Meet the four-year-old Al Qaeda fighter in Syria

New Delhi: Shocking videos and photographs of children as young as 4-years-old have emerged showing him spraying bullets from an AK-47 in Syria. The disturbing footage was posted on YouTube and is believed to be that of a son of a jihadist from Albania who is one of thousands of foreigners fighting with Al Qaeda in Syria. The boy, wearing a black mask, can be seen firing shots from a black AK-47-style automatic assault rifle with a folding stock. He is so small that the barrel of the gun has to be supported by a section of road block so that he can cope with its weight. The child opens fire to shouts of Allahu Akbar – Arabic for ‘God is Greater' – before an arm reaches down and retrieves the weapon. The video of the four-year-old first emerged on January 21 on a YouTube channel operated by a jihadist who claimed to be based in northern Syria. The footage was removed after it was exposed by an American-based ‘anti-jihad' activist who claimed it was evidence of child abuse. Copies of the video, however, remained in circulation on other online channels. Not only the video of a child not strong enough to hold the weapons on his own, other images surfaced of boys reportedly aged nine to fifteen training at al-Qaeda camps somewhere in Syria. Referred to as "cub jihadists" by the terrorists, the camouflaged-clad boys not only became proficient with the AK-47 automatic rifle, but also with heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launchers.