‘ISIS Made Me Practise Beheading Infidels Using A Doll’ – 14-Year-Old Boy Who Fled Terror Camp

A 14-year-old who was among the boys abducted by ISIS from Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority has shared the callous feats young boys are trained and mandated to do in their terror camp.

The children had all been shown videos of beheadings and told by their trainers that they would perform one someday.

First, they had to practice their technique. More than 120 boys were each given a doll and a sword and told to cut off its head.

‘…they taught me how to hold the sword and they told me how to hit. They told me it was the head of the infidels,’ the boy, renamed Yahya by his ISIS captors, told The Associated Press last week in northern Iraq, where he fled after escaping the ISIS training camp.

When Islamic State extremists overran Yazidi towns in northern Iraq last year, they butchered older men and enslaved many of the women and girls.

Dozens of young Yazidi boys like Yahya had a different fate: The ISIS sought to re-educate them.

They forced them to convert to Islam from their ancient faith and tried to turn them into jihadi fighters.

It is part of a concerted effort by the extremists to build a new generation of militants, according to interviews with residents who fled or still live under ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

The group is recruiting teens and children using gifts, threats and brainwashing. Boys have been turned into killers and suicide bombers.

An ISIS video issued last week showed a boy beheading a Syrian soldier under an adult militant’s supervision.

Last month, a video showed 25 children unflinchingly shooting 25 captured Syrian soldiers in the head.

In schools and mosques, militants infuse children with extremist doctrine, often turning them against their own parents.   

Fighters in the street befriend children with toys.

ISIS training camps churn out the Ashbal, Arabic for ‘lion cubs’ – child fighters for the ‘caliphate’ that ISIS declared across its territory.

The caliphate is a historic form of Islamic rule that the group claims to be reviving with its own radical interpretation, though the vast majority of Muslims reject its claims.

‘I am terribly worried about future generations,’ said Abu Hafs Naqshabandi, a Syrian sheikh who runs religion classes for refugees in the Turkish city of Sanliurfa to counter ISIS ideology.

In ISIS-held towns, militants show young people videos at street booths. They hold outdoor events for children, distributing soft drinks and candy – and propaganda.

According to an anti-ISIS activist who fled the Syrian city of Raqqa, they tell adults: ‘We have given up on you, we care about the new generation.’

Yahya, his little brother, their mother and hundreds of Yazidis were captured when ISIS seized the Iraqi town of Sulagh in August.

He spent nearly five months in the terror camp, training eight to 10 hours a day, including exercises, weapons drills and Quranic studies.

They showed him how to shoot someone from close range. The boys hit each other in some exercises. Yahya punched his 10-year-old brother, knocking out a tooth.

The trainer ‘said if I didn’t do it, he’d shoot me,’ Yahya said. ‘They… told us it would make us tougher. They beat us everywhere.’

In an ISIS video of Farouq camp, boys in camouflage do calisthenics and shout slogans.

An ISIS fighter says the boys have studied jihad so ‘in the coming days God Almighty can put them in the front lines to battle the infidels.’

Videos from other camps show boys crawling under barbed wire and practicing shooting.

One child lies on the ground and fires a machine gun, but he’s so small the recoil bounces his whole body back a few inches.

Yahya escaped from the terror camp in early March.

Source: DailyMail