ISIS' Horrifying 22-Minute Propaganda Video Shows Child Executioner Shooting Prisoners in Head
Terror group ISIS has released its latest propaganda video, this time featuring a child soldier who shoots several prisoners in the head as they plead for their lives at an Iraqi river.
MailOnline reported on Wednesday that footage of the executions in the 22-minute video was taken during the Speicher massacre in Tikrit in 2014, which left close to 1,700 people dead.
The graphic film shows a boy with a handgun shooting prisoners with hands tied behind their backs, as uniformed ISIS soldiers stand watching from behind. The boy kills at least two men in the footage, and their lifeless bodies are thrown into the river.
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The rest of the video also shows very graphic murder scenes, with jihadists shooting young men to death and throwing their bodies into shallow graves.
The mass slaughter around Tikrit remains one of the largest massacres in ISIS' invasion of Iraq and Syria, though — thus far — only 600 bodies have been exhumed since government and allied forces retook the city back in April.
ISIS has been investing greatly in its training camps for young boys, where the children — many of whom have been kidnapped from various parts in the region — are indoctrinated into ISIS ideology and trained to fight for the militants.
Earlier in July a separate video showed children carrying out a mass execution of 25 men accused of being soldiers for the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The slaughter took place inside a Roman amphitheater in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, with the seemingly teenage ISIS soldiers filmed standing behind kneeling prisoners.
Steve Emerson, the executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, said back in June that "indoctrinating kids with ISIS' fanaticism is not only the easiest population to indoctrinate but also produces new generations of ISIS believers and ultimately, at some point, fighters. This is the way you build a Caliphate."
He continued: "Their goal is to rebuild the Islamic societies they have conquered into a global comprehensive Islamist system that takes over all aspects of society, from garbage collection to teaching at the Madrassas [religious schools]."
Charlie Winter, researcher at the counter-extremism think tank Quilliam, has argued, however, that it would not be correct to presume children are willingly joining ISIS.
"Even if they have the perception of choice, it's not choice. If you're a minor and being indoctrinated from a very young age, you don't have the power to make a serious choice. I think that it's certainly worth considering more robustly that people are being groomed," Winter said.
