Islamic terrorist group ISIS has kidnapped 500 children and Iraqi officials are concerned they’re being trained to be suicide bombers.
Farhan Mohammed of Anbar’s Provincial Council told reporters that ISIS was able to kidnap over 400 children from their region in less than a week.
“Daesh [Arabic acronym for ISIS] has kidnapped at least 400 children in the western province of Anbar and taken them to their bases in Iraq and Syria,” Mohammed was quoted as saying by the Christian Post.
The terrorists also kidnapped 120 children from schools in the northern part of Nineveh province.
ISIS has been releasing videos to social media showing children who are being indoctrinated by the terrorists. They call their camps training for “cubs of the caliphate.” The Iraqi Human Rights Commission estimates that 1,000 children have been trained by the terrorist group.
“They use children because it is easy to brainwash them,” Rami Abdulrahman, the head of the Syrian Observatory, told Reuters. “They can build these children into what they want. They stop them from going to school and send them to IS schools instead.”