According to a report from an Iraqi security official, ISIS found a new low to sink to when it used an orphaned baby to demonstrate improvised explosive devices to a gaggle of recruits.
The report comes from Security Committee Chairman Sadiq al-Husseini of Iraq’s Diyala province, who spoke to a local Arabic-language paper. The story has since been picked up by a number of international news sources, including the UK Daily Mail.
“The organization booby trapped the baby in front of dozens of armed ISIS men and then detonated it from afar,” explained al-Husseini, according to a translation from The Clarion Project. “The rigging of the baby and its detonation was a training exercise of ISIS to teach its people booby-trapping techniques.”
“The organization doesn’t care about the most basic human values. Their crimes are incalculable and the blowing up of the baby is the best proof to the threat of ISIS’ ideology to the state,” the security official added.
He went on to say that the baby’s father had been “arrested and swiftly executed for killing several ISIS militants,” so the hideous murder of the child was part of the Islamic State’s revenge against him. No details were provided about the fate of the baby’s mother.
The Daily Mail goes on to list a variety of ISIS abuses against children to make the case that al-Husseini’s account is credible, including the use of teenage suicide bombers. The depravity of ISIS is unquestionable, but this remains a single-source story; there appears to be no independent corroboration, all reports seem to lead back to a single interview al-Husseini gave to local media, and there is no indication of how he learned of this atrocity. Did one of the ISIS recruits defect and talk about it, was the baby’s murder observed by other Iraqis in the vicinity, or is this a second–or third–hand account?