An Interview With Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, a journalist and film producer, has won many international awards for her documentaries and is the first non-American to be awarded the prestigious Livingston Award, a U.S. reporting prize for media professionals under the age of 35. She holds masters degrees in both international policy studies and communications from Stanford University in California.
Q: Your film Children of Terror focused on young Afghan refugees in your home country of Pakistan. Why did you choose them as a documentary topic?
A: I spent 10 weeks living with these children in a refugee camp in Karachi and realized very early on that their experiences were quite different from that of most children in Pakistan. It was clear that these children have been greatly affected by the violence they have grown up with, and that will influence the type of adults they become. I felt that their story needed to be told.
Q: What can you tell us about the cumulative losses children experience in societies where family and civil structures have been overwhelmed by terrorist violence?
A: Terrorism intentionally creates insecurity and fear. It deliberately ruins the social fabric of a society by ignoring the common laws of humanity—then many of those with education or financial means flee, and those who remain try to live amid the violence and downward economic spiral. Families are destroyed and children are robbed of their innocence. The losses they experience are material, social, and emotional.
Having grown up amid violence, the young boys I came to know in the camp were more familiar with Kalishnikovs and APC guns than they were with their alphabet. They spoke about the fear they felt—at night when they could not sleep because of bomb blasts and gunfire, about being injured when outside of their home in the daytime, and about being forcibly recruited into or confronted by a local militia.
When a generation grows up under this kind of violence and fear, it is deprived of an education and knowledge of its true culture. Young children are forced to fend for themselves on the streets—often sent out to scavenge for food or to work at dangerous jobs for money. They are treated as adults and not as children. This is one of the successes of the perpetrators of random violence: They create an environment where children cannot behave as children but, instead, are forced to take on adult responsibilities.
Most of the young boys I spoke with had never spent much time with their fathers or older brothers because they, the adult males, had either been killed or were away from home for a long time. These young boys were essentially, then, the “men” about the house, handed the responsibility of providing for and protecting the women of the family. They had to learn how to use a gun at the age of six or seven and, by the time they were 14 or 15, were ready to go off to fight themselves.
This is how terrorists ensure having a steady supply of recruits—creating an unworkable society, then offering an alternative one—one which they, of course, control with violence, intimidation, and manipulation. They make use of disasters, both natural ones and those they created, by offering aid to those in need, but with very tangled strings attached.
Q: How does recruitment take place?
A: Children are the perfect recruits for terrorists because they do not have the ability to question adult motives, are easily swayed by appeals to their emotions, and can be readily convinced to undertake whatever job is asked of them.
Decades before “jihad” began in the Muslim world, child soldiers were being recruited in Africa and in South America. In those wars, children proved to be fearless. After all, study after study tells us that the young are impulsive and inclined toward taking risks. They are too developmentally immature to properly judge their ability to handle situations or see the potentials for tragedy.
Every parent knows that children, oblivious to how their actions can affect themselves and others, often make poor decisions. That is why children can and have been repeatedly exploited by others. That is also precisely why children need to be educated, to be able to reflect on matters, consider consequences, and develop understanding.
In the Muslim world, many children are being manipulated simply by being forced onto the street. They have to find food and money however they can. If they are boys, they might be offered a place in a religious school where they will be fed and taught—but what they are taught may be a fundamentalist ideology that is intolerant of others, and even intolerant of those who practice the same religion but differently, that sees the West and its ways as an enemy to be conquered.
These children are being cajoled or coerced into joining jihad and are recruited precisely because their very youth can be exploited: Not immediately recognized as a threat, they can slip in and out of highly secure areas while playing football on the streets. They are the perfect foil for terrorists—so naïve they do not have a clear idea of what is expected of them until it is too late.
Contrary to what the West may think, terrorists are becoming more successful in their recruitment of young Muslim men and, even more troubling, young women to their cause. One of the biggest reasons for this victory is their success in keeping much of the Islamic world poorly educated and closed to new ideas.
Q: What about the parents of these children?
A: The reaction of parents can be surprising. Poverty and illiteracy play a major role in determining their beliefs. In Southern Afghanistan, many of the families I spoke with were proud of the fact that their young sons—some less than 15 years old—had glorified the name of Islam by “attacking the enemy.” These particular young boys belonged to large families; some had up to 10 siblings. Their parents were poor and could not take care of them, so they had been sent off to remote Islamic schools in Pakistan. Their parents barely knew them anymore.
As I pointed out earlier, many of the adult males are gone, and often the women and their daughters, already denied education, are forbidden to work outside the home. If given a choice between school, food, and clothing or sorting through garbage for sustenance, … well, sometimes there is no choice.
That is one of the reasons that terrorists are so successful in convincing young boys to join them and adopt their point of view, because they do not have a support system to fall back upon or parents to confer with; they are often under severe peer pressure to sign up, to belong to something that is more organized than the streets, for a chance to attain some kind of glory or redeem their honor.
At the same time, poor parents collect economic rewards for the sacrifice of their sons and daughters to suicide terrorism and receive selected passages from the Quran—without any proper context—which show that their children died following the instructions of the Prophet. Solitary women, especially, sometimes gain a distinctive social status in the community, aside from monetary support, for being the mother of martyrs.
The attitude toward women and education, the poverty, constant violence, and fear … it all makes for a very complicated situation.
Q: Tell us a little about some of the children in your film—in particular, the serious boy who accompanied you to the public swimming pool, the gentle one who worked in the rug factory, and the bright and sparkling little girl who did not want to get married.
A: Khal Mohammed was 11 and, without family in the camp, had been taken into a fundamentalist school. Although he could not read, he memorized all the verses of the Quran, an enormous accomplishment. He was a very stern boy, however, and when we went to the public swimming pool, where the women were fully covered—except for their faces, hands, and feet—he insisted that not only were they “bad” but that he would go to hell for having even been among these people acting “immorally” in their holiday enjoyment.
Noor Mohammed was 10 and solely responsible for financially supporting his family by doing the dangerous and difficult work of making rugs. Another intelligent child, he spoke wistfully of his life before his father and uncle were killed and how he would be in school if they were still alive. During the making of our film, he lost his job for being late for work—there were many boys eager to take his place—because of having to attend to his older, drug-addicted brother who was in the hospital.
Laila, also 10, repeatedly said she did not want to get married but, instead, wanted an education, while her father gently admonished her, explaining that she would shortly be betrothed because, as she got older, she needed a man to protect her. Indeed, the main game for the girls in the camp was playing “wedding.”
Young girls are particularly vulnerable to recruitment to extremist ideology because few other paths are offered them. In countries like Pakistan, fundamentalist religious schools are already carefully inducting young women, realizing that by indoctrinating them, they are able to control an entire family. A woman goes home from the mosque, educates her children, and talks to her neighbors, and thus the ideology flourishes and grows. This is the first step toward militarizing women.
We are already seeing the next step. Recently in Islamabad, a group of women, wielding sticks, demanded that video shops be closed and music stores banned. They attacked a house where they felt immoral behavior was taking place and kidnapped the women living in the house. Some of these female militants sitting in judgment of others were barely 15 years old. That is the effectiveness of the proponents of fundamentalist ideology. Today, they are raiding a house against “immoral” fellow Muslims and tomorrow they may very well choose to strap on bombs and become suicide bombers against “infidels.”
Indeed, many well-educated, Western-born Muslim women are susceptible to recruitment. I wrote an article that looked at Muslim religious schools in Mississauga, Canada. There, young Canadian-Muslim women are being told to shun the Western world they live in. These women, brainwashed into covering their faces and adhering to sexual segregation, are continually told that their Muslim brothers are dying in battles to defend their honor so that Western men are not able to “defile” them. Ironically, they reject the very political system that gives them the choices they currently enjoy. This is a difficult problem because in societies like Canada and the United States, where multiculturalism and freedom of religion are not only encouraged but a bedrock of societal belief, many people do not question the teachings being put forth in religious schools. It is a fundamental tenet that females have the right to an education and the right to practice the tenets of their faith. Unfortunately, these empowered women are learning a very extreme interpretation of Islam, one in direct conflict with the society they grew up in and against which they, and their children, are bound to clash in the future.
Q: What do you believe is the future for these children?
A: It is estimated that more than 50 percent of the world’s Muslim population is under the age of 18, which is a terrifying demographic, especially since most of these young people have little or no access to education and employment. They are frustrated by the corrupt governments that rule them. They see double standards played out by the West, which insists on democracy in Iraq, but not elsewhere in the region. They are aware that Islam was once the foundation of a great culture, and they wonder what has happened because their generation has experienced only poverty, war and destruction, corruption, and nepotism. Somehow, this problem must be turned to an advantage: These young people, if properly educated and given opportunity, could instead be the engine of change and economic progress.
True Islam encourages Muslims to adapt to changing times, but extreme fundamentalists have always opposed anything new, from the telegraph to television. They oppose modern education because they say that it teaches topics that are not in harmony with Islam. Educated Muslims know that this is a ploy to prevent young, active minds from challenging them.
It becomes a vicious cycle: By deliberately depriving young Muslims from receiving a good education, the fundamentalists ensure that the future of their potential recruits is bleak and the resulting frustrations make them easily susceptible to terrorist ideology. That ideology requires them to violently reject any ideas that challenge fundamentalist precepts and prevents their learning the importance of freedom of thought and speech that separate logical ideas from emotional biases, the very thing on which the vibrant societies that most people want for their children can be built.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
