A recently released ISIS video brutally depicts five child soldiers brutally killing five Kurdish prisoners. All five children — adolescent boys, it would appear — are apparently from five different countries. The footage is a chilling testament to what ISIS expects of its child soldiers as well as the cold efficiency those children present as they perform the executions.
Iraqi News reported on August 27 that the Kurdistan Democratic Party’s media official in Mosul, Saeed Mamouzini, confirmed that the five men in orange overalls in a video released by ISIS were indeed five Kurdish men from Rojava known to be ISIS prisoners. The execution video shows five ISIS child soldiers standing behind the kneeling men prior to their execution. In carrying out the killings, each child fires a handgun, coldly shooting each prisoner in the back of the head.
The five executions are among a total of 15 shown in the video. The other 10 men killed by older ISIS militants have yet to be identified.
The Clarion Project, a non-profit organization that exposes extremism, estimated that the five ISIS child soldiers appeared to be between the ages of 12 and 13. The video shows one of the children reading a prepared list of threats against the Kurdish peoples, at one point tauntingly stating that their Western allies were incapable of helping them, while the other four wait patiently with their handguns. When the reader finishes, the five boys shoot the prisoners point-blank.
The horrific footage is sandwiched between the killings of the other 10 men, five in each segment. All of the executions — four beheadings, 11 shootings — are believed to have taken place in Raqqa, Syria, the capital of the self-declared caliphate of the Islamic State.
The child soldiers are thought to be from five different nations, according to the Clarion Project. Those countries are the United Kingdom, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan. The video, of course, is presented with a warning of its graphic nature.
https://www.facebook.com/intlpv/posts/1647466002160720
Although the horrific executions shock the sensibilities, the fact that they are being carried out isn’t a new occurrence. Reports of ISIS recruiting and/or indoctrinating young children have made headlines since ISIS forced its way onto the world stage with its rise during the Syrian civil war and its military territorial grab that culminated in the fall of Mosul in Iraq and the declaration of an autonomous Islamic State and worldwide caliphate.
If the early reports weren’t enough, videos and internet postings from ISIS itself has reinforced the fact that the extremists not only intended to use but were openly using child soldiers to carry out terrorist and military acts. As was detailed by the Inquisitr in May, reports from German and Dutch intelligence agencies noted that children as young as 9-years-old were being used by ISIS as soldiers , human shields, and suicide bombers. The report asserted that child recruits were easily trained and indoctrinated by ISIS due to being more impressionable.
https://www.facebook.com/cnn/posts/10154479202056509
More recently, a spate of attacks featuring young ISIS militants made world headlines. The Inquisitr reported one such incident where a child suicide bomber, believed to be between 12- and 14-years-old, detonated a bomb at a Kurdish wedding just north of the Syria border in Turkey. The attack killed 54 people, 22 of which were under the age of 14.
And the threat is ongoing. The Inquisitr recounted witness testimony read before Members of Parliament (MPs) last month that spoke to ISIS atrocities against children and its methods of indoctrinating children by taking them from their parents and forcing them to go to Islamic State schools. In some instances, the circumstances are worse.
“They arm them, and they put them in front of their own parents and demand that they kill them,” a teenaged former captive of ISIS told MPs in a private session in April.
There is resistance, however. ISIS, of course, deals with it the same as it does with any kind of resistance to its authority — by killing the so-called offender. As the Inquisitr reported last week, seven parents were executed in Mosul when they refused to send their children to ISIS schools.
[Image via Shutterstock]