London : As many as 20 children, including a one-year-old boy, have been taken into state care in the UK over their parents’ alleged links with the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist network, a media report said on Sunday.
The children were placed in foster care or with relatives and in some cases reunited with their families only on condition that the parents wear an electronic tag to deter them from fleeing to Syria, ‘The Sunday Times’ reported. The newspaper’s investigation focuses on British youngsters who have been exposed to extremism by their families.
It analysed hundreds of pages of transcripts from nearly a dozen cases heard by the secretive family courts in Britain relating to Syria. The findings raise fears of what has been dubbed “Generation Jihad” of radicalised children in the UK. In one case, a two-year-old boy who was taken to Syria by his mother to live under ISIS reportedly showed a marked interest in guns and “shooting people” on his return to Britain.
The boy, who cannot be identified for legal reasons and is referred to as “Y”, was made to pose alongside an AK-47 assault rifle and dress in ISIS-branded clothing for propaganda during his brief stay in Raqqa, the defacto capital of ISIS. He was assessed by a social worker and a doctor on his return to Britain in 2015.
In a judgment later handed down at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, Justice Russell said: “The evidence of the social worker is that Y is all too aware of what a gun is and becomes overexcited by the suggestion of guns and shooting, and runs around mimicking shooting and makes noises of gunfire.”