Chilling moment 11-year-old Islamic State 'jihadi cub' kisses his father before blowing himself up
Disturbing video footage has emerged of an 11-year-old child jihadi kneeling before his father's outstretched hand and kissing it before blowing himself up in a suicide blast near Aleppo, Syria.
The boy, identified as Abu Imara al Omri, is seen saying his final goodbyes before donning a weapon and being groomed for his mission by another Islamic State militant.
He is shown in the video inspecting the truck and being taught how to ignite and drive the truck, a weapon increasingly being used in attacks against forces loyal to president Bashar al-Assad.
Islamic State propaganda continues to boast about young 'cubs of the caliphate' being sacrificed as part of a new generation of jihadists, with the extremist group encouraging mothers to send their sons into death.
"As for you, O mother of lion cubs. ... And what will make you know what the mother of lion cubs is? She is the teacher of generations and the producer of men," an article in Dabiq read.
This is not the first time the Islamic State has used children as propaganda.
In Raqqa, the Islamic State group's de facto capital in Syria, boys attend training camp and religious courses before heading off to fight. Others serve as cooks or guards at the extremists' headquarters or as spies, informing on people in their neighbourhoods.
It is difficult to determine just how widespread the exploitation of children is in the closed world of IS-controlled territory. There are no reliable figures on the number of minors the group employs.
But a United Nations panel investigating war crimes in the Syrian conflict concluded that in its enlistment of children for active combat roles, the Islamic State group is perpetrating abuses and war crimes on a massive scale "in a systematic and organised manner".
The group "prioritises children as a vehicle for ensuring long-term loyalty, adherence to their ideology and a cadre of devoted fighters that will see violence as a way of life," it said in a recent report. The panel of experts, known as the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, conducted more than 300 interviews with people who fled or are living in IS-controlled areas, and examined video and photographic evidence.
The use of children by armed groups in conflict is, of course, nothing new. In the Syrian civil war, the Free Syrian Army and Nusra Front rebel groups also recruit children for combat, said Leila Zerrougui, the U.N. secretary-general's special representative for children and armed conflict.
But no other group comes close to IS in using children in such a systematic and organised way. And the effect is that much greater because IS commands large areas in which the militants inculcate the children with their radical and violent interpretation of Shariah law.
"What is new is that ISIS seems to be quite transparent and vocal about their intention and their practice of recruiting children," said Laurent Chapuis, UNICEF regional child protection adviser for the Middle East and North Africa, using an alternate acronym for the group. "
Children as young as ten, 12 years old are being used in a variety of roles, as combatants as messengers, spies, guards, manning checkpoints but also for domestic purposes like cooking, cleaning, sometimes providing medical care to the wounded."
"This is not a marginal phenomenon. This is something that is being observed and seems to be part of the strategy of the group," Zerrougui said in a phone interview from New York.
She said some children join voluntarily for various reasons but others are targeted.
"They are abducting children and forcing them to join, they are brainwashing children and indoctrinating them to join their group. All the tools used to attract and recruit children are used by this group," she said, adding that children as young as nine or ten are used for "various roles."
