Isis 'accidentally kills four children blowing up church'

Isis accidentally killed four Iraqi children on Tuesday when the group destroyed a historic Christian church in Iraq's second biggest city of Mosul, according to a Kurdish sources.

The Christian church, believed to be over 1,000 years old, was called St Mary's, although conflicting reports suggest the church was actually called the Mother of Aid.

Militants replaced the Christian cross on the roof of the church with an Isis flag before blowing the building up using improvised explosive devices.

Speaking to Kurdish website Rudaw, Saeed Mamuzini, a spokesman for the Mosul arm of the Kurdistan Democratic Party said that the four young children had been killed in the blast as they played near the church.

Mosul fell to Isis in early June last year, after Iraqi soldiers reportedly abandoned their positions in the town and fled, leaving it open for the militant group to easily conquer.

According to Assyrian International News Agency, since taking over Mosul on 10 June, Isis has destroyed or taken over 45 Christian institutions in the city, often converting them into mosques or Isis headquarters.

Earlier in the year, on 21 February, Isis blew up the Virgin Mary Church also in Mosul, which had served as a sanctuary for the remaining Christians left in the region, and in July 2014, Isis militants destroyed yet another Christian Church: a 1,800-year-old Assyrian Christian church in Mosul, Iraq.

Later that month, it also released videos and photographs showing fighters in Mosul using sledgehammers to demolish the tomb of Prophet Jonah, a central figure in the Bible's Book of Jonah, revered by both Christians and Muslims.

Speaking to Newsweek in February of this year 65-year-old Aziz Emmanuel al-Zebari, who is a Chaldean Catholic who left Mosul in 2006 said: "For the last nine months the church bells have gone silent and there is not a single Christian in those villages and the city of Mosul."