The 14-year-old ISIS 'emir': Young boy rules Syrian camp detaining Islamists ... trends now
A young boy rules a Syrian camp detaining Islamists and jihadi brides including Shamima Begum, ordering punishment and beatings for women and preaching extremist hate to other children.
The 14-year-old boy is the senior enforcer for the Islamic State in Roj detention camp in northeastern Syria, imposing strict religious rules and preaching extremist doctrine.
The teenager gathered other youth around him to reestablish the terrorist group in the camp after the last IS-held village, also called caliphate, in Baghouz was overrun by Kurdish-led forces when he was nine years old.
'He is like the Islamic State emir in this camp,' Rashid Omar, 39, told the Times. He is the director of Roj, where currently 2,600 people are detained, more than half of which are under 18.
In his office, Omar has a picture of the young IS enforcer, which shows the heavily-built teenager dressed in black. Another photograph shows his equally young deputy, also aged 14, who is also dressed in black with appears paler than his leader.
The 14-year-old boy is the senior enforcer for the Islamic State in Roj detention camp in northeastern Syria, imposing strict religious rules and preaching extremist doctrine (file image of a boy at Roj detention camp)
Officials in charge of Roj (pictured) and another detention camp, which house thousands of women and children who previously lived in the Islamic caliphate, said housing them together drastically increases the threat of breeding more extremists
The boys lead a gang of male youth who enforce their rules by threatening adult women with brutal beatings if the boys believe the women did something wrong.
They have made improvised weapons to arm themselves and indoctrinate the next generation in weekly khutbah sermons where they share their extremist ideology.
'Everyone is afraid of him and his deputy here. Women get beaten for disobeying his orders, and then are threatened with death to stop them reporting these assaults,' Omar said.
'Whenever we try looking for him, the other kids start rising against us. There are a lot of teenagers with him in this camp.'
Officials in charge of Roj and another detention camp, which house thousands of women and children who previously lived in the Islamic caliphate, said housing them together drastically increases the threat of breeding more extremists.
'Every time we try to separate teenage males from radical mothers in rehabilitation centres, we get criticised by UN agencies for rights abuses. What are we supposed to do?,' Omar said.
The children who were taken to Syria to live in the caliphate by their radicalised parents have grown up being taught the extremist ISIS doctrine and many are said to have turned into angry radical youths.
With many countries like the UK refusing to repatriate their citizens from Syria and Turkish drones and jets regularly hitting the area targeting the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), these problems have only grown.
Al-Roj, once considered to be a model detention facility compared to the savage al-Hawl camp, is regressing under the influence of the youth gang of the 14-year-old ISIS 'emir'.
Boys were wading through the flooded Roj camp after a heavy rainstorm hit parts of northeastern Syria on March 19, 2023
An unidentified woman, reportedly a wife of a suspected Islamic State (IS) fighter, walks with her children at Roj refugees camp in Hasakah, northeast of Syria, on March 30, 2019
Roj camp is home to an estimated 60 Britons, with around 2,600 detainees in total
Searches of the facilities have revealed self-made knives and improvised welding equipment for the first time.
Meanwhile 95 per cent of the woman in the camp from 55 countries have gone back to wearing the niqab - either out of choice or because they were forced to do so.
Recent drone strikes have cut the camp's water and electricity supplies and the only way to access water is via two nearby wells, whose pumps have stopped when the electricity was cut after a Turkish strike and are now powered by generators running on expensive fuel.
Detainees increasingly show defiance towards the guards, with some reporting that adult women in the camp have directed throat-cutting motions at the guards, telling them that they will soon be in charge as the strikes make them 'feel empowered', according to camp director Omar.
He said it feels like they are 'under siege', after Turkish strikes destroyed Roj's infrastructure.
Turkey's strikes have started in October last year and come after attacks by the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK, against Turkish institutions and military posts in Iraq. Turkey claims the SDF was complicit in
