ICC Note:

Two teenage Yazidi boys open up about what it was like to be forced to train and fight for the Islamic State. Held for over a year, the boys reported having pretended to be Muslim in order to survive. They were brainwashed and beaten just like so many other boys forced to be in these camps; some as young as eight years old. The boys stated that if they had not been rescued when they were, they would have become ISIS militants.

3/15/2017 Iraq (BBC) – Lovant and Sabbah were just 16 and 14 when they were forced to fire bullets into the dead bodies of men executed for being traitors by so-called Islamic State.

This was target practice – just one part of the daily rounds of weapons training they endured at a military camp for youngsters.

The boys are Yazidis from northern Iraq. In 2014, the world watched in horror as tens of thousands of their people were trapped on Mount Sinjar in the searing heat without food or water. At the same time, the teenagers Lovant and Sabbah were being rounded up in their village by IS fighters.

Most of the adult males were taken away and murdered, while the boys were moved with their mothers to a nearby city in northern Iraq, before being separated from their families altogether.

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