London: In a shocking revelation, a 12-year-old child soldier from Syria’s Raqqa, who was held captive by Islamic State, revealed how militants brainwash children to murder their parents.
The child soldier claims that he was asked to kill his own parents while being trained by ISIS. Nasir, the escapee, told CNN that he was one among 60 children who were being trained to become suicide bombers. After finishing their training, they would have then been infiltrated into the Islamic State’s terror base in Raqqa.
While the captive children underwent suicide bombing training, they were repeatedly told that ISIS cares for them more than their own parents.
"The scariest times for us all were when the airstrikes happened. They'd lead all of us underground into the tunnels to hide. They told us the Americans, the unbelievers, were trying to kill us but they, the fighters, they loved us. They would look after us better than our parents," Nasir said.
Nasir also said that, they were told that their parents were disbelievers and that their first job was to go and murder their parents.
He was also forced to appear in one of the propaganda videos of ISIS and was instructed not to cry during the any of the training sessions.
Fortunately for him, his ordeal came to an end when he managed to escape from ISIS and made his way to a refugee camp where he was reunited with his parents. "When we escaped and I saw my mother again, it was like coming back to life," he said.
Nasir's testimony comes in the wake of the recent incident where an Islamic State militant executed his mother in public in the Syrian city of Raqqa because she had encouraged him to leave the group. The woman in her 40s had warned her son that a US-backed alliance would wipe out Islamic State and had encouraged him to leave the city with her.
The Islamic State group, which controls wide areas of Syria and Iraq, has executed hundreds of people it has accused of working with its enemies or breaching of its ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam.
