22 de agosto de 2016, 16:06Baghdad, Aug 22 (Prensa Latina) Iraqi police stated today that an 11-old boy was arrested and his explosive belt seized in the vicinity of a Shiite mosque in the city of Kirkuk.
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The youth, age 12 or 13, was captured before he could detonate his explosives belt in Kirkuk’s Huzairan neighborhood, the Kurdish Rudaw news agency reported.
Kurds have been a key ally in the fight against the Islamic State, and Kurdish forces have driven the militants out of a swatch of Kurdish areas of Turkey and Iraq. UNICEF said that three quarters of child suicide bombers had been girls.
The use of children in suicide attacks by global terrorist organisations is nothing new: numerous Tamil Tigers “Black Tiger” suicide attack squad recruits in the 1990s were believed to be under the age of 18, although the group did not officially release the ages of its militants.
Kirkuk has seen a rise in ethnic tensions following the Islamic State group’s blitz across northern and western Iraq in 2014.
The group has deployed child suicide bombers to stage attacks in both Iraq and Syria.
That tactic has been used before in Iraq, where children or even mentally disadvantaged adults have been dispatched as unwitting bomb couriers into markets and checkpoints before they are blown up from afar.
Iraqi security forces largely withdrew from Kirkuk and Kurdish forces known as the peshmerga took control of the city.
Most militant groups operating during the Second Intifada (2001-2004) claimed not to use children as suicide bombers, but there are differences over the definition of what constitutes a “child” combatant.
“Teenagers are easier to recruit for suicide missions, especially in moments of suffering or despair having lost loved ones”, he said.
The terrorist group maintains an army of child soldiers – stolen from their families and indoctrinated to their cause.
According to the UNICEF report, almost two thirds of all the child attackers they tracked were girls.
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So far the organization has not issued a statement to say a word about the detained boy, but Iraqi authorities believe ISIS is likely behind the failed bombing. This news story is related to Latest/144638-In-Iraq-Nigeria-and-now-Turkey-child-bombers-strike/ – breaking news, latest news, pakistan ne.
