Damned right they are, and their deaths are to be blamed on their leaders….
ARMED ISIS CHILDREN CAN BE TARGETED, LEGAL EXPERTS SAY
Though children have always had a protected status in war, armed ISIS children can be targeted under the laws of armed conflict, IDC Herzliya Professor Daphne Richemond-Barak told the Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.
“If children are holding a gun then direct participation in hostilities rules apply to children… children might be targets and not just victims,” she said.
Richemond-Barak and Syracuse Professor William Banks spoke to the Post in the midst of the International Institute of Counterterrorism Conference in Herzliya, discussing a range of new battlefield and law issues ranging from subterranean warfare to new standards for targeted killings.
The premise of Richemond-Barak’s comments about armed children as targets is that until ISIS started to use children on a mass scale, the issue of Western countries going up against large numbers of children simply had not come up.