Islamic State Chickens: Terror Groups Uses Fowl, Goats as Suicide Bombers; Online Pictures Show Hens Strapped With Improvised Explosives

By Samuel Smith, Deputy Managing Editor Friday, July 24, 2015

Photos have been posted online purporting to show the Islamic State's new attack strategy — using innocent chickens and hens as suicide bombers to kill their enemies.

The Daily Mail reports that both pro-IS and anti-IS tweeters have shared pictures of what appears to be chickens with improvised explosive devices strapped onto them.

According to the British news agency, claims have been made that IS is equipping chickens with explosives in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. The chickens are then encouraged by the militants to venture into the opposition's territory, where IS militants remotely detonate the explosives and kill opposition fighters that are within the striking distance of the birds.

The photos emerged after Kurdish forces claimed to have captured a bomb-strapped chicken in the Syrian city of Al-Hasakah, according to the International Business Times.

Although there's no verification as to whether or not IS has in fact taken up the practice of using chickens as suicide bombers to carry out militants' dirty work, an unnamed British man fighting for the Kurdish forces explained to the Daily Mail that IS is using any means necessary to bring about the demise of the opposition.

"IS will use whatever means they can to bring death and destruction," the British fighter said. "Using animals has little military value. It is just another example of how their twisted minds enjoy dreaming up bizarre ways to kill people."

As IS has recently suffered a few defeats along its supply lines in Syria, Nasser Kataw — an expert on Iraqi terror groups who lectures at the University of Baghdad — told British newspaper The Daily Star that IS' ammunition continues to become scarce and could be forcing the terror group to devise more creative ways to utilize the weapons it has.

"The regime has countless small arms like semi-automatic weapons and pistols and lots of field weapons like mortars, but the ammunition is running low and cannot easily be replaced," Kataw said. "The regime is now desperately trying to fashion its own weapons, but lacks the machine shops to make such precision items."

According to the Daily Mail, the emergence of the bomb-strapped chicken photos comes after reports surfaced alleging that IS strapped improvised explosives to a goat and sent the goat into a Kurdish base in the Syrian border town of Kobane.

IS has also used children as suicide bombers. In early July, militants forced a 14-year-old boy to carry out a suicide attack in northern Syria that killed over 50 members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party.

The Iranian AhlulBayt News Agency reports that at least 40 children, aged between 12 and 17, have died in suicide operations for IS in the last seven months.

If the fowl claims are true, it wouldn't be the first time that IS has massacred chickens. In April, the terror group destroyed two truck shipments of U.S.-produced chicken that were on their way to starving Syrians in the war-ravished nation because it supposedly violated the caliphate's dietary restrictions.