Will religious sects turn children into obedient voters, or into bloodthirsty organization members?

Across the world, at very different points in time, people have encountered acts of violence committed by children. Child soldiers, child guerrillas, and child terrorists... No matter where they are in the world, these children have carried out acts that are faster, more violent, and more ruthless than those committed by adults.

Children kidnapped in Uganda and manipulated to the point of killing their own families, children raised on ISIS propaganda and displayed as executioners in execution videos, and children turned into hitmen by cartels in Latin America were just a few examples of this dark picture. These children were used not only as warriors; they were also used as informants, ammunition carriers, suicide bombers, sexual objects, and tools for organizational propaganda. They continue to be used.

When a fourteen-year-old child in our country coldly slaughtered his schoolmates, we as a nation were stunned, asking, "How could this happen, how could a child do this?" While expressing this shock, we did not feel the need to remember the children used in unsolved murders in the Southeastern Anatolia Region in our very recent history, the thousands of cases of violence, and how children between the ages of 9 and 18 were turned into operative parts of murder and torture mechanisms.

Let us remember! These children had slaughtered people targeted for them at close range with knives, cleavers, and guns. Among the people they killed were those they knew and those they did not; sometimes their victims were even members of their own families or first-degree relatives.

It is not possible for us to explain this phenomenon, which evokes a horror movie, with a few self-explanatory sentences or simple causal equations. Nevertheless, the first way to approach the analysis process is through asking questions and sequences of remembrance that examine the past.

THE ROAD FROM SCHOOL BAG TO WEAPON!

Who had convinced children carrying school bags to hold guns, knives, cleavers, axes, and razors, and to kill and injure people? There is an answer to this question that is not unsolved. These were none other than the bearded, robed, clergyman-looking members of radical religious organizations stationed in neighborhoods...

It is precisely at this point that we need to look at the present. Because there are frightening similarities between the approach of these men, who infiltrated the cognitive world of children in the past, and the bearded, robed sect members who are now permitted to enter our schools through official channels. To understand the current danger, which may still be in its initial stages, we must remember how children in Southeastern Anatolia were convinced to commit acts of violence and carefully analyze the similarities between the methods used in both periods.

Therefore, we will formulate our subsequent answers around these questions: Where and how did radical religious organizations reach these children? What conditions made children vulnerable and accessible?

THE WAY TO REACH CHILDREN WAS THROUGH SCHOOLS AND FAMILIES

Schools were seen as the most suitable areas for such radical organizational activities. Because the children in the age range the organizations wanted to reach were present in these institutions in groups, and because schools were places where children were most vulnerable and away from the eyes of parents, these institutions were among the primary targets of the organizations. Organization members waiting in front of schools would make the first contact with the children, and learning whether the children were poor became the first information the organization needed. Because through this information, children were marked, and subsequently, their sympathies were sought to be won through psychological and economic tools.

The next step in leaving children vulnerable was families. Organization members living in houses rented in neighborhoods would establish a family structure consisting of so-called wives, sisters, and daughters to communicate with other housewives and young girls living in the neighborhood.

In the conversations they systematically organized, it was insistently explained that the correct clothing for women was the chador and veil; at the same time, it was whispered into the ears of mothers how noble the rank of martyrdom was and how auspicious it was to sacrifice a child for the sake of religion. After all, it was possible for a child who became a martyr to intercede for 25 people in the afterlife and take them to heaven with him.

In the region where the struggle for livelihood and unemployment were at their peak, the presence of criminal, mafia-like formations and the PKK certainly made the work of radical religious organizations easier. They would insistently ask families who were already worried about their children, "Do you want your children to go to the mountains and become faithless communists, or do you want them to be mujahideen who are beneficial to their mothers and fathers, whether dead or alive?"

In the next stage, they would tie the hands of religious families who were convinced that religion and morality were being lost with another argument: "The streets are full of alcohol, drugs, theft gangs, and doors to adultery. Do you want to burn in hell because of your children's sins, or do you want to go to heaven?"

Who would want their child to be an adulterer, a thief, or impudent? "Entrust your children to us," they would say; "at least they will learn to read the Quran and stay away from sin." The organization promised moral, obedient children who knew the value of their mothers and fathers. This process lasted for months. Families entrusted their children to robed murderers, saying, "At least they will recite a Fatiha for our souls and do good deeds on our behalf."

ANGER IN KARATE GYMS, NEW IDENTITIES IN THE STREETS

Once the families' suspicions were reduced, it was time to create spaces that would bring these children and others together and channel their adolescent energy in a specific direction. For this purpose, free karate courses were opened. These courses very quickly turned into spaces that provided organization members with the opportunity to make both physical and psychological contact with children. When they approached children living in heavy poverty, surrounded by all kinds of dangers, with the offer, "We will teach you how to defend yourself, and we won't even charge you money," they found a strong response in the inner worlds of children who were in need of defense and felt weak.

Thus, the high energy containing aggression of pre-adolescent and adolescent children became available for use by these bloodthirsty murderers, as if it had been placed before them on a golden platter.

The aggression seen during adolescence was, of course, not a pathological phenomenon on its own. The energy that emerged during this period was merely a natural manifestation of the search for boundaries, the effort to form an identity, and the struggle for status.

This intensity of energy leading to aggression could easily have been directed toward sports, art, science, profession, citizenship, production, and self-control if it had encountered the healthy institutions of the state, but that did not happen. Authoritarian religious structures, aware of the same energy reserve, raised this energy to a pathological level and used the released anger to build unquestioning obedience, destructive masculinity, discipline prioritizing violence, enemy construction, community belonging, sacred murders, and sacred deaths.

Grocery stores and greengrocers were opened in neighborhoods; food, beverages, and various products began to be distributed at near-free prices to families who handed over their children without question. They were like bloody monsters distributing bread wrapped in black rags.

Smiling, soft-eyed, bearded, robed Ali hodjas, Ahmet hodjas, Ebu Zer brothers, Ebu Ubayds would pat the children on the back, slip amounts of money into their pockets that they had never possessed before and never would, meet the children's families, and listen to their family stories. They gave the children code names and ranks, providing them with new identities and statuses; thus, they alienated them from their own identities and the personal responsibility for the crimes they would commit. Those who were slightly older and more prone to manipulation were promoted within a short time and appointed to manage other children.

THE DUTY ASSIGNED TO WOMEN: SACRIFICING CHILDREN, OBEDIENCE, AND SEXUALITY

The duty of the so-called chador-wearing, veiled, sunglass-wearing sisters, mothers, and young girls of the Ali hodjas was to apply heavy psychological pressure on the women, young girls, and female children in the neighborhood to cover their heads and then wear chadors.

How could the sister or older sister of a child who would be a martyr in the future show her hair or face to men? How could she tolerate a man outside hearing her voice? A woman who was already a sinner by birth could only go to heaven by dying for the sake of Allah or by spending her life for the sake of the mujahideen. Such a life or such an honorable death could only be granted to Allah's believing servants.

There was, of course, a purpose-driven reason for them to be suggesting this state of mind to women in tears. Because it would not be enough for families to just sacrifice their children; in the later stages, the homes of these children would also be needed as spaces. Manipulated young girls were needed behind the front where the boys, who would soon turn into young men, were being fought.

Manipulated young girls would be presented for marriage to the young men who had also killed their own childhoods along with the people they killed at crime scenes. In other words, the bloodthirsty Ebu-so-and-so brothers were providing these young men with access to money, sexuality, and power status. They were promising them a new world where they could see themselves as entitled to suppress, manage, and punish others, where they could consider killing a duty, and where they could attain a primitive male dominance. The only price to be paid was to go crazy enough to risk dying while killing and to accept a paranoid life that would pass with dissociative personality splits.

Everything proceeded extremely systematically. Before long, propaganda books infiltrated homes. Black headbands with white Arabic writing and green turbans wrapped around the head while praying appeared.

Stickers of veiled women with Kalashnikovs decorated the edges of mirrors in poor homes. The slogan "It is halal to die and kill in the way of Allah" turned into whispers loud enough to drown out human screams, spreading from rooftops to houses, from houses to streets, from streets to cell houses, becoming fluid, becoming disgusting.

In the karate courses opened in neighborhoods, children were taught how to methodically neutralize a person; methods of using guns, knives, and sticks were taught. The emotional weight of the motivation loaded onto the children was very great: If they died, they would be martyrs; if they survived and killed, they would be Allah's revolutionary warriors. Yet, they were all just, and only, innocent children between the ages of 9 and 18.

According to the suggestions given by Ebu Ubayd, Ebu Zer, or Ali hodjas, who presented themselves as messengers, everything done was Allah's command. Because Allah wanted it so, they were learning to use knives, guns, cleavers, axes, razors, and blades.

First came being a believer and a mujahid, then came dying and killing in the way of Allah. Karate moves were repeated accompanied by Allahu Akbar shouts, and black-and-white Arabic-inscribed headbands were tied to the children's foreheads. The "Die, kill!" slogans, which turned the cracking voices of adolescent children into masculine shouts, echoed through the white lime-washed walls of the sports room. The Quran courses, tea houses, and neighborhood grocery stores opened by these men, as well as the family homes of some children, were used as places where children, who were already very poor, took refuge and were trained. Children who found family warmth around the hot stove in the tea houses were not charged for tea or oralet, and they were treated to simit. Following the assassinations or attacks, considerable pocket money was distributed to the children. The mechanism had been established and had begun to operate easily.

THE BLOOD WAS WASHED AWAY, BUT THE LAND DID NOT FORGET!

So, what happened in the end?

According to the Turkey Hezbollah report published by Human Rights Watch in 2000, more than a thousand people were killed in street executions in Southeastern Anatolian cities between 1992 and 1995. It was recorded in the report that people who witnessed Hezbollah murders frequently reported that the perpetrators were "very young."

What happened? Children slaughtered the imams of the mosques where they went to learn the Quran every summer, in the bloodiest way possible, with axes and cleavers, because they were not radical enough Muslims and did not open the mosques to their use.

What happened? The neighborhood grocer was killed in front of his workplace one morning because he refused to pay protection money. One child attempted to kill his own older brother because he was a leftist; another child disowned his mother and father on the grounds that they were not religious enough.

Although they were from the same side, one of the two radical religious groups slaughtered the members of the other group one after another because they refused to kill people. Small children shot and fled from their leftist teachers in primary and secondary school who taught them how to read and write in the morning frost...

The streets turned into hell corridors where blood was shed, smelling of gunpowder, where children who committed murders and fled shouting "Allahu Akbar!" spread fear.

Young girls and women poured buckets of water to wash away the blood spilled in their neighborhoods. They swept the bloody water from in front of their houses with yellow straw brooms. However, they could neither clean the city's story, nor save the children who had dissociative splits in their characters and perhaps would never be able to return to normal for the rest of their lives, nor bring back those who died.

When the blood was washed away, they went into their houses and locked their iron doors one after another; they were forced to be silent, forced to hide in the darkness and forget.

Children and families were manipulated; people were kidnapped, never to be found again, or imprisoned in torture cells and killed.

A thousand people of a city were slaughtered with violence; their lives were recorded under the heading of unsolved murders and erased from the face of the earth.

Years later, we watched the endless footage of cell houses on television; how people killed by being tortured with pig ties were removed from behind the broken walls of houses...

THE WHOLE STORY HAD STARTED JUST LIKE TODAY

Everything, everything; the bearded, robed Ali hodjas, Ebu Zer brothers, Ebu-so-and-so men in radical religious organizations, who patted children on the back, slipped money into their pockets, appeared so-called smiling, merciful, crazed, hunched over, and shy; whispered violence, blood, and death with their high-pitched voices, and used prayer words as a tool for their ideas, had planned all of this, and to implement these plans, they had broken the children's characters, brainwashed them, and manipulated them.

They were just like the men who are now trying to shape and break the characters of our children in our primary and secondary schools, whose ability to think abstractly has not yet fully formed, through concepts of fear of death, hell, and sin. They also used the same methods on children in the beginning. The whole story had started just like today.

There was only one difference: Their access to school children had not been approved through an official channel, and they had not been allowed to enter schools and make suggestions to children.

So now, are we really allowing radical religious organizations to access our primary school children once again, and through official channels at that, for the sake of political fortune?

It is obvious that they are acting with concerns for political fortune and that the new generation is intended to be designed as new voters. However, can it be ignored how dangerous the childhood phase is; how uncontrollable the energy a child carries can become when handed over to the wrong hands?

Don't you think there are lessons to be learned from the fact that the first people these children killed were the neighborhood imams they did not find Muslim enough?

Do you really want voters designed by creating a ground for obedience with religious motivations? If that is the plan, your method is very dangerous.

In fact, your method is heading toward handing over children, who are so open to manipulation due to their age and cognitive structure, to radical religious sects that are so skilled at breaking characters, brainwashing, and producing anger. In this case, we all know that the issue is neither religion nor morality. Unless your goal is to make an intervention that is unimaginably risky for the future of the entire country, you need to abandon this method.

When the uncontrollable goals of radical religious organizations and the potential energy of childhood come together, the possibility that doors will open not to obedient voters, but to terrifying murderers, should disturb us all.

It is possible that our words will not reach the state authorities; there is no doubt that they are determined to implement the plan in their minds. Whether there is anyone from the same side who reads our deep fears impartially and tries to understand them; that possibility is also unknown. However, the main addressee is the families, regardless of which side they are from, who want to protect their children from the bloody teeth of monsters disguised in sheep's clothing from the outside world.

The picture we have described so far is not just a historical narrative; it is a reminder that reveals the reasons for our concern against the repetition of the systematic error that bloodied the country in our recent past.

WHEN A CHILD IS THE PERPETRATOR, WHO IS THE REAL CULPRIT?

The real question that needs to be asked is this: Why are our children the target?

Why do ideological structures prioritize recruiting children over adults?

What are the psychological and social mechanisms that convince a child to hate, feel anger, and commit violence within a few years?

It is not possible to understand the issue only by analyzing the child who commits violence; therefore, any analysis that blames the child will remain incomplete. Because the first perpetrator of violence is not the child. At every stage of a child's transformation into a murderer or an anti-civilization, anti-social person, there is a planned and intense mechanism of physical and psychological violence that the child is exposed to.

If morality is to be taught through religion, the practitioners of this education should be religious culture and ethics teachers who have studied at state universities.

Our children's cognitive structure, pure minds, and the future of the country should not be handed over to sect, association, and community members who are doubtful of even having received compulsory education in state schools, who have no academic background or pedagogical formation, but who have received special training on how to manipulate children. It should be remembered and noted with importance that when a child becomes a perpetrator, there is often a family, a school system, state policy, economy, and society that failed before him.

Sources:

1. https://www.hrw.org/report/2000/02/16/what-turkeys-hizbullah/human-rights-watch-backgrounder
2. https://en.tihv.org.tr/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/1996-Human-Rights-Report.pdf
3. https://www.refworld.org/reference/annualreport/usdos/1995/en/25685
4. https://www.refworld.org/reference/annualreport/hrw/1995/en/92892

Note: The images were generated by artificial intelligence with GPT and are representative; they have no relation to real people or places.