Islamic State atrocities against children have continued with the kidnap of more than 1,200 children from northern Iraq in order to train them as jihadists.
In the week that ISIS punished two boys in Syria by suspending them from a pole for eating during the Muslim fast of Ramadan, it has emerged that the children have been forcibly relocated to a jihad training base in Mosul.
Saeed Mamouzini, of the Kurdish Democratic Party in Mosul, told al-Sumaria TV in Iraq that 1,227 children from Mosul had been seized and taken to a "cubs of the caliphate" indoctrination centre. There, they will be brutalised with extremist ideology and trained up to be murderers, terrorists and suicide bombers.
Parents and other adults who tried to resist the abductions were also seized.
The latest abductions follow the seizure of 400 children from Anbar province and more than 100 children from Diyala province earlier this month. Children are also being taken by jihadist forces in other countries.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi warned that ISIS is deliberately putting children on the front line to confuse opposing forces. He called on the United Nations to condemn these actions as war crimes.
"IS militants train children and send them to the frontlines to scare opposition forces. They train children from about 100 countries around the world." He said IS was attracting suicide bombers coming from every country in the Middle East and that at least 40 would-be suicide bombers enter Iraq each month.
"It is up to others to stop these terrorists from coming to our country, and to stop this machine of killing and destruction and terrorism," he said.
