Jihadi fighters are hunting down kittens in the Iraqi city of Mosul after a fatwa on cat-breeders was issued by senior Daesh clerics.
The new law forbids the indoor breeding of cats inside the Islamic State's 'caliphate' and claims to be in line with the jihadists' "vision, ideology and beliefs".
Residents of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul were warned not to violate the ban which was declared on Tuesday, as Daesh fighters began searching their houses for kittens, Iraqi News reported.
The purge will come as a surprise to many after the radical group deliberately posted pictures of kittens on social media in a bid to attract new breed of young fighters.
A UN report in 2014 showed thousands of jihadists had flocked to Iraq and Syria after seeing pictures of cats posed alongside AK-47s and in the arms of masked extremists. 15,000 fighters from 80 countries joined the fight after seeing their posts on social media.
The move was a deliberate attempt to groom youngsters into joining the extremist group, said the report. Daesh understand and recognise 'the terror and recruitment value of multi-channel, multi-language social and other media messaging,' it said, adding that by embracing the cat craze, they were attempting to show a more 'cosmopolitan' side.
One twitter account, The Islamic State of Cat, showed Daesh fighters feeding and playing with kittens, as well as sick photographs of the cats surrounded by guns and grenades.
Last year prolific British Daesh recruiter Omar Hussein posted pictures of his pet alongside propaganda images and advice about how to join the Islamic State group.
In one his grey cat, named Lucy, was shown curled up inside a suicide belt. Below the shot Hussein - who once worked as a security guard at Morrisons' supermarket in Buckinghamshire - wrote 'Come closer and I'll blow the entire house down!'
But many of the extremists seem to be genuine feline fans. In 2015 Dutch jihadist Israfil Yilmaz, 28, became an overnight heart-throb after he posted pictures of himself holding a ginger kitten.
The extremist, who was reportedly killed in an airstrike in Raqqa last month, received 10,000 marriage proposals after posting the images with the caption "Soft towards the creation of Allah but fierce and harsh towards the disbelievers."
A fatwa is a legal decree issued by a specialist in Islamic law. Daesh relies on a central committee to issue fatwas which is comprised of influential clerics and figures working for the group.
Earlier this year jihadis operating in the 'Euphrates provice' in Iraq and Syria declared an embargo on the common practice of breeding of pigeons on rooftops, claiming the sight 'reveals the genitals' which is an idiom used to indicate dishonorable activity. Local pigeon breeders were told they had one week to get rid of the pigeons or face public flogging.
By Franki Cookney
