Teen ISIS Recruit’s Suicide Bomb Explodes At Home, Kills Entire Family
A suicide bomb left in the control of a newly recruited teen ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) member is the apparent cause of the death of his entire family in a house just outside of Mosul, according to Iraqi sources.
Iraqi News reported this week that a new ISIS recruit was apparently responsible for the death of his six-member family when the suicide belt he was supposed to detonate amidst enemy forces exploded instead inside his home, killing him and the rest of his family, including three children. The report was passed along from Alsumaria News, which noted that the teen was part of the contingent of Islamic State child soldiers known as the “Cubs of the Caliphate.”
An unnamed source wishing to remain anonymous told Alsumaria News that the teen was at his home in the al-Wehda district, which is east of Mosul, and was putting on an explosive belt given to him and others recruited into the suicide bomber squad.
“The teenager’s belt exploded inside his home. It appeared later that all of his family, including three children, were killed.”
The source said that teens wearing explosive belts for ISIS had become commonplace, especially on the east side of Mosul. “It comes as part of ISIS strategy to strengthen its grip on the ground and intimidate the people,” he explained.
It has not been reported whether or not the teen’s family was aware of his involvement with ISIS.
The recruiting of teens and younger children into the Islamic State ranks is nothing new. As the Inquisitr has reported, recruiting children as young as 9-years-old has been documented by European intelligence agencies. The practice has been ongoing since the inception of the so-called caliphate, which was announced in June 2014, after ISIS militants took over extended areas of eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq.
An NBC News report noted that indoctrinating the children and adolescents in the radicalized Wahabbist version of Sunni Islam was a long-term strategic move by ISIS. Many of the child soldiers, once trained, are deployed as human shields and suicide bombers as well as regular rank-and-file fighters. The recruitment into the extremist ranks is seen as putting more soldiers on the battlefield, and early indoctrination ensures the Islamic State’s “longevity by providing a ready-and-willing next generation of jihadis.”
A series of suicide bombings and attempted detonations during the summer seemed to underscore the point. Especially horrific was the suicide bombing of the Kurdish wedding just north of the Syrian border in Turkey in August. According to the Inquisitr, the terrorist act was carried out by a teenager and left 54 people dead, nearly half of whom were under the age of 14.
More recently, however, news of the deaths of hundreds of the “Cubs of the Caliphate” has been reported. As recounted by the Inquisitr, British human rights watchdog organization, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, revealed that more than 300 ISIS child soldiers had been killed in the first couple of weeks of fighting in Mosul, which began in mid-October. The youths had been schooled and trained in Syria by the Islamic State, then ordered to fight in the battle for the besieged Iraqi city.
Such a desperate use of children in the fighting prompted the British paper, The Sun, to compare the ISIS tactic to that of the use of the Hitler Youth in the waning days of Nazis during World War II.
But not all the young people in ISIS territory are under the extremists’ control. In fact, some of the Islamic State’s more horrific executions have been performed against groups of youths accused of participating in a resistance movement. The Inquisitr reported that a group of nine youths was executed by ISIS in late August with a chainsaw and a group of six was killed with welding tools in late September.
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