Footage captured by a local television station showed the moment a would-be Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) child suicide bomber was apprehended, seconds before he was able to detonate his explosives belt.
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His arrest came less than 24 hours after another child suicide bomber killed at least 51 people and injured 100 more at a wedding party in Turkey. However, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Monday that authorities were still trying to identify the bomber and did not know whether he was “a child or a grown-up”, the Associated Press reported.
The murderous terror attack that was executed by a 12-year-old at a Turkish wedding and the dramatic arrest of a teenager wearing an explosives belt in Iraq provide evidence about the Islamic State’s newest strategy.
Speaking to reporters in Ankara, Mr Yildirim said: “We are not in a position to verify anything about who the perpetrator was – if it was a child, an adult, or for which organisation”.
In West Africa, especially Nigeria, Boko Haram has preyed on displaced children and the young girls it kidnapped, forcing them to become bombers.
Experts claim that the reason behind the rise in ISIS’s child recruits stems from the fact that over the past two years, more than 45,000 ISIS terrorists have been eliminated from coalition force airstrikes and, therefore, the terrorist organization is attempting to meet its so-called quotas.
Iraqi security forces in Kirkuk also intercepted a 12-year-old boy strapped with a suicide vest not more than a day after the blast in Turkey. At least 22 of the victims were younger than 14, according to a government official.
“[Children] are not just being used to shock people in execution videos”, says researcher Charlie Winter to CNN.
In Kirkuk, hundreds of residents attempted to flee earlier this month, risking violent reprisals from ISIS, as Iraqi and Kurdish forces prepared to move into the jihadist held region. The United States estimates that USA and coalition jets have killed 45,000 Islamic State militants since an air campaign began two years ago. It was eventually removed from the boy’s body and the explosives defused at the scene.
When children are abducted by terrorists, they are submitted to bad training practices to follow the group’s ideology.
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According to the Unicef report, almost two thirds of all the child attackers they tracked were girls.
