An escaped Islamic State child soldier in Sanliurfa, Turkey, shows the scar on his neck to a reporter on Jan. 27. He says a bullet grazed his neck during battle.
SANLIURFA, Turkey — At age 14, Khaled held his first gun. Fifteen days later, one of the world’s most feared extremist groups sent him into battle.
Khaled remembers how heavy the Kalashnikov rifle felt, how the noise hurt his ears. He recalls the terror of waking up in the hospital after a bullet grazed the back of his neck.
Now, this quiet teenager from Syria’s eastern city of Deir al-Zour is speaking out against the jihadist group that has violently seized large swaths of Iraq and Syria. His message is simple: Don’t join the Islamic State.
Khaled is just one of scores of child soldiers in Syria. While nearly all parties in the Syrian conflict — U.S.-backed moderates, Kurdish fighters, extremist groups and regime forces alike — have been accused of recruiting and using children in combat and support roles, the Islamic State is the most infamous in this regard.
Khaled says he had no idea what was in store for him when he joined ISIS last winter.
When anti-government protests broke out across Syria in the spring of 2011, the 11-year-old wanted nothing more than to take to the streets. He watched with envy as his older brothers and cousins joined the calls for freedom, but his family forbid him from going to demonstrations — it was too dangerous for a child, they said.
They were right. Soon, the Syrian regime brutally cracked down on dissent. His family could only shield him for so long. Protest soon turned to war.
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But the U.S.-led coalition likely doesn’t have the level of intelligence it would need within Syria to avoid hitting training camps that host child soldiers, said Jennifer Cafarella, a researcher on the Syrian civil war at the Institute for the Study of War.
Khaled was one of the lucky ones. He managed to escape after three months with ISIS by convincing them, with the help of his pleading mother, to let him go home for a brief break. When he returned home to Deir al-Zour, the hardline rebel group Jabhat al-Nusra, or al Qaeda in Syria, detained him for 12 days. The group was locked in a bitter fight with ISIS, and Khaled was the enemy. But once again, his mother helped secure his release, unharmed.
Despite Khaled’s brief detention, he says al-Nusra, along with the Free Syrian Army, which also had control over the area, gave him sanctuary from the wrath of ISIS.
But when ISIS drove out other rebel groups from his area months later, Khaled’s mother decided it was time for him to leave, terrified that they would hunt down her son. “I was very afraid for my family and afraid that they would come to my home and force me to fight,” Khaled said. He had no intention of returning to a group he said was slaughtering civilians.
Khaled paid for a fake ID card and in November traveled with a family that claimed him as their own, passing through ISIS checkpoints. His mother stayed behind with family members who couldn’t afford to make the expensive and dangerous trip. Khaled breathed easy when he and the family made it across the Turkish border with the help of a smuggler, but when they parted ways, the 15-year-old found himself alone in a country that was not his own.
Now, this child soldier turned refugee has no easy way of continuing his education or finding work in Turkey. He lives in a hotel with strangers, surviving off of cash sent by his brothers who sought refuge and work in Saudi Arabia. He desperately wants to join them.
Khaled can’t return to that Thursday last January and turn back from the ISIS recruitment office, as his cousin did. But he wants others to know the hard truth about the extremist group. Because if he had, he never would have joined.
Zaher Said contributed reporting from Sanliurfa, Turkey; Akbar Shahid Ahmed contributed reporting from Washington, D.C.; and Eline Gordts contributed reporting from San Francisco.
