THE recent security campaigns against terrorists have revealed to us that some of the apprehended suspects were young children who were barely 16. They have been nabbed on charges of belonging to Daesh (the so-called IS) despite their very young age. These terrorists are by far the youngest members of the deviant organization who have been recruited inside the Kingdom. The danger does not only lie in the existence of dormant or active terrorist cells in our country but in the presence of a new generation of children who belong to the terrorist organizations. The presence of young terrorists among us is solid evidence and enough confirmation that we have not done much in the past years to wipe out extremist ideologies. Regretfully, a new generation of terrorists is being born in our country right in front of our eyes. Some of us do not want to face the real reasons for extremism. We continued to claim that this ideology was alien to us and it came to our country from outside. We, therefore, continued to act as if we had no soil for extremism or terrorism to be born in our society. The denial of the existence of an extremist ideology in our society including schools, universities, summer youth camps, mosques and other domains does not help solve the problem of terrorism in our very country. The recent solutions will not be of any use since it will be very difficult to change the ideologies the young men and women were brought up to believe in all their lives. Terrorism in the past used to hit far away from us. We did not care much about it at that time. It was targeting non-Muslim areas away from the Kingdom. It targeted churches, synagogues, foreign embassies and other establishments that were not directly related to us. However, since the beginning of the new millennium, it started coming closer to us. We began to feel its heat but it was never close to every individual in our country. It used to target some vital facilities in the Kingdom. Now terrorism has taken a new step forward. It has come closer to all individuals in the Kingdom. It is now targeting the mosques. We will not know where it will hit tomorrow. Any one of us may lose our lives in a terrorist operation since the houses of God are not spared. It is true that our youth are being targeted by terrorist organizations to carry out suicide bombings. We should not, however, deny that our young men and women have more aptitude and inclination to join these terrorist organizations than their counterparts elsewhere. The reason is that they have already had large exposure to terrorist ideas since an early age, otherwise why are the young Saudis the easiest targets for terrorist organizations to recruit? We should not look here or there for the solution to the problem of terrorism in our society. We should, rather, look under our feet to find the successful solutions. Today we have a new generation of children. They are like the small bombs that are ready to explode any time. Our problem is that we do not know where they will explode the next day.
