By Michael Georgy

DOHUK, Iraq (Reuters) – Wearing funky beads, Laith Abbas comes across as just another Iraqi teenager trying to look cool, until he describes how he clutched an AK-47 assault rifle at checkpoints along with other Islamic State militants who terrorised Mosul.

Abbas is one of 54 teenagers Kurdish authorities are trying to de-radicalise at a reform centre in the northern city of Dohuk for youths and women suspected of aiding Islamic State.

The idea is to prevent the hardline Sunni group from brainwashing a new generation of suicide bombers and fighters into threatening Iraq’s stability again after an ongoing army offensive in their stronghold of Mosul ends.

“We encourage them to choose life, not death,” said Zaki Saleh Moussa, head of the institution in the northern Iraqi city of Dohuk.

Reuters was given exclusive access to the facility and allowed to speak with Abbas, another 17-year-old boy and two adult women, all in the presence of interrogators.

All four prisoners denied that they wilfully supported the fighters, and said Islamic State had put pressure on them to cooperate. An interrogator said he was sceptical of those accounts and a court would determine the prisoners’ fate.

“My uncle and cousin pressured me to join,” said Abbas, sitting in a room with books on culture and art designed to open up new horizons for teenagers and women exposed to jihadist ideology.

“I had no choice. My family was in a feud with another one and they threatened to give those people my whereabouts and said ‘we will let them kill you’,” he said.

MORE:   http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/-choose-life–not-death–reform-centre-tells-iraqi-teenage-militants/42960752