Some people are born with less empathy than others. Absence of empathy can be a trait (as in biologically based psychopathy) or a state.21 Empathy can be temporarily and sometimes necessarily shut off, as when a surgeon needs to cut into flesh to save a life.
But empathy can also become attenuated, such as when a person is too often severely frightened, too often victimized, or too often involved in perpetrating violence. Frequent exposure to savagery is one way to reduce a person’s capacity to feel. When a person is trained, or trains himself, to feel less empathy and its absence becomes a trait, he becomes capable of dehumanizing others, putting him at risk of acts of extreme cruelty. In our view, ISIS is using frequent exposure to violence as a technology to erode empathy among its followers.
But empathy alone is not enough to explain the decline in violence, Pinker argues. The Enlightenment added another variable: the recognition that there is a universal human nature, and that like everything else, this too can be studied.22 Reason allows us to move beyond our personal experiences, and to frame our ideas and experiences in universal terms. This leads us to recognize the ways our actions might harm others. The interchangeability of perspectives is the principle behind the Golden Rule and its equivalents, which have been discovered and rediscovered in so many moral traditions.23 ISIS rejects this universal moral principle, in a way that repulses and disgusts not only “children of the Enlightenment” but most observers,24 including jihadi ideologues.25
That said, Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges urge us to remember that ISIS is appealing to sacred values, not reason. Although “logically and empirically inscrutable,” such beliefs can strongly influence behaviors, they argue. They find that “seemingly contrary evidence seldom undermines religious belief, especially among groups welded by costly commitment in the face of outside threats [see discussion of millenarian movements in Chapter 10]. Belief in gods and miracles also intensifies when people are primed with awareness of death or when facing danger, as in wartime.” They also find that “cross-national analyses show that a country’s devotion to a world religion correlates positively with existential insecurity.”26
But appealing to sacred values could (and often does, at least in modern times) lead to peace, not terrorism and war. Sacred texts are filled with contradictions. Terrorists across religions find justification in religious texts to do what they want to do, in ISIS’s case, rape, pillage, and plunder.27 While an appeal to sacred values may make conflicts more intractable, why is ISIS drawn to the parts of the text that would seem to justify slavery, rape, and murder?
During the early 1930s, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud exchanged letters that were later published (although they were subsequently suppressed by Hitler). Einstein asked:
How is it possible for this small clique to bend the will of the majority, who stand to lose and suffer by a state of war, to the service of their ambitions?
He further wrote, in partial answer to his own questions,
Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction. In normal times this passion exists in a latent state, it emerges only in unusual circumstances; but it is a comparatively easy task to call it into play and raise it to the power of a collective psychosis.
Freud responded:
When a nation is summoned to engage in war, a whole gamut of human motives may respond to this appeal—high and low motives, some openly avowed, others slurred over. The lust for aggression and destruction is certainly included; the innumerable cruelties of history and man’s daily life confirm its prevalence and strength. . . . [T]he ideal motive has often served as a camouflage for the dust of destruction; sometimes, as with the cruelties of the Inquisition, it seems that, while the ideal motives occupied the foreground of consciousness, they drew their strength from the destructive instinct submerged in the unconscious. Both interpretations are feasible.
What “unusual circumstances” are most likely to bring forward this “lust for aggression and destruction”? Possible answers include political disenfranchisement (Chapter 2) and collective trauma (discussed at the end of this chapter).28
As we have noted, ISIS’s psychological warfare is directed at its potential victims. But it is also directed at those it aims to control. It is deliberately attempting to blunt its followers’ empathy by forcing them to participate in or observe acts of brutality. Over time, this can lead to secondary psychopathy, or a desire to harm others, and contagion of violence. Beheadings are one such tool for blunting empathy.
BEHEADING
In a detailed assessment of capital punishment, Rudolph J. Rummel estimates that nineteen million people were executed for trivial offenses between the time of Jesus and the twentieth century.29 Offenses that were once punished by execution included stealing bread and criticizing royal gardens.30 Public executions were common and often took on a celebratory atmosphere until their prominence diminished in the mid-nineteenth century with a growing awareness of their inhumane nature.31 Today, many countries consider capital punishment of any kind as a violation of human rights, although it is still practiced in the United States, as well as some non-Western countries.32
Until fairly recently, beheading was a common form of execution throughout the world, because it was once viewed as more humane than other forms of execution. But decapitation is not easy. To ensure that the victim quickly loses consciousness and does not feel multiple swipes at his neck, a skilled headsman is required. Beheading devices, precursors to the guillotine, were used for criminals of noble birth.33 The guillotine, considered more humane but also more efficient than decapitation by hand, was used on an industrial scale to execute thousands of people during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, and more than 16,000 people in Nazi Germany. The very word terrorism comes from Reign of Terror, and thus beheading is intimately associated with terrorism.34 The guillotine continued to be used in France until capital punishment was banned in that country in 1977,35 and in Germany until 1966.36 China and Japan also employed beheading—as a dishonorable death—until the twentieth century.37
Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that still practices public beheadings.38 Beheadings are performed on Fridays, outside of mosques in major cities. The punishment derives from the Wahhabi interpretation of the Islamic religious laws of Shariah.39 The crimes of rape, murder, apostasy, blasphemy, armed robbery, drug trafficking, witchcraft and sorcery, and repeated drug use are punishable by beheading.40
Muhammad Saad al Beshi, one of Saudi Arabia’s lead executioners, explained that it takes a great deal of skill to sever a head with a single stroke of the sword, to minimize pain. It is not something that can be done with a knife or a dagger, he said, and requires training.41 To use unskilled headsmen is sadistic.
ISIS’s style of execution—hacking away at the victim’s neck—is not designed to minimize pain, but rather to maximize it. In an interview with captured ISIS fighters, Israeli journalist Itai Anghel said one ISIS executioner intentionally used a dull knife because he wanted the beheading to last longer and cause more pain.42
CHILD SOLDIERS
ISIS actively recruits children43 to send them to training camps and then to use them in combat, including suicide missions. ISIS has used children as human shields, suicide bombers, snipers, and blood donors.44 The U.N. Secretary General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict reports that “ISIL has tasked boys as young as 13 to carry weapons, guard strategic locations or arrest civilians.”45 Human Rights Watch (HRW) found that hundreds of “non-civilian” male children had died in the fighting.46
ISIS strictly controls the education of children in the territory it controls. According to a teacher from Raqqa, ISIS considers philosophy, science, history, art, and sports to be incompatible with Islam.47
“Those under fifteen go to Shariah camp to learn about their creed and religion,” an ISIS press officer in Raqqa told Vice News. “Those over sixteen, they can attend the military camp. . . . Those over sixteen and were previous
ly enrolled in the camps can participate in military operations.”48 But in ISIS propaganda videos (discussed in more detail in Chapter 5), even younger children are shown being trained in the use of firearms.
This is a hallmark of a “total organization,” which sociologist Erving Goffman defined as one that “has more or less monopoly control of its members’ everyday life.”49 Pol Pot experimented with creating a utopia in Kampuchea (the name used for Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge controlled it) in the 1970s, using methods not that different from those employed by ISIS. The idea was to create an entirely new society, uncontaminated by the values the Khmer Rouge aimed to stamp out. Children were seen as the least corrupted by bourgeois values and would be educated “according to the precepts of the revolution,” which did not include traditional subjects.50 The children were both victims and perpetrators of terror.
According to the research of Mia Bloom and John Horgan, ISIS follows a trend of training ever-younger operatives. By doing so they hope to ensure a new generation of fighters. Leadership decapitation is significantly less likely to be effective against organizations that prepare children to step into their fathers’ shoes.51
Residents of Raqqa reported to Syria Deeply that children are taught how to behead another human being, and are given blond dolls on which to practice.52 One child told HRW interviewers, “When ISIS came to my town . . . I liked what they are wearing, they were like one herd. They had a lot of weapons. So I spoke to them, and decided to go to their training camp in Kafr Hamra in Aleppo.”53 He attended the camp when he was sixteen years old, but the leader told him he preferred younger trainees. Pol Pot, too, preferred younger trainees.54 Like other “total organizations” (discussed in Chapter 10), ISIS aims to create a new form of man. Young children are easier to mold into ISIS’s vision of this new man. As psychiatrist Otto Kernberg explains, “Individuals born into a totalitarian system and educated by it from early childhood have very little choice to escape from total identification with that system. . . . Totalitarian educational systems permit a systematic indoctrination of children and youth into the dominant ideology,” especially when they are young.55
Another child, Amr, told the HRW interviewers that he had participated in a “sleeper cell” for ISIS at age fifteen, to collect information on the Syrian government’s operation in Idlib. When he started working for ISIS full time, he was given a Kalashnikov rifle, a military uniform, and a bulletproof vest. He and the others in his unit, including other children, were encouraged to volunteer as suicide-bombers, and several hundreds of fighters did so. Amr said that he didn’t want to be a suicide-bomber, so he delayed signing up, hoping his name would come up last. He told HRW that he felt social pressure to “volunteer” to die.56
Some of the children come with their parents from abroad, to grow up in what their parents see as a pure Islamic state. They learn to say that they are citizens of the Islamic State rather than from their country of origin.57 The poorer neighborhoods of Ankara, Turkey, are reportedly a source of child recruits. One such neighborhood, Hacibayram, has become a recruitment hub for ISIS.58
HRW discovered that child soldiers are paid the equivalent of $100 per month, around half as much as adult fighters.59 In Raqqa, ISIS pays parents and bribes children to attend the camps.60 But the recruits are not always volunteers. Children of ethnic minorities, particularly the Kurds and Yazidis, have been kidnapped and forced to join ISIS. According to Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, in one case, more than six hundred Kurdish students were kidnapped on their way home from taking exams in Aleppo. Their captors gave the boys an Islamic “education,” encouraging the children to join the jihad, showing them videos of beheadings and suicide attacks.61
A doctor told the HRW interviewers that he had treated a wounded boy between the ages of ten and twelve. The boy’s job was to whip prisoners.62 Army Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster is Deputy Commanding General for the Future of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. His job is to assess threats of the future for the U.S. Army. He describes ISIS as “engaging in child abuse on an industrial scale. They brutalize and systematically dehumanize the young populations. This is going to be a multigenerational problem.”63
Using children under the age of eighteen as soldiers is a war crime.64
LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF VIOLENCE
What can we expect the long-term effect on these children to be?
At any one time, an estimated 300,000 children around the world are used as soldiers.65 A “child soldier” is defined as a person under eighteen who is associated with an armed group or armed force. The definition of child soldier includes not only those who participate in combat, but also cooks, porters, spies, and sex slaves.66
Researchers have been studying the reintegration of child soldiers for a number of years now, principally in Sierra Leone and Uganda. Individuals exposed to a single traumatic event may develop PTSD. Those exposed to repeated or prolonged trauma, as is the case for child soldiers, are at risk of developing complex PTSD,67 or developmental trauma disorder,68 wounds that are more difficult to treat.
A team led by Fiona Klasen that studied three hundred former Ugandan child soldiers found that the most common experiences were exposure to shootings, beatings, starvation, and witnessing of killing. More than half the children had killed someone. Three-quarters of the children also had at least one experience of domestic or community violence.69 Approximately one-third of them were diagnosed with PTSD. Two-thirds were suffering behavioral and emotional problems, mostly anxiety and depression, not violence.70
Another team, led by Theresa Betancourt, evaluated child soldiers from Sierra Leone. There, too, approximately one-third showed PTSD symptoms.71 A follow-up study showed improvement in PTSD symptoms four years later, with half as many reporting PTSD symptoms. Psychological adjustment was greatly improved when children received family and community support; while post-conflict stigma increased symptoms.72 Longitudinal data on aggressive behavior in former child soldiers is not yet available.73
Psychologists who study the impact of trauma and violence refer to “moral injury” as a risk factor for further violence, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and major depression.74 The term “moral injury” refers to pain or damage to the conscience caused by an individual’s witnessing, failing to prevent, or perpetrating acts that violate deeply held ethical norms.75
But what kinds of transgressions cause moral injury? There is a large amount of literature demonstrating that ethical norms are often culturally or situationally specific. However, some acts are considered wrong by nearly all cultures and religions. One of these is murder. Another is the act of deliberately targeting civilians in war, which is banned by all major religions.76 Thus, those who perpetrate acts of terrorism, as we have defined it, are susceptible to moral injury, and to acquired callousness, which is sometimes called secondary psychopathy. Thus, inducing followers to commit atrocities is part of the technology for reducing empathy.
It is more difficult to treat the aftermath of war for those who experience moral injury. PTSD, in turn, is a risk factor for further violence, especially among men.77 Perhaps surprisingly, among military personnel, combat exposure and life threat are not the most significant risk factors for PTSD. When military personnel know that they have hit their target and killed someone—as is the case for close combat (such as ISIS’s beheadings), they are at greater risk to develop posttraumatic stress disorder.78
We usually think of moral injury and PTSD as a problem for legitimate military personnel, not terrorists, and one might ask why it should matter to anyone other than the terrorists themselves that their actions put them at risk of PTSD. The reason we should care, in our view, is that widespread commission of atrocities could lead to a form of societal PTSD—both for victims of atrocities and for perpetrators. One of the results of continuously witnessing morally injurious actions, or of perpetrating them, is the blunting of feeling, and loss of empathy. Ironically, some child soldiers may avoid adv
erse mental health outcomes by developing an appetite for aggression; those who learn to take pleasure from killing appear to be less susceptible to PTSD symptoms, according to work in Northern Uganda and Colombia by Roland Weierstall and colleagues.79
Is ISIS deliberately trying to create a society with an appetite for violent aggression? It is impossible to know ISIS’s conscious intentions in this regard, but either way, the end result of its rule in Syria and Iraq will no doubt be a deeply traumatized generation and a host of new challenges from within.
SLAVERY
Slavery was abolished in most countries by the end of the nineteenth century, although it is still practiced illegally in some countries.80
In a report issued in early October, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) reported that hundreds of women and girls were abducted from Yazidi and Christian villages in August 2014. By the end of August, UN officials reported that some 2,500 civilians from these villages had been abducted and held in a prison. Teenage children, both males and females, were sexually assaulted, according to villagers who managed to speak with the UN officials. Groups of children were taken away. Women and children who refused to convert were sold as sex slaves or given to fighters. Married women who agreed to convert were told that Islamic law did not recognize their previous marriages. They were thus given to ISIS fighters to marry, as were the single women who agreed to convert.81
The Yazidis are a mostly Kurdish-speaking population whose syncretic religion pulls from both Islam and Christianity. ISIS views the Yazidis as devil worshippers.82 The Yazidis and other religious-minority groups are not “people of the book,” and are therefore required to convert or die, according to ISIS’ interpretation of Shariah law.
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