Mosul battle: ISIS targets children, hides bombs insides teddy bears and toy trucks
Mosul: As Iraqi troops edge closer to Mosul intensifying the battle against Islamic State, the terror group is reportedly stuffing bombs in teddy bears and toy trucks in order to target children.
According to a report in the Daily Mail, ISIS is using toys as triggers for bomb blasts and have been described as 'worst than animals' by Iraqi forces.
"Why would ISIS use something nice, like a bear or a rabbit? They used this toy because they know the peshmerga [Kurdish fighters] will not touch it but children will," said Colonel Nawzad Kamil Hassan, an engineer working with the Kurdish forces.
This revelation comes in the wake of recent reports that stated how ISIS terrorists have been going door to door in villages and using civilians as human shields as they prepare to defend themselves from Iraqi forces.
Civilians leave their houses as Iraq's elite counterterrorism forces fight Islamic State militia in the village of Tob Zawa, about 9 kilometers (5½ miles) from Mosul, Iraq. (Photo: AP)
Witnesses described scenes of chaos over the past week as hundreds of people were ordered out of their homes without having time to pack and driven north across the Ninevah plains toward the heavily-fortified city, where ISIS has been preparing for a climactic showdown.
In one village south of Mosul, Iraqi forces found the bodies of 70 residents who had been gunned down, and ISIS appears to have killed 50 former Iraqi police officers it was holding in a building near the city.
Iraqi forces have been pushing toward Mosul from several directions since the operation began October 17. It is expected to take weeks, if not months, to retake Iraq's second-largest city, which fell to the extremists in a matter of days when they swept across northern and central Iraq in the summer of 2014.
The battle for Mosul, still home to 1.5 million residents, could be one of the toughest in a decade of turmoil since the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, brought Iraq's majority Shi'ites to power.
