A little boy smiles as he holds an assault rifle as if it were a harmless toy.
This shocking photograph was posted on Twitter by the child’s British mother, who is so proud of him that she has put the snap on her profile page.
No older than three or four, the youngster is seemingly being groomed to join the ranks of the Isis extremists in Iraq. For him, a game of soldiers involves messing around with an AK-47 rifle.
According to an investigation by The Sunday Times, the boy named Isa – the Arabic version of Jesus – is the son of a former London student and her Swedish husband.
He also has a younger brother, aged about 12 months, who his mother refers to as a ‘mini mujahid’, or holy warrior.
The family are said to be living in Syria and are disciples of the Isis cause. Isa’s mother calls herself Umm Isa (Mother of Isa) and her Twitter name is Muhajirah fi Sham, which means ‘immigrant in Syria’.
She is married to a Swedish Islamic fighter called Abu Bakr and is reported to be a convert who previously attended a mosque in South London.
The British woman was featured on a Channel 4 News clip last year firing an AK-47 and a revolver in Syria. She claimed to have studied media, film, psychology and sociology in Britain.
At the time, her husband was attached to a foreign fighters’ brigade, part of which later merged with Isis. It is unclear when Umm Isa travelled to Syria and whether her older son was born there. She has said she has no plans to return to the UK.
On Twitter, Umm Isa has also shared a photograph of an Isis crucifixion and boasted about witnessing a public execution.
In one post, using barely comprehensible text speak, she complains that not enough fellow Muslims have joined the Isis cause in Syria.
She wrote: ‘Wer [where] r all da sisters dat want 2 join us in Sham [Syria] nd marry nd support a mujahid? Wer r all da brothers dat r spose 2 b on da front line?’
Her neighbour, another British woman who uses the alias Umm Khattab al-Britaniyya, has also shared the photograph of Isa carrying a rifle, commenting: ‘Look at my little mujahid, this kid is the funniest man, love him.’
Umm Khattab started a Twitter account on June 27 —the day after 16-year-old twins Zahra and Salma Halane went missing from their home in Manchester to head for Syria.
She later tweeted: ‘Missing twins – chilling with one of them now.’
The woman also claimed that she had met ‘many British girls’ since arriving in Syria.
About 500 British Muslims are thought to have gone to fight in Syria, despite religious leaders appealing to them not to travel to the war zone.
• A British student who hit the headlines last month when he appeared in a jihadist recruitment video has boasted of being involved in the murders of five people.
• Reyaad Khan, 20, who left his Cardiff home earlier this year to join Isis extremists in Syria, posted images of corpses following a raid on a rival extremist group known as Jabhat Al-Nusra, and wrote: ‘JN guys we caught & executed.’
Source: the Daily Mail
M. Wassouf