Originally published in The Christian Post
A 13-year-old boy has shared of the beheadings, stonings and crucifixion he witnessed terror group ISIS carry out at children’s camps in Syria, where the Islamic militants are indoctrinating young boys into their ideology and training them to use weapons.
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“My friends and I were studying at the mosque, and they taught us that we should enrol in jihad with the [Islamic State],” Mohammed told CNN in a video. “I wanted to go, but my father did not allow me to.”
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The 13-year-old explains that he was called to attend one of ISIS’ children’s camps in northern Syria, and that the terror group threatened his father with death if he refused.
“For 30 days we woke up and jogged, had breakfast, then learned the Quran and the hadith of the prophet,” Mohammed shared. “Then we took courses on weapons, Kalashnikovs and other light military stuff.”
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He added that some of the militants joked around with the recruits, but others made the young boys witness murders.
“They used to bring young [kids] to the camp to lash them,” the boy added. “When we go to the mosque, they order us to come the next day at a specific time and place to [watch] heads cut off, lashings or stonings.
“We saw a young man who did not fast for Ramadan, so they crucified him for three days, and we saw a woman being stoned [to death] because she committed adultery.”
The video notes that Mohammed has now been able to flee to safety in Turkey.
ISIS has captured significant territory in Iraq and Syria, and has declared the creation of an “Islamic State,” threatening religious minorities and all who stand in its way.
The terror group has been accused of beheading children and carrying out mass rapes in the region. It has been condemned by the United Nations, the United States and the majority of the international community.
“They are systematically beheading children, and mothers and fathers. The world hasn’t seen an evil like this for a generation. There’s actually a park in Mosul that they’ve actually beheaded children and put their heads on a stick,” National spokesman for Iraqi Christians and Chaldean-American businessman Mark Arabo told CNN in another interview.
“And they have them in the park. This is crimes against humanity. The whole world should come together. This is much broader than a community or faith. This is crimes against humanity and they are doing the most horrendous, the most heartbreaking things you can think of,” he explained.
ISIS has also posted a number of graphic videos showing off the Islamic extremist committing atrocities. Last week, a video showed the apparentmass slaughter of close to 250 Syrian soldiers who had been captured last weekend in Northern Syria, with an ISIS fighter announcing that they have all been executed.
Earlier in August, the Islamic militants also released a video showing the beheading of American journalist James Foley, who had been kidnapped two years earlier in Syria while working for US-based online news outlet GlobalPost.
Another account stated that a 5-year-old boy, the son of a founding member of St. George’s Anglican Church in Baghdad, was cut in half by Islamic terrorists during an attack on the Christian town of Qaraqosh.
“I’m almost in tears because I’ve just had somebody in my room whose little child was cut in half,” said Anglican Canon Andrew White of St. George’s Church. “I baptized his child in my church in Baghdad. This little boy, they named him after me — he was called Andrew.”
US President Barack Obama has said that the terror group “speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just God would stand for what they did yesterday, and for what they do every single day. ISIL has no ideology of any value to human beings.”
Obama added: “Their ideology is bankrupt. They may claim, out of expediency, that they are at war with the United States or the West, but the fact is they terrorize their neighbors and offer them nothing but an endless slavery to their empty vision, and the collapse of any definition of civilized behavior.”
