ISIS unleashes its ‘caliphate cubs’
Islamic State has unleashed a wave of child suicide bombers – ‘‘cubs of the caliphate’’ – on civilian targets in Iraq and Turkey.
Within 24 hours two children are believed to have detonated their devices and a third has been foiled.
Pictures emerged on Monday of the boy who was prevented from triggering his explosives in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Sunday night. They showed a bomb belt strapped around his stomach, covered by a Barcelona football shirt bearing the striker Lionel Messi’s name.
A police source said that the boy had been born in 2000 in Mosul, which is controlled by Islamic State. They said that he appeared to have been drugged.
His capture was caught on camera by a crew from Rudaw, an Iraqi Kurdish news channel. The child burst into tears as he was held by two uniformed men and stripped to the waist. After they cut the belt off him he was put in a police van and driven away.
He was caught soon after police said that another young suicide bomber had attacked a mosque in Kirkuk. The boy, whose age has not been confirmed, died and two people were wounded in the explosion in the Shia-dominated southern suburbs of the city.
Isis follows a fundamentalist version of the rival Sunni branch of Islam.
Two roadside bombs were discovered and defused at the same time.
‘‘There is a dangerous campaign tonight against Kirkuk,’’ an Iraqi security official told the TV channel.
The two child attackers in Kirkuk struck after a devastating suicide bomb attack at a Kurdish wedding party in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep on Saturday night that President Erdogan of Turkey said had been carried out by a child aged between 12 and 14. The bomb killed 53 people, most of whom were children, some as young as four, and injured dozens more.
Binali Yildirim, Turkey’s prime minister, said the age and identity of the attacker remained unclear.
Gaziantep is 50km from the Syrian border and is home to about 350,000 Syrian refugees. It has long been suspected that Isis has cells in the city. An Isis suicide bomb in the city in May killed three police officers.
Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, said Isis ‘‘must be cleansed from our border’’.
The attacks on Kirkuk appear to be an attempt to stir sectarian violence among the city’s population, which is made up of Sunnis, Shias and Kurds.
While it is still officially ruled by the central government in Baghdad, Kirkuk was annexed by Iraqi Kurdish forces in 2014 after Isis’s blitzkrieg through Iraq. Islamists control territory to the south and west of Kirkuk.
Isis is increasingly launching attacks on civilian targets in the Middle East and Europe as it loses territory in Iraq and Syria. It has been pushed out of several strongholds this year, as Kurdish, Sunni and Shia forces – as well as the western coalition and the Iraqi and Syrian national armies – attack its positions.
Reports suggest that many of Islamic State’s foreign fighters are trying to flee the caliphate, but are being stopped by their desperate leaders.
Islamic State has previously used children for suicide attacks on military targets in Iraq and Syria. These three incidents coming so close together have raised fears that Isis, which has trained children to become jihadists, has sent them to attack targets outside the battlefield.
The terrorist group’s use of child soldiers is well-documented, and scores of children who have escaped its territory have told how they were indoctrinated at the Al Zarqawi training camp, named after a former al-Qaeda chief.
Child soldiers have also appeared in disturbing propaganda videos put out by the group, including one in which a group of pre-pubescent boys killed regime soldiers by shooting them in the head in the ampitheatre of the ancient desert city of Palmyra.
Last year two children who had escaped from Tel Abyad, a Syrian city then under Isis control, said there were waiting lists for wouldbe suicide bombers, such was the extent of Isis brainwashing.
The terrorist group teaches that fighters who kill themselves in the cause of jihad, or holy war, will ascend straight to Heaven, even though suicide is considered a sin in Islam.
At least 89 children died fighting for Isis last year and three times as many children fought for the group in 2015 than in the previous year.