Toy photographer Brian McCarty was recently poking around a site aimed at tracking unauthorized commercial usage of his art when he found something unsettling: The Islamic State appeared to have ripped off his work, Photoshopped it a bit and turned it into recruiting propaganda.

He posted the image to Facebook to ask his Arabic-speaking friends if the words on the doctored picture said what he thought they did.

“One wrote back almost immediately and said, ‘Oh yeah,’ ” McCarty said. In 2011, McCarty, 41, began a project called WAR-TOYS. He teams with non-governmental organizations and with the help of art therapists who specialize in helping children, McCarty creates photographs, based on interviews and drawings, that capture the children’s memories. He’s traveled to Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Israel and plans to continue the project in South Sudan, Mali, Nigeria, Kenya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ukraine and Colombia.

McCarty uses toys he finds in each locale to create tableaus, then captures them with his camera. So far he has 50 such photographs, one of which the Islamic State commandeered. The simplicity of the photographs is instantly affecting, particularly when they include modern-looking toys in garish, man-made colors set against violent backgrounds. In one, a girl’s house in Israel is represented by a bright pink-and-purple doll house. Two figures stand beside it as it’s besieged by missiles. In another, a woman in an abaya carries a child out of a bombed-out building guarded by a military tank.

The picture the Islamic State stole holds a specific memory for McCarty.

In 2012, McCarty was working with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza City when he met a girl at Asma Co-Ed Elementary School. She drew a picture “filled with helicopters and tanks and soldiers,” but when she spoke to McCarty, she spoke singularly of herself and the missiles she had seen.

Read the article “What Do You Do When ISIS Steals Your Antiwar Art to Recruit Members?” on washingtonpost.com.