ISIS training 1,400 captive Yazidi children to be jihadis and suicide bombers
The Islamic State terrorist group reportedly trains more than a thousand captive Yazidi children to become jihadis and suicide bombers, according to a report.
Hussein Kuru, director for the office of Yezidi Abductees Affairs in Duhok province reported Wednesday in a press conference that the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Peshmerga forces freed 2,640 Yezidi men and women from the clutches of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS or Daesh) militants but that at least 3,770 Yazidis remain captive. Among the remaining captives, ISIS reportedly grooms the children for jihad or religious war.
"IS militants are reportedly training 1,400 Yezidi children to carry out military activities and suicide attacks," said Kuru, according to basnews.
He added that the officials discovered 33 Yazidi mass graves in Sinjar and other recaptured areas and estimated more than 400,000 Yazidis displaced from Sinjar, Bashiqa and Nineveh since ISIS seized control of the lands in 2014 and declared its Caliphate.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) also reported the following day that ISIS executed at least 12 of the Iraqi captives who tried to escape.
A Yazidi girl, who managed to escape the IS camps after six months and 12 days of captivity, already told the United Nations during a conference early this year of the terrors suffered by the Yazidi captives at the hands of the militant group. Samia Sleman, 15, said ISIS killed off Yazidi men and older women, subjected young women into sex slavery and trained and brainwashed young boys to become future jihadis.
"There are young Yazidi boys they are training in ISIS camps to make them future jihadis to fight with ISIS and brainwashing them at the time when we were in captivity they separated all the girls and sold them to each other," said Sleman.
She implored the international community to recognize the atrocities against the Yazidi religious minorities as genocide and denounced the lack of concrete actions against the IS.
"Why are these innocent kids and these innocent people suffering this much in that region? Why don't we see any action being taken even though it has been over a year and half now?" Sleman asked.