Numerous women and girls they captured were given to ISIS loyalists as sex slaves.
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They forced boys as young as eight to convert to Islam from their ancient faith and become jihadi fighters, making them practice beheadings on dolls.
“I was scared”, Yahya, who preferred not to reveal his real name for fear of retaliation, said in an interview with the Associated Press. In order to practise the technique, each boy is given a doll and a sword and asked to cut its head off, reported Fox News.
A 14-year-old who was among the line of abducted boys from Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority said that at first, he couldn’t cut it right – he chopped once, twice, three times. They told me it was the head of the infidels’. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to behead someone like that”.
The Yazidi boys are told the exercise is part of their “re-education” as Islamic State attempts to train up a new generation of terrorists and suicide bombers. They were taken to Raqqa, where the brothers and other Yazidi boys aged 8 to 15 were put in the Farouq training camp. “They… told us it would make us tougher”.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 1,100 Syrian children under 16 joined Islamic State this year and 52 have died while fighting, including eight suicide bombers.
He continued: “Their goal is to rebuild the Islamic societies they have conquered into a global comprehensive Islamist system that takes over all aspects of society, from garbage collection to teaching at the Madrassas [religious schools]”. Yahya punched his ten-year-old brother, knocking out a tooth. “(The trainer) said that if I didn’t do it, he’d shoot me”, he said. They beat us everywhere. The boys hit each other in some exercises. While the remaining guards slept, he and his brother slipped away and now reside in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Dohuk with their uncle. They are first shown beheading videos and told that they would perform it someday. Previous videos have shown boys killing what IS alleged were an Israeli spy and two Russian agents.
The boy, who was among the hundreds kidnapped by ISIS from northern Iraq, managed to escape from the training camp located at the group’s headquarters in the Syrian city of Raqqa.
Separately, Syrian army sources said a senior army commander, General Muhsen Makhlouf, was killed in an Islamic State ambush on Thursday in the desert around Palmyra, where the Syrian army was launching an assault to regain the town.
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The report describes recent ISIS propaganda videos in which camouflage-uniformed children and teenagers are seen in camps doing calisthenics, receiving beatings, and training with firearms, in addition to videos which show children participating in, or carrying out, executions, including one in which “25 children unflinchingly [shoot] 25 captured Syrian soldiers in the head”.
