(Vocativ) – The boy hovered above the handcuffed soldier, who confessed to being a Syrian army captain. Clad in camouflage and clutching a small knife, the child, one of the Islamic State’s newest recruits, forced his prisoner onto his stomach. He jerked the man’s head back by his hair and put the blade to his throat. Then he began to saw. Later, the boy, whose name and age are unknown, posed with the prisoner’s severed head. The scene, filmed outside the Syrian city of Palmyra and released by the Islamic State last week, marked the first time ISIS had publicly shown a child carrying out a decapitation. And it was the third time in less than two weeks that the jihadist group bragged about a killing committed by its growing band of child soldiers.
