With the Islamic State militants' strangle hold over Mosul coming apart, more accounts of atrocities committed by the terror outfit are being revealed. An Iraqi news portal published a video that details a child's account of the brutal handling of children as pawns in the mindless war.
The child throws fresh light into the inhuman ways in which the Isis militants recruit and employ children to commit atrocities in the war, including cold blooded killing of rival soldiers.
In the video, the child identified merely as Mohamed describes how the Sunni Islamist militant faction that once controlled vast swathes of land in Syria and Iraq force children to fight in the ranks of the so-called 'Cubs of Caliphate'.
Among the atrocities committed are sending children to the front lines of the battle and subjecting them to cruel training. The children are recruited from mosques and brainwashed into the adopting the cruelest interpretation of their ideology and are even made to believe that killing their own parents is legal in the Jihadist vocation.
The physical side of the grueling training of the child soldiers is mindlessly cruel as well. The would-be suicide soldiers and jihadist martyrs are asked to break sticks on their stomachs and tiles on their heads as part of the training.
The child in the video, whose face is masked, reveals that parents would face harsh punishment and risk execution if they don't let their wards join the jihadist killer machine. The cubs of caliphate have carried out executions and mass slaughters, the child reveals.
As the Iraqi onslaught aided by US and Russia intensified, the Isis took hundreds of child soldiers by force as they fled to Syria but around half the children died, the report said.
Recent reports showed Isis made a mockery of education in areas they controlled, by stuffing their deranged ideology into textbooks. If the pervasive use of jihadist symbolism and ideology wasn't enough, they even used mathematics text books to further the toxic ideology.
Subjects including maths, English language and technology were illustrated by deadly weapons like AK 47s, sub machine guns, bombs, tanks and warplanes. In a grammar test students are asked to construct sentences using words like bomb, vest and explode. Practical lessons included making suicide vests and the learning the proper ways of beheading prisoners.
