REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, DAMASCUS -- As many as 14 Syrian children recruited by the Islamic State (IS/ISIS) group have recently been killed during the terror group's battles in Iraq, a monitor group reported on Tuesday.
The killed children were dispatched to Iraq after completing their training in the IS camps in Syria, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, stopping short of providing their ages.
Some of the kids were either killed during battles against the Iraqi forces, or by blowing themselves up in suicide attacks, said the Observatory, adding that other teen combatants were killed by the strikes of the U.S.-led anti-terror coalition against the IS positions in Iraq.
Last March, the observatory, which tracks the Syrian war, said that over 400 Syrian children under 18 years of age have been recruited by the IS militant group since the beginning of this year.
The UK-based watchdog group said most of the recruitment was from eastern parts of the country, namely in Deir al-Zour province, where IS militants enjoy considerable sway.
IS has been working hard to recruit children who live close to its branch offices.
The militant group never care whether those children seeking to have or have not the consent of their parents. Sometimes, it even forced parents to send their children to join their ranks.
In the camps, children have to learn in ideological courses the group's credo and how to fight in battles, according to the Observatory. To keep these children around, the IS lured them with financial rewards.
According to the Observatory, around 140 armed children under the age of 18 were sent to fight in the predominantly Kurdish city of Ayn al-Arab in northern Syria against Kurdish fighters last January.
Moreover, videos of children training and shouting sectarian slogans have gone viral over the Internet. Even those in school have been deprived of normal curriculums, as IS abolished government curriculums and textbooks, replacing them with materials teaching Islamic sharia according to IS understanding.
Commenting on the use of children in armed conflict, Kumar Tiku, chief of communications of the UN Children's Fund, said in a recent interview with Xinhua that using children has become a "growing trend."
"We see children used in a variety of ways such as getting initiated into radical education of extremist interpretations of religion as well as domestically where armed groups use them for personal needs," he said.
He stressed that "the most alarming trend is the increasing use of children in combat roles," noting that this has "profoundly negative implications for the future of this generation of children."
The United Nations recently said that over 10,000 children have been killed in the Syrian conflict, with many more subjected to "abominable" suffering, including rape, torture and combat recruitment. Thousands more have been forced to flee their homes due to the prolonged conflict.
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