Video footage provided by the United States and Iraqi military shows several armed boys training for al-Qaeda. The tapes, five of them, were found when the U.S.-led coalition forces broke in some al-Qaeda hideouts located in the vicinity of Baghdad in December, the U.S. military said.

The tapes showed clearly about 20 boys, under the age of 11, handling guns and grenades during training exercises. These videos were released also with the hope that the Iraqis might turn against the Islamic militants after watching them.

The training exercises shown on the tapes consisted in running around with pistols, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. The teens taking part in the training were also videotaped while they took part in a mock kidnapping, where they force the fake hostage to kneel in the dust with a pistol at his head.

According to BBC's Jim Muir in Baghdad, the children are also shown wearing menacing black facemasks as they announce the killing of their prisoners.

The U.S. army officials said they believe the tapes were made so that al-Qaeda can use them as a propaganda tool for attracting new, young recruits. The boys who appear on the video tapes weren’t kidnapped or press-ganged into taking part at the trainings, the US military spokesman Rear Admiral Gregory Smith said.

"Clearly there are families in which the adult males are part of al-Qaeda and you would assume that those children are growing up in that environment that would, unfortunately, produce the next generation of al-Qaeda," he said.

However, although the sight of some kids training to become terrorists is disturbing enough, Iraq’s defence ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari believes the tapes is a sign that al-Qaeda begun showing signs of desperation. He also said that the children shown on the video tapes were trained to kidnap to raise funds from ransoms.