By Kathryn Maureen Ryan
Impunity Watch, Managing Editor
DAMASCUS, Syria – A new propaganda video released by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) appears to show a young children shooting a detainee the group has claimed was an Israeli spy, a chilling representation of the organizations complete disregard for international law and basic human decency. The victim was identified in the video as 19-year-old Mohamed Said Ismail Musallam, an Israeli citizen of Palestinian descent. The video shows Musallam’s Israeli passport claiming that this document is somehow proof that he was an agent sent to infiltrate the group. The young man’s family says he had no ties with the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, and had, in fact, been recruited by ISIS as a potential member of the militant group. “Mohamed told me and his brother that ISIS took him,” according to Said Musallam, his father. “They sent him money through the Western Union. They said you will have girls, money, cars, villas, paradise, but afterwards he discovered that there is nothing.”
While propaganda videos depicting the brutal murder of detainees have become relatively common propaganda tools for the ISIS movement this video was particularly disturbing because of the young face behind the trigger. Unlike past videos the executioner was not a masked man but was instead a young child.
Another video released in January apparently shows a young boy with a pistol apparently shooting two men in the back of the head. The boy then stands over one of the bodies, fires two more times. Last August, a photo posted to Twitter from an ISIS stronghold showed a 7-year-old boy holding a man’s severed head and his father’s words, “That’s my boy.”
ISIS has taken over schools to indoctrinate children. Human Rights Watch reports ISIS and other extremist groups “have specifically recruited children through free schooling campaigns that include weapons training and have given those dangerous tasks, including suicide bombing missions.” ISIS makes no attempt to hide its use of child soldiers, proudly calling the young fighters “cubs of the caliphate. The group has even called on foreign fighters who come to Iraq and Syria to going the fight to bring their own children and families to the war zone.
The use of child soldiers, which includes any child under the age of 18, is a war crime. Child soldiers, far too young to understand the war around them, often experience psychological trauma from their experiences. According to The Guardian, a study of 300 former Ugandan child soldiers found that approximately one third of the young fighters were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Two-thirds were suffering behavioral and other emotional problems, mostly anxiety and depression.
For more information please see:
CNN International – New ISIS Video Claims To Show Child Killing Palestinian Captive – 11 March 2015
National Post – ISIS Releases Video of Extremists Killing Man They Said Was an Israeli Spy: They Made A Boy Do the Dirty Work – 11 March 2015
The Guardian – ‘Raising tomorrow’s Mujahedeen’: The Horrific World of Isis’s Child Soldiers – 10 March 2015
Haaretz – ISIS Releases Video Purporting To Show Child Soldier Killing ‘Israeli Spy’ – 10 March 2015
