Keeping up with the jihadis

Featuring titles such as 'The Little Terrorist' and 'Generation Kilafah', the chilling images show innocent children being forced to embrace their parents' extremism in ISIS' de facto capital Raqqa.

While some shots feature children so young that they are unlikely to be aware of the significance of the photographs, another shows a masked young girl of around three-years-old dressed in full combat gear, carrying an AK47 and raising her index figure to make a well-known jihadi gesture.

Although the images were posted on Twitter over the past year, they form part of a new study of the everyday lives and, inevitably, deaths of the young Western women who chose to live under ISIS.

One photograph in the study, which was published on Buzzfeed, shows a woman calling herself Umm Abdullatif posting a photograph of a young boy aged about five dressed in military fatigues and firing a huge assault rifle. 

She identifies the child as her son's 'lil best mate' and suggests he has already been killed, adding that she hope her own child 'grows up to be like him and receives and beautiful death just like him'.

Another photograph, this time posted by a woman calling herself Umm Usama, shows a one-year-old girl sleeping alongside a small, black pistol and is captioned 'Even my baby girl goes 2 bed with her gun #generationkhilafah'.

A similar image was posted on Twitter showing a newborn baby fast asleep in a plastic crate and covered in a Hello Kitty blanket. The otherwise adorable photograph is ruined, however, by the fact an AK47 machine gun is propped up against the side of the tiny baby's bed.

The image was posted on Twitter by a man claiming to be the child's father and was captioned: 'The Little Terrorist #Hammam was born in the land of the caliphate, I ask God Almighty to make him one of the Caliphate’s soldiers.'

The study reveals numerous other images of young children being exploited for shocking photographs that are later posted by their twisted parents on social media.

The majority show young boys and girls dressed in combat clothing and brandishing weapons and are captioned with horrific messages by their parents wishing the children a hasty death.

Others show young boys and girls wearing clothing daubed in the chilling black and white ISIS logo, stating that the children are being 'raised as lions' who will one day fight against the West.

The overall effect is to instill fear in the West that even if the current generation of ISIS jihadis are killed, there will still be generation after generation of bloodthirsty, brainwashed terrorists ready to fight and die in order to carry out atrocities against innocent people.

The use of sickening images of gun toting children also allows the often very young militant parents to brag and boast about how 'hardcore' they are, distancing themselves from Western ideals of parenthood and encouraging them to take part in a pathetic one-upmanship on social media.

(dailymail.co.uk)