Syrian Kurdish center sets out to defang 'cubs of the caliphate'
Former Islamic State child soldiers who are being reeducated at a Kurdish center face an uncertain future.
TELL MAAROUF, northeast Syria — A boy is hunched on a bunk bed, his small fingers deftly stringing macrame beads. The result is a heart-shaped key ring. On it is inscribed the word “Love.”
Nearby a pair of boys are playing Monopoly. In a communal kitchen one boy flips pancakes; others watch National Geographic TV or mill around the courtyard exchanging jokes.
Egyptians, Bosnians, French and Pakistanis. They are from across the globe, united by a dark past in which they might have been beheading people or blowing themselves up.
They are alleged “cubs of the caliphate," the child soldiers of the Islamic State (IS). The Kurdish-led autonomous administration in northeast Syria, which lost thousands of men and women in the fight against the jihadis, are now trying to “rehabilitate” around 130 boys currently housed in this low red-brick building with arches, which locals say once served as a madrassa, or Islamic school, built by the Turco-Persian Ghaznavi sheikhs.
