A WOULD-BE suicide bomber thought to be as young as 12 has told Iraqi police he was kidnapped by masked men who placed an explosive vest on him.
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Less than 24 hours before the boy’s arrest, a child suicide bomber killed at least 51 people and injured a further 100 as they danced at a wedding party in Turkey.
However, Turkish authorities are not yet in a position to verify whether the attacker was the child, according to Prime Minister Binali Yildirim.
As the self-declared Islamic State (ISIS) has lost stretches of territory in Iraq and Syria and tens of thousands of fighters, it is relying more on child bombers. “It is easier for children to infiltrate outside of ISIS’s area”, a Kirkuk Police commander explained.
Rudaw reported one security official saying: “There is a risky campaign tonight against Kirkuk”. “IS trains and indoctrinates children as early as primary school age such that they are “ready” to become militants as soon as they hit puberty”, Ege Seckin, political analyst at IHS, told IBTimesUK. This was the deadliest attack in Turkey so far this year. “When considered in the context of the child soldiers in other conflicts, this is somewhat counter-intuitive”, the report said.
The world is beginning to face another kind of terrorism from children carrying suicide bombs. A bomber – believed be a teenager – detonated his explosives as officials were handing out trophies to players after the tournament, killing 29 and wounding 60. The leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, used teenagers as suicide bombers to fight the American occupation in Iraq before he was killed in a US airstrike in 2006.
Tactics such as those are mirrored in West Africa where United Nations officials have tracked a rise in attacks like the one carried out by a girl as young as ten who a year ago exploded a bomb in a busy market place in the Nigerian city of Maiduguri, killing 16 people.
The northern and western parts of Iraq have been plagued by gruesome violence ever since Daesh terrorists mounted their offensive in June 2014.
Although not all of young militants are committed to the terrorist ideology, the promise of food, shelter, and friendship (when they are isolated from their family) is commonly used as a tactic to brainwash infants.
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UNICEF says that three quarters of Boko Haram child suicide bombers were girls.
