It is difficult for children growing up in a home with white supremacist parents to avoid becoming a racist. It is hard to escape life in the drug-trade if all your relatives are already in it. Children are not equipped with the mental maturity to choose a good life if everyone around them is telling them to do evil things. The next generation of terrorists are being groomed right under the noses of the international community in the ISIS refugee camps in the Middle East, and we must do more to help them.
CENTCOM Concerned About Refugee Camps
General Kenneth McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, spoke with the American Enterprise Institute and pointed out what keeps him up at night. His first topic of two major avoidable disasters was the improper handling of refugees in the CENTCOM region. His example was the activities in the al-Hol IDP/Refugee Camp in north east Syria.
This camp is under the control of U.S. partners and holds around 60,000 people, mostly women and young children. According to the UN around 7,000 of the camp inhabitants are children of ISIS terrorists. McKenzie noted that while sustenance and basic needs are being cared for by various aid and development agencies and non-government organizations, there is a greater threat to many than health concerns. General McKenzie see’s the radicalization of those children into an Islamist supremacy mindset as the greater strategic threat. These children have almost no defense against the power of the ISIS ideology that the world watched ravage Syria and Iraq without mercy.
deradicalizing the next generation
Refugee camps are not the best location to inoculate children from violent ideologies. There are too many other immediate and life-threatening issues being dealt with on a daily basis.
General McKenzie calls the lack of focus on deradicalizing these youths a profound problem; noting that “we are giving ourselves the gift of fighters five to seven years down the road.”
We are watching the next generation of Islamist terrorists get created under our supervision. This isn’t happening in a dark room, or secretly on the internet; it is happening in the open air of a refugee camp.
The CENTCOM commander stressed that these refugees must be moved to nations where they can be reabsorbed into society and deradicalized before they are lost forever. He also reminded the audience that there is not a military solution for this problem, yet he, as a military commander raised this as his first nightmare scenario unfolding in his region.
It takes Time
Deradicalizing is a very difficult process and many nations have seen more failure than success in the arena. The better route is to insulate the youths from the radicalization process, and that will not occur in a refugee camp. IN the future and right now, as terrorist groups like ISIS, or other violent militias that prey on young men and boys, push refugee populations into a caravan, nations must be smart enough to focus on quickly finding physically and mentally safe places for the most vulnerable.
General McKenzie urged nations to rapidly repatriate their citizens that are in the camps, and to get nations in the CENTCOM region especially, to invest more time and effort in finding the most successful techniques for deradicalizing those who have been infected by the ISIS ideology virus.
