A newly released ISIS video shows a child shooting a man the group claims is an Israeli spy.
The video identifies the man as 19-year-old Mohamed Sa’id Ismail Musallam, an Israeli citizen of Arab descent.
In the video, ISIS claims Musallam is an Israeli agent, sent to infiltrate ISIS. The 19-year-old’s family has previously denied he had any involvement with the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency. Israeli officials declined to comment Tuesday night.
The video, which was posted Tuesday on ISIS-affiliated social media accounts, shows a man who appears to be Musallam on his knees, wearing an orange jumpsuit. An adult ISIS fighter and a child — both in fatigues — stand behind him.
The adult, speaking French, gives a command to the child to go forward with the killing. The child steps in front of the man and raises what appears to be a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun and shoots Musallam in the forehead. The man immediately falls forward to the ground. The child appears to then fire at least two more shots into the body.
The high-resolution video image appears to match known images of Musallam, who has also been identified by Israeli media. His Israeli passport is shown. And the man in the video speaks Arabic in a working-class Jerusalem dialect, consistent with where Musallam is known to have lived, just north of Jerusalem.
An issue last month of ISIS’ English-language propaganda magazine, Dabiq, included a purported interview with Musallam.
This isn’t the first time ISIS has used children to drive home its message.
An ISIS propaganda video released in January — one that CNN could not independently verify — shows a 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, and later raises his pistol high. 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 featured children as fighters before, calling them the “cubs of the caliphate” (the adult jihadis call each other “lions”) and has encouraged foreign fighters to bring their families.
It has taken over schools to indoctrinate children. Human Rights Watch says ISIS and other extremist groups “have specifically recruited children through free schooling campaigns that include weapons training and have given them dangerous tasks, including suicide bombing missions.”