ISIS News: Escaped Child Soldier Tells His Heartbreaking Story
Nasir has come a long, long way, and at 12 years of age, he has seen the worst things in life after being taken by the Islamic State to serve as a child soldier.
In his interview with CNN, Nasir (not his real name) said he was being trained to be a suicide bomber before he escaped. "There were 60 of us....When they were training us they would tell us our parents were unbelievers and that our first job was to go back and kill them," he said.
He, along with the other captured children, was treated nice to make them feel that the ISIS fighters loved them more than their parents did. They were taught that Americans were "unbelievers" and had the goal of killing them all.
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Whenever there were airstrikes, the scared children were led to underground tunnels to keep them from being injured so they can one day become fighters for the caliphate.
Nasir recalled how each time he wanted to cry, he was told not to and he had to "cry quietly" as he thought of his worried mother and how life would have been better out of the ISIS' hands.
In his shocking tale, he told of how the youngest among them was only 5 years old, but even at that age, none of them were kept from the training that would hone their minds and bodies into becoming terrorists.
After he was featured in a propaganda video by the ISIS at the Al Farouq Institute in Raqqa, Syria, Nasir escaped and has since been reunited with his mother. "When we escaped and I saw my mother again, it was like coming back to life," he recalled.
Peshmerga commander Aziz Abdullah Hadur shared his sentiments after being in the battlefield against the extremists. He said there were times when they had to fight against children who were forced by the ISIS to attack the border. The children they see were "skinny" and "barely look human."
What's more terrifying is Hadur's account of how he saw children standing at the border wearing vests with explosives attached to them. Hadur and his men find it difficult to tell if the children trying to cross the borderline have been sent to destroy the Kurdish camp or if they were merely trying to get help after escaping.
"You don't know what to do because if you don't kill them they'll kill you," Hadur explained.
Over the past months, some propaganda videos have been released by the ISIS featuring children undergoing training to become big shot fighters. The children are being trained to one day overcome the world and probably lay out attacks similar to the Paris tragedies.
Nouri, 11, and his brother, Saman, 5, have also escaped from the terrorists, and while Saman didn't suffer as much as his older brother did, the atrocities keep haunting him.
Saman received numerous beatings, while Nouri had his leg broken in three parts after refusing to join other boys in training. The two have now been reunited with their grandparents, but the memories remain as they think of how their captive parents and baby brother fare in the presence of the world's enemies.
