Islamic State Using Brainwashed Yazidi Children to Conduct Suicide Attacks

The Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) is taking a page from the book of its Boko Haram branch and brainwashing kidnapped children from the Yazidi minority group into carrying out suicide attacks.

Instances of child suicide bombings are occurring against the U.S-led coalition operations against the jihadist group in Iraq and Syria.

Rudaw reports:

The [autonomous] Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) [in northern Iraq] has urged the international community to help children who have been subjected to years of brainwashing and military training by ISIS after the extremist group released a propaganda video claiming to depict two Yezidi suicide bombers.

The United States and the United Nations have officially acknowledged that the Yazidis, Christians, and other ethnoreligious minorities in Iraq and Syria have been victims of genocide at the hands of ISIS.

“To our knowledge, more than 1,000 Yezidi children are being trained by ISIS. They indoctrinate them in the Islamic Sharia and Jihad theoretically and practically. And they also teach them the means of killing and how to carry out suicide attacks practically,” revealed Khairi Botani, head of the KRG’s Yazidi affairs office.

“Unfortunately, we several times through the media have urged the world that they are like time bombs, if they are not defused they will explode in Europe or somewhere else. Therefore we have asked for many times to help them escape even if it is through particular operations,” he added.

In a 30-minute propaganda video posted online Tuesday, ISIS features two young brainwashed Yazidi brothers, believed to be ages 11 and 12, expressing their alleged desire to carry out a suicide attack on behalf of ISIS, reports the Foreign Desk, adding:

The boys’ families, who confirmed their identities to The Foreign Desk, said they have had no information regarding their whereabouts, and this video is the first they have seen or heard from the boys since their abduction in 2014.

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Following taped speeches showing the brothers brandishing their weapons and sporting shy smiles, the pair enter separate explosive-laden vehicles.

Using drones, ISIS captures video footage of the final moments of the Yazidi boys’ lives before they carry out separate vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) attacks.

ISIS’s brutal Boko Haram wing, based in Nigeria, is notorious for using children and pregnant women as suicide bombers.

To justify genocide against the Yazidis, ISIS has deemed the minority group “devil worshippers” and “not people of the book.”

“When we were in Sinjar, we worshipped the devil and we were without God… We were ignorant and not aware of concepts such as Halal and Haram,” one of the boys says in the propaganda video.

ISIS took the two brothers captives when they captured the Yazidi-majority Iraqi town of Sinjar in August 2014, executing as may as 5000 Yazidi men and taking thousands of women and girls as sex slaves.

The jihadists also killed the boy’s father and four of their siblings during the 2014 Sinjar massacre.

ISIS has succeeded in brainwashing some Yazidi boys into wanting to kill their family members.

Some Yazidi boys who have been indoctrinated by ISIS have hesitated to escape the jihadist group’s training camps when given a chance, Reuters reported last year.

In August 2016, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that ISIS is indoctrinating thousands of boys abducted in Iraq and Syria into fighting in the Islamic State “jihad.”

The ISIS child jihadists are known as “Cubs of the Caliphate.”