Terrorism: 'Suicide vest' torn from child moments before explosion
Security forces in Iraq have ripped what appears to be a suicide vest from off of a young boy, moments before a deadly explosion.
News camera operators and photographers were on the scene on Sunday for the dramatic confrontation, with pictures showing men in police and armed forces uniforms restraining the boy as they removed the apparent explosive device from his body.
The distraught child can be seen crying as police take him from the scene.
The boy is believed to be aged around 12 or 13.
He was intercepted by Kurdish forces in Kirkuk, north of Baghdad on August 21. According to reports, he was just moments away from detonating the bomb.
The confronting pictures emerged amid growing fears Islamic State terrorists were increasingly using children to carry out their crimes.
Turkey’s president Tayyip Erdoganat the weekend blamed an ISIS suicide bomber for an attack on a wedding party which left at least 50 people dead.
The attacker was reportedly between 13 and 14 years old when he detonated a suicide bomb among guests dancing in the street in Gaziantep near the Turkey-Syria border.
That attack was the latest in a series of terrorist acts in Turkey aimed at Kurish people and designed to inflame ethnic tensions.
AFP reports an attack in October left 100 Kurds dead in Ankara at a rally of pro-Kurdish and labour activists.
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.
"Our forces received 600 people yesterday and offered them assistance," a brigadier general with the Kurdish peshmerga forces told AFP earlier in August.
"We heard from them that Daesh (IS) is holding hundreds of families hostage and has executed young men for escaping from the land of jihad (holy war) to the land of the infidels," he said.
