Dubai: Daesh has recruited at least 400 children in Syria in the past three months and given these so-called “Cubs of the Caliphate” military training and hard-line indoctrination, a monitoring group said on Tuesday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the children, all aged under 18, were recruited near schools, mosques and in public areas where Daesh carries out killings and brutal punishments on local people.

One such young boy appeared in a video early this month shooting dead a Palestinian accused by Daesh of being a spy. A French police source said the boy might be the half-brother of Mohammad Merah, who killed three soldiers, a rabbi and three Jewish children in Toulouse in 2012.

The Observatory said that its sources reported a total of 120 new recruits joining the organisation in the past two-and-a-half months, which contrasts with monthly figures reaching 1,200 last year, Rami Abdul Rahman, head of the British-based Observatory.

told DPA.

At the height of Daesh’s success last summer, after it captured Iraq’s second city Mosul and declared its leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi “caliph”, the Observatory said 6,300 new fighters joined up in the cities of Aleppo and Raqqa.

Abdul Rahman said the group’s recruitment of both Syrian nationals and foreign fighters was slowing.

‘Easy to brainwash’

“They use children because it is easy to brainwash them. They can build these children into what they want, they stop them from going to school and send them to Daesh schools instead,” said Abdul Rahman.

Daesh declared a caliphate last year in territory it controls in Syria and Iraq and is being targeted by US-led air strikes in both countries.

It has beheaded or shot dead Syrian civilians, combatants, foreign aid workers and journalists and has released videos appearing to show children witnessing or participating in some of the killings. The group persecutes people across sects and ethnicities who do not adhere to its ultra-hardline doctrine.

The group may be resorting to children because it has been having difficulties recruiting adults since the start of the year, with only 120 joining its ranks, Abdul Rahman said.

This was partly due to tighter controls on the Turkish border, where foreign fighters tend to enter, he added.

Daesh has encouraged parents to send children to training camps or has recruited them without their parents’ consent, often luring them with money, said the Observatory, which tracks the conflict using sources on the ground.

At the training camps, the children learn to fire live ammunition, fight in battles and to drive, it said. Daesh also recruits children as informants and as guards for its headquarters and also welcomes children with birth defects into its ranks, the Observatory added.

— With inputs from agencies