When children are abducted by terrorists, they are submitted to bad training practices to follow the group’s ideology.
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The group is believed to use threats, intimidation and an unrelenting endurance training to break down the children.
The Post reports ISIS is using more children in its bombing attacks, calling them “cubs of the caliphate”.
Turkish authorities are also investigating whether militants may have placed the explosives on the suspect, without his or her knowledge before detonating them long distance.
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. According to Daily Mail, Kirkuk intelligence official Chato Fadhil Humadi reported that the boy “claimed during interrogation that he had been kidnapped by masked men who put the explosives on him and sent him to the area”.
Security officials said the boy is 16 years old, though local media reports said he was much younger. Iraqi security forces largely withdrew from Kirkuk and Kurdish forces known as the peshmerga took control of the city.
“Teenagers are easier to recruit for suicide missions, especially in moments of suffering or despair having lost loved ones”, he said. “They also attract less attention and less suspicion than male adults”.
Video of the arrest shows police removing an explosive belt from the boy, who claimed he had been kidnapped by terrorists and was being forced to blow himself up.
An hour earlier, a suicide bomber conducted an attack in front of a Shia mosque, in Kirkuk. Previously, there have been reports on how children are recruited as soldiers in Nigeria and Somalia by Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab respectively. The first open source database documenting ISIS child propaganda was launched this year after 13 months of study.
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“This is one of the defining features of this conflict”, said Thierry Delvigne-Jean of the agency’s west and central Africa office.
