HRW: IS child abuse

Members of "Islamic State" (IS) tortured and abused over 150 Kurdish children, who they captured earlier this year near the northern Syrian town of Kobane, the Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday.

The international rights group drew its conclusions from interviews with several children who were among the kidnapped boys. They were abducted in late May on their way home, after taking school exams in the city of Aleppo.

According to the Human Rights Watch, around 50 of the Kurdish boys escaped early in their captivity. The rest were released in groups - the last and most recent coming on October 29.

Beheading videos and beatings

Human Rights Watch said the IS militants forced children as young as 14 to watch videos of beheadings and beat them with cables during six months of captivity, adding that the abuse amounted to war crimes.

Four of the children who were released told the rights group that they were held by the extremists in the northern Syrian town of Manbij. They described frequent abuse at the hands of the militants, who used a hose and electric cable to administer beatings.

"Those who didn't conform to the program were beaten. They beat us with a green hose or a thick cable with wire running through it. They also beat the soles of our feet," it quoted one boy as saying.

"They sometimes found excuses to beat us for no reason ... They made us learn verses of the Koran and beat those who didn't manage to learn them."

'YPG infidels'

The boys said that some of the worst abuse was reserved for captives who had family members in the Kurdish militia known as the YPG, which has been in heavy combat with IS militants for control of Kobane since mid-September.

Their captors "told them to give them the addresses of their families, cousins, uncles, saying, 'When we go to Kobane, we will get them and cut them up.' They saw the YPG as infidels," one 15-year-old boy told Human Rights Watch.

The children, however, said they were not told why they were released, other than that they had completed their religious training, the Human Rights Watch report said.

Syrian Kurds released

As part of the group's brutal campaign to take over predominantly Kurdish areas of northern and eastern Syria, militants have taken hundreds of Kurds captive over the past year.

Also on Tuesday, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the extremist group had released at least 93 Syrian Kurds who were kidnapped in February, as they made their way from northern Syria to neighboring Iraq. It was not immediately clear why the hostages were released. According to the Observatory, the militants are still holding about 70 other Kurds captive.

ksb/mz (Reuters, AP, AFP)