
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liar-Clinton Extreme Meltdown From
Surprise Question – Screams,
Thrown Water, Obscenities
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ Bill Still received some information overnight that point out the serious character defects or total lack thereof on the part of the Democrat candidate for president... liar-Hillary Clinton exhibited rage towards the moderator at the Commander-in-Chief Forum, Matt Lauer, for doing in one instance what he should have done for the entire thirty minutes, asking her and pressing her on a question that she hadn’t been fed in advance. She was supposed to go out, recite responses that were well rehearsed and wait for Trump to be caught off guard. Instead it was she who got the surprise and that triggered a rage that we’ve rumors of. Now a firsthand accounting of what happened was sent to Bill Still, and he’s sharing it with America. The source of his information originated at a Comcast email address, the parent company of NBC. It is supposedly from members of the technical crew that worked the event and describes what happened moments after liar-Clinton walked off the set. They described “a massive profanity-laced tirade” on the part of liar-Clinton that was directed at Matt Lauer in particular, but had moments for others, including DNC Chairperson Donna Brazile... http://rickwells.us/clinton-extreme-meltdown-surprise-question-screams-thrown-water-obscenities/
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Judge Gives Court Order Beat Down to the IRS!
by Stephen Dinan
{washingtontimes.com} ~ A federal judge has ordered the IRS to finally clean up the tea party targeting mess, giving the tax agency less than a month to decide on a handful of applications that are still pending more than three years... after officials first admitted they were targeting the conservative groups and subjecting them to intrusive scrutiny. The IRS also must file a brief detailing the steps it has taken to prevent further targeting and to make sure the tea party groups don’t face any more fallout from the stigma of having been singled out in the first place, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said in an order issued late Friday. Judge Walton ordered final decisions on two applications that have been pending for years and said four other groups that had withdrawn their applications amid the unconstitutional targeting can resubmit and the IRS must decide on those, too, by Nov. 11… http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/16/irs-ordered-to-clear-tea-party-backlog-within-mont/
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Lou Dobbs – liar-Clinton State Dept Bribing
nObama’s FBI – Unlimited Federal Corruption
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ An increasingly thoroughly disgusted Lou Dobbs says, “You could not make anything that is happening in this country these days, you could not make it up... A few thoughts now on liar-Hillary Clinton and those who drive the liar-Clinton Cartel from the Near East desk of the State Department to the office of John hanoi-Kerry himself to the liar-Clinton Foundation to the Justice Department to the FBI to the White House. The stench of broken trust and public corruption fills the dank, heavy air of our capital.” “Despite what you may be told by the liar-Clintons and their accomplices and co-corrupters,” says Dobbs, “There are few accidents and seldom any coincidences in the dark, secretive liar-Clinton realm of power. There is most often only careful calculation and orchestrated lies and deceit.” "In a monumental Irony,” Dobbs says, “the search for truth hidden by and behind the rotting bureaucracy of our federal government has been chiefly aided by the relentless stream of emails, documents and secretive speeches given by Mrs. liar-Clinton, all now revealed – by WikiLeaks. The WikiLeaks releases confirm without exception that the liar-Clinton cartel will do anything to hide the truth from Americans, giving life to the axiom she stated in a 2013 speech saying, ‘you need both a public and a private position.”... http://rickwells.us/lou-dobbs-clinton-state-dept-bribing-obamas-fbi-unlimited-federal-corruption/
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liar-Clinton Campaign Tried to Limit Damage From Classified Info on Email Server
by Bill Gertz
{freebeacon.com} ~ Documents from liar-Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign show researchers justified leaks of top secret data on drone strikes and North Korea’s nuclear program found on her private email server by highlighting similar disclosures... The detailed reports on the classified information found on liar-Clinton’s private email system were produced by campaign researchers and sent to senior officials, including campaign chairman John Podesta, by opposition research director Tony Carrk on January 29. The documents were among thousands of hacked emails obtained from Podesta’s Gmail account and posted last week on Wikileaks. The U.S. intelligence community has accused Russia of orchestrating the hack in order to influence the U.S. presidential election... http://freebeacon.com/politics/clinton-campaign-tried-limit-damage-classified-info-email-server/?utm_source=Freedom+Mail&utm_campaign=a0351bcbb7-WFB_Morning_Beacon_10_18_1610_17_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-a0351bcbb7-45611665
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.
The 'children of ISIS,' target practice
starts at age 6. By their teens, they're
ready to be suicide bombers
by Souad Mekhennet & Joby Warrick
{jewishworldreview.com} ~ The interview had gone on for nearly an hour when Taim, a slim, dark-eyed boy, started to fidget. The 8-year-old asked for paper and settled back in an oversized hotel chair to draw a memory.
His picture, in a child's bold scrawl, was a scene from the small park near his house, a place where he used to play in the days before the bearded men with guns took over the city. A crowd in the park had gathered around two figures, and Taim remembered them vividly: A man with one eye, and a bald man who seemed upset about something.
"He was looking very angry," Taim said, narrating his drawing of the bald man. "He is holding the other man and he is also holding something in his right hand.
"The other man has no eye - they had already taken his eye, you see?" he said, pointing to the second figure. "And then the other men stood behind him, and the head of the man with one eye just fell."
The boy's slender finger touched the page to show the severed head he had drawn.
"His head just fell," Taim repeated.
The boy closed his eyes, as if to make the image go away.
"No," he said finally. "I don't want to remember it."
During the two years since the founding of the self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria, an estimated 6 million people have lived under the rule of the Islamic State. At least a third of these - about 2 million souls - are under age 15.
These are, in a real sense, children of the caliphate. Collectively, say experts who have studied them, they are a profoundly traumatized population: impressionable young brains exposed to not only the ravages of war but also countless acts of unspeakable cruelty, from public floggings and amputations to executions - the crucifixions and beheadings that have contributed to the Islamic State's global notoriety.
The Washington Post interviewed five boys whose families escaped from Islamic State territory, including Taim, a Syrian refugee interviewed near his temporary home in Europe. The location of the refugee facility is being withheld by The Post at the family's request. The newspaper also reviewed videos, reports and transcripts containing the stories of dozens of other boys and girls whose experiences are broadly similar to those interviewed.
Some, such as Taim, also ended up in the terrorist group's schools and training camps, where they were force-fed a diet of Islamic State ideology and gory videos. Isolated from their families, they were taught to shoot rifles and throw grenades, and also encouraged to volunteer as suicide bombers, a role extolled by their instructors as the highest calling for any pious Muslim youth. Several described being made to witness - and even participate in - the executions of prisoners.
Aid workers who interact regularly with such youths describe deep psychological wounds that may be among the Islamic State's most enduring legacies, setting the stage for new cycles of violence and extremism many years after the caliphate itself is wiped away. But relief organizations are straining to offer even limited counseling to children in the region's overflowing refugee camps, and officials said even fewer resources are available for those living in shattered Iraqi and Syrian towns that were recently liberated from terrorist rule.
"Everyone has been traumatized," said Chris Seiple, president emeritus of the Institute for Global Engagement, a charity that works with families fleeing the Islamic State. In counseling sessions set up by his organization in northern Iraq, he said, "you can watch how these kids try to begin working through this stuff," sometimes with words but often in drawings that seem to conjure up the same recurring nightmare.
"We see kids drawing pictures of watching ISIS chopping off heads," said Seiple, using a common acronym for the Islamic State. "What do you do with that, besides weep?"
Taim was 6 when the militants with their black flags rolled into Raqqa, a city in north-central Syria. The streets of the Islamic State's future capital had already witnessed sporadic battles between rival factions since the start of country's civil war in late 2011. Now, with the terrorists in charge, the fighting would ease, but the bloodshed would grow steadily worse.
Taim, among the youths interviewed, was exposed to an unusually wide range of experiences during the nearly two years his family lived in the caliphate, from attending a school supervised by Islamic State instructors to undergoing military training in a camp intended to turn young boys into warriors and suicide bombers. In other respects, his story is strikingly similar to that of the four other boys, all of whom described harsh conditions and the brutal treatment of ordinary citizens, including family members. The Post agreed not to identify the boys, or photograph them, to protect their privacy and prevent possible retaliation by Islamic State supporters. Taim's family name was withheld at his parents' request.
Bright and alert with a shy smile, Taim turns wistful when asked about his memories of the early weeks after the jihadists took control. Before the Islamic State, daily life revolved around family, play time and his local school, which he adored. "I loved school," he said with a grin, listing math, art and sports as favorite subjects.
Initially, the town's new occupiers closed his school, turning the building into a military base, Taim's family members said. When students were finally allowed to return months later, the fighters were still there, a physical presence in the classroom. They gave out trinkets and prizes and personally oversaw the introduction of a new curriculum, developed and approved by the Islamic State.
"They would give us toys at the beginning," he said, "but when the lessons began, they were very serious. They would mainly teach us about Islam."
Taim remembered how his new teachers gave special emphasis to a particular story from the life of Muhammad. In it, Islam's founder punishes a group of camel thieves by plucking out their eyes and chopping off their limbs. For Raqqa youths, the lesson about harsh justice appeared to serve as both a warning and a justification for the cruel punishments the militants were beginning to inflict on the city's residents for violations ranging from suspecting spying to smoking cigarettes.
Over time, the Islamic State replaced traditional classroom textbooks with new ones, written and published by the terrorists themselves. Many of the books have been collected and studied over the past two years by Western analysts, who describe the group's educational literature as thinly disguised propaganda.
For very young children, lessons on arithmetic and handwriting are illustrated with pictures of guns, grenades and tanks. For older pupils, books on science and history glorify martyrdom and portray the creation of the Islamic State as humanity's crowning achievement.
Jacob Olidort, an expert on Islamic militant literature who has analyzed dozens of such texts, said the literature is a serious and systematic attempt at shaping young minds, with the aim of producing not just believers but fighters.
"What we learn is that education is not only part of their arsenal, but an entire theater of conflict," said Olidort, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "They're trying to create a jihadi generation. It's not just believing the right creed, but being able to fight. It's about convincing young people that only their perspective on the world is right and everyone else's is wrong."
For Taim, some of the most memorable lessons were not contained in books. Often, he recalled, the Islamic State's teachers admonished the children to act as informants, promptly reporting any behavior by their parents that violated religious laws or suggested opposition to the group's rule.
One day, he said, the teachers marched the class into a nearby park and made the children stand around an open pit - a future grave, one of the instructors said, for any child who failed to speak up if his parents were resisting or hiding from the Islamic State.
"If we did not tell them," he said, "they would throw us into the hole."
Even under the rule of terrorists, Taim's parents sought to preserve a few fragments of a normal life for the young family. His mother donned the heavy abaya robe and double veil whenever she ventured outside to shop, and the family's daily rhythm adjusted to accommodate the Islamic State's strictures on participation in daily prayers.
But privately, the parents worried that life under the regime was profoundly affecting their oldest son. A walk to the nearby al-Rasheed Park - a favorite playground before the civil war - entailed a risk of encountering decapitated corpses, part of a garish display that followed the near-daily executions in Raqqa's main square. The boy personally witnessed several beheadings, and years later he could describe vividly how the bearded executioner would hold the victim's head with one hand while using the other to slice and hack.
"There was a lot of blood. A loooootttt of blood," Taim said, drawing out the word.
But a bigger jolt came on the day that Taim burst into the house and began packing his belongings, announcing that he had been selected for a special training camp for boys. The parents had heard about the place, a kind of boot camp for preteens where children received intensive instruction in weaponry, combat skills and Islamic State ideology.
Taim insisted that "it was his will" to leave home to enroll in the camp, and he accused his parents of neglecting his religious education, his mother said. She knew the futility of opposing the Islamic State's wish for her son, yet she tried to talk him out of going. Stay, she told her son, and the family would go to mosque more frequently.
"I said, 'Come home and pray! You can pray at home!' " she recalled. "He said, 'May Allah deprive you, as you deprived me."
The camp in which Taim eventually enrolled was one of dozens established throughout the caliphate to train boys as young as 6. Some are named after the organization's leaders and heroes, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who founded the Iraqi terrorist group that would later call itself the Islamic State.
All are prominently featured in the jihadists' online propaganda, which includes video footage of young boys in camouflage uniforms firing weapons, assisting in executions and training for suicide missions.
"The Islamic State seduces young boys into their training camps and puts so many resources into training them for absolute loyalty and obedience," said Anne Speckhard, an expert in violent extremism and an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical Center. For the Islamic State, she said, the camps are most effective as a production line for suicide bombers, "because children are the easiest of any of their cadres to totally manipulate."
Speckhard interviewed graduates of such camps as part of a project for the Washington-based International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, which collected the stories of Islamic State veterans in video archives and in a published volume called "ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories of the Terrorist Caliphate." In one of the videotaped interviews, a 15-year-old Syrian describes how boys at his camp would compete for a chance to become a "button" - a suicide bomber.
"They teach him about the car, how it's rigged up, and you go near it to see that you push the button and it will explode," said Ibn Omar, who was 13 when he joined an Islamic State youth camp in Syria. "They tell them to blow themselves up among the unbelievers - the infidels. The guy who taught us religion taught this. He taught us, 'When you get to that car and push the button you will go to Paradise.' "
Taim, just 6 at the time of his induction as a "cub of the caliphate," was too young, even for such a simple-minded mission. For him, camp was a mix of fun activities - sports, contests and target practice - with a heavy dollop of religious indoctrination. Many of his school friends trained alongside him, together with foreigners: teens and boys from faraway places such as Egypt, Pakistan and Uzbekistan.
"They said only special boys would get there: the best ones. And they would strengthen our belief," he said. "They wanted to teach us more about religious rules, sports and how to become a mujahid," or holy warrior.
Between lessons, he said, the instructors showed videos: hour after hour of violent images, all of them starring Daesh - a common Arabic acronym for the Islamic State - and all striking precisely the same theme.
"They would show how Daesh was fighting and beheading all those who were against the caliphate," Taim said.
Back in Raqqa, the pressure to flee the caliphate grew stronger. The city's new leaders began harassing Taim's father, suspicious that he might have once fought for a rival militia group. The parents began to worry that Taim would be taken from them permanently.
The family gathered what money they had. One day, when Taim was home, they slipped out of Raqqa, paying bribes at checkpoints and border crossings and then joining the torrent of refugees heading from Turkey to Northern Europe. Eventually, they landed in a refugee camp, where they would begin to seek a new life for Taim far outside the reach of the Islamic State.
In the caliphate, the boundaries of the self-declared Islamic State are contracting against the steady advance of a U.S.-led military coalition, which has overrun key cities and killed many of the group's most prominent leaders. Yet, the youth camps still remain - a testament to their enormous value at a time when the terrorist group is fighting for its survival. An Islamic State operative, who agreed to be interviewed by The Post over the Internet, described the camps and their young graduates as vital to the organization's future.
"They are our fighters and leaders of tomorrow, and they will be strong and not fearing to die," said the operative who would only speak on condition of anonymity. "In the future you will not only fear our men. You must fear our children, too."
The Syrian boy who escaped the caliphate's fearsome embrace appears for now to be adjusting. Taim beams when he talks about his new school, and his quick grasp of the local language betrays both an intelligence and a yearning for acceptance in his family's adopted homeland. He is a charmer, playfully asking a visiting journalist about her age after she asks about his.
"Don't worry, I know women like to make themselves younger than they seem," he said. Giggling, he elaborated on the source of his knowledge: "This one guy from Daesh said I should learn this lesson about women so I won't get in trouble with my future wife."
Yet, even in peaceful, prosperous Northern Europe, the Islamic State at times seems terrifyingly close. Taim's mother described occasional fits of hysteria in which the boy screams uncontrollably. He chatters at length about his experiences in the training camp, only to abruptly shut down. "I don't like to remember what happened there," he said.
Taim's mother said that she is seeking counseling for her son while trying to keep his mind occupied on school and sports. But there are times, she said, when Taim is overcome with dread, convinced that the Islamic State will never relinquish its hold on him.
During such spells, the mother said, the 8-year-old becomes quietly forlorn, as though resigning himself to a dreary fate that he cannot escape.
"I belong to the Daesh people now," he said.
His picture, in a child's bold scrawl, was a scene from the small park near his house, a place where he used to play in the days before the bearded men with guns took over the city. A crowd in the park had gathered around two figures, and Taim remembered them vividly: A man with one eye, and a bald man who seemed upset about something.
"He was looking very angry," Taim said, narrating his drawing of the bald man. "He is holding the other man and he is also holding something in his right hand.
"The other man has no eye - they had already taken his eye, you see?" he said, pointing to the second figure. "And then the other men stood behind him, and the head of the man with one eye just fell."
The boy's slender finger touched the page to show the severed head he had drawn.
"His head just fell," Taim repeated.
The boy closed his eyes, as if to make the image go away.
"No," he said finally. "I don't want to remember it."
During the two years since the founding of the self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria, an estimated 6 million people have lived under the rule of the Islamic State. At least a third of these - about 2 million souls - are under age 15.
These are, in a real sense, children of the caliphate. Collectively, say experts who have studied them, they are a profoundly traumatized population: impressionable young brains exposed to not only the ravages of war but also countless acts of unspeakable cruelty, from public floggings and amputations to executions - the crucifixions and beheadings that have contributed to the Islamic State's global notoriety.
The Washington Post interviewed five boys whose families escaped from Islamic State territory, including Taim, a Syrian refugee interviewed near his temporary home in Europe. The location of the refugee facility is being withheld by The Post at the family's request. The newspaper also reviewed videos, reports and transcripts containing the stories of dozens of other boys and girls whose experiences are broadly similar to those interviewed.
Some, such as Taim, also ended up in the terrorist group's schools and training camps, where they were force-fed a diet of Islamic State ideology and gory videos. Isolated from their families, they were taught to shoot rifles and throw grenades, and also encouraged to volunteer as suicide bombers, a role extolled by their instructors as the highest calling for any pious Muslim youth. Several described being made to witness - and even participate in - the executions of prisoners.
Aid workers who interact regularly with such youths describe deep psychological wounds that may be among the Islamic State's most enduring legacies, setting the stage for new cycles of violence and extremism many years after the caliphate itself is wiped away. But relief organizations are straining to offer even limited counseling to children in the region's overflowing refugee camps, and officials said even fewer resources are available for those living in shattered Iraqi and Syrian towns that were recently liberated from terrorist rule.
"Everyone has been traumatized," said Chris Seiple, president emeritus of the Institute for Global Engagement, a charity that works with families fleeing the Islamic State. In counseling sessions set up by his organization in northern Iraq, he said, "you can watch how these kids try to begin working through this stuff," sometimes with words but often in drawings that seem to conjure up the same recurring nightmare.
"We see kids drawing pictures of watching ISIS chopping off heads," said Seiple, using a common acronym for the Islamic State. "What do you do with that, besides weep?"
Taim was 6 when the militants with their black flags rolled into Raqqa, a city in north-central Syria. The streets of the Islamic State's future capital had already witnessed sporadic battles between rival factions since the start of country's civil war in late 2011. Now, with the terrorists in charge, the fighting would ease, but the bloodshed would grow steadily worse.
Taim, among the youths interviewed, was exposed to an unusually wide range of experiences during the nearly two years his family lived in the caliphate, from attending a school supervised by Islamic State instructors to undergoing military training in a camp intended to turn young boys into warriors and suicide bombers. In other respects, his story is strikingly similar to that of the four other boys, all of whom described harsh conditions and the brutal treatment of ordinary citizens, including family members. The Post agreed not to identify the boys, or photograph them, to protect their privacy and prevent possible retaliation by Islamic State supporters. Taim's family name was withheld at his parents' request.
Bright and alert with a shy smile, Taim turns wistful when asked about his memories of the early weeks after the jihadists took control. Before the Islamic State, daily life revolved around family, play time and his local school, which he adored. "I loved school," he said with a grin, listing math, art and sports as favorite subjects.
Initially, the town's new occupiers closed his school, turning the building into a military base, Taim's family members said. When students were finally allowed to return months later, the fighters were still there, a physical presence in the classroom. They gave out trinkets and prizes and personally oversaw the introduction of a new curriculum, developed and approved by the Islamic State.
"They would give us toys at the beginning," he said, "but when the lessons began, they were very serious. They would mainly teach us about Islam."
Taim remembered how his new teachers gave special emphasis to a particular story from the life of Muhammad. In it, Islam's founder punishes a group of camel thieves by plucking out their eyes and chopping off their limbs. For Raqqa youths, the lesson about harsh justice appeared to serve as both a warning and a justification for the cruel punishments the militants were beginning to inflict on the city's residents for violations ranging from suspecting spying to smoking cigarettes.
Over time, the Islamic State replaced traditional classroom textbooks with new ones, written and published by the terrorists themselves. Many of the books have been collected and studied over the past two years by Western analysts, who describe the group's educational literature as thinly disguised propaganda.
For very young children, lessons on arithmetic and handwriting are illustrated with pictures of guns, grenades and tanks. For older pupils, books on science and history glorify martyrdom and portray the creation of the Islamic State as humanity's crowning achievement.
Jacob Olidort, an expert on Islamic militant literature who has analyzed dozens of such texts, said the literature is a serious and systematic attempt at shaping young minds, with the aim of producing not just believers but fighters.
"What we learn is that education is not only part of their arsenal, but an entire theater of conflict," said Olidort, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "They're trying to create a jihadi generation. It's not just believing the right creed, but being able to fight. It's about convincing young people that only their perspective on the world is right and everyone else's is wrong."
For Taim, some of the most memorable lessons were not contained in books. Often, he recalled, the Islamic State's teachers admonished the children to act as informants, promptly reporting any behavior by their parents that violated religious laws or suggested opposition to the group's rule.
One day, he said, the teachers marched the class into a nearby park and made the children stand around an open pit - a future grave, one of the instructors said, for any child who failed to speak up if his parents were resisting or hiding from the Islamic State.
"If we did not tell them," he said, "they would throw us into the hole."
Even under the rule of terrorists, Taim's parents sought to preserve a few fragments of a normal life for the young family. His mother donned the heavy abaya robe and double veil whenever she ventured outside to shop, and the family's daily rhythm adjusted to accommodate the Islamic State's strictures on participation in daily prayers.
But privately, the parents worried that life under the regime was profoundly affecting their oldest son. A walk to the nearby al-Rasheed Park - a favorite playground before the civil war - entailed a risk of encountering decapitated corpses, part of a garish display that followed the near-daily executions in Raqqa's main square. The boy personally witnessed several beheadings, and years later he could describe vividly how the bearded executioner would hold the victim's head with one hand while using the other to slice and hack.
"There was a lot of blood. A loooootttt of blood," Taim said, drawing out the word.
But a bigger jolt came on the day that Taim burst into the house and began packing his belongings, announcing that he had been selected for a special training camp for boys. The parents had heard about the place, a kind of boot camp for preteens where children received intensive instruction in weaponry, combat skills and Islamic State ideology.
Taim insisted that "it was his will" to leave home to enroll in the camp, and he accused his parents of neglecting his religious education, his mother said. She knew the futility of opposing the Islamic State's wish for her son, yet she tried to talk him out of going. Stay, she told her son, and the family would go to mosque more frequently.
"I said, 'Come home and pray! You can pray at home!' " she recalled. "He said, 'May Allah deprive you, as you deprived me."
The camp in which Taim eventually enrolled was one of dozens established throughout the caliphate to train boys as young as 6. Some are named after the organization's leaders and heroes, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who founded the Iraqi terrorist group that would later call itself the Islamic State.
All are prominently featured in the jihadists' online propaganda, which includes video footage of young boys in camouflage uniforms firing weapons, assisting in executions and training for suicide missions.
"The Islamic State seduces young boys into their training camps and puts so many resources into training them for absolute loyalty and obedience," said Anne Speckhard, an expert in violent extremism and an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical Center. For the Islamic State, she said, the camps are most effective as a production line for suicide bombers, "because children are the easiest of any of their cadres to totally manipulate."
Speckhard interviewed graduates of such camps as part of a project for the Washington-based International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, which collected the stories of Islamic State veterans in video archives and in a published volume called "ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories of the Terrorist Caliphate." In one of the videotaped interviews, a 15-year-old Syrian describes how boys at his camp would compete for a chance to become a "button" - a suicide bomber.
"They teach him about the car, how it's rigged up, and you go near it to see that you push the button and it will explode," said Ibn Omar, who was 13 when he joined an Islamic State youth camp in Syria. "They tell them to blow themselves up among the unbelievers - the infidels. The guy who taught us religion taught this. He taught us, 'When you get to that car and push the button you will go to Paradise.' "
Taim, just 6 at the time of his induction as a "cub of the caliphate," was too young, even for such a simple-minded mission. For him, camp was a mix of fun activities - sports, contests and target practice - with a heavy dollop of religious indoctrination. Many of his school friends trained alongside him, together with foreigners: teens and boys from faraway places such as Egypt, Pakistan and Uzbekistan.
"They said only special boys would get there: the best ones. And they would strengthen our belief," he said. "They wanted to teach us more about religious rules, sports and how to become a mujahid," or holy warrior.
Between lessons, he said, the instructors showed videos: hour after hour of violent images, all of them starring Daesh - a common Arabic acronym for the Islamic State - and all striking precisely the same theme.
"They would show how Daesh was fighting and beheading all those who were against the caliphate," Taim said.
Back in Raqqa, the pressure to flee the caliphate grew stronger. The city's new leaders began harassing Taim's father, suspicious that he might have once fought for a rival militia group. The parents began to worry that Taim would be taken from them permanently.
The family gathered what money they had. One day, when Taim was home, they slipped out of Raqqa, paying bribes at checkpoints and border crossings and then joining the torrent of refugees heading from Turkey to Northern Europe. Eventually, they landed in a refugee camp, where they would begin to seek a new life for Taim far outside the reach of the Islamic State.
In the caliphate, the boundaries of the self-declared Islamic State are contracting against the steady advance of a U.S.-led military coalition, which has overrun key cities and killed many of the group's most prominent leaders. Yet, the youth camps still remain - a testament to their enormous value at a time when the terrorist group is fighting for its survival. An Islamic State operative, who agreed to be interviewed by The Post over the Internet, described the camps and their young graduates as vital to the organization's future.
"They are our fighters and leaders of tomorrow, and they will be strong and not fearing to die," said the operative who would only speak on condition of anonymity. "In the future you will not only fear our men. You must fear our children, too."
The Syrian boy who escaped the caliphate's fearsome embrace appears for now to be adjusting. Taim beams when he talks about his new school, and his quick grasp of the local language betrays both an intelligence and a yearning for acceptance in his family's adopted homeland. He is a charmer, playfully asking a visiting journalist about her age after she asks about his.
"Don't worry, I know women like to make themselves younger than they seem," he said. Giggling, he elaborated on the source of his knowledge: "This one guy from Daesh said I should learn this lesson about women so I won't get in trouble with my future wife."
Yet, even in peaceful, prosperous Northern Europe, the Islamic State at times seems terrifyingly close. Taim's mother described occasional fits of hysteria in which the boy screams uncontrollably. He chatters at length about his experiences in the training camp, only to abruptly shut down. "I don't like to remember what happened there," he said.
Taim's mother said that she is seeking counseling for her son while trying to keep his mind occupied on school and sports. But there are times, she said, when Taim is overcome with dread, convinced that the Islamic State will never relinquish its hold on him.
During such spells, the mother said, the 8-year-old becomes quietly forlorn, as though resigning himself to a dreary fate that he cannot escape.
"I belong to the Daesh people now," he said.
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