Extensive video footage obtained by a British news outlet reportedly shows a secret training facility and weapons laboratory belonging to ISIS in Syria.
The lab houses remote controlled car bombs developed by ISIS, and the training videos also suggest that the terrorist group has produced a thermal battery to repurpose old surface-to-air missiles.
Sky News reported of the exclusive footage:
[ISIS] can now recommission thousands of missiles assumed by western governments to have been redundant through old age. Heat-seeking warheads can be used to attack passenger and military aircraft. They are 99 percent accurate once locked on. ... The [ISIS] research and development team has produced fully working remote controlled cars to act as mobile bombs, while they have fitted the cars with "drivers"; mannequins with self-regulating thermostats to produce the heat signature of humans, allowing the car bombs to evade sophisticated scanning machines that protect military and government buildings in the West.The group trained fighters from a variety of countries to carry out attacks and to train more jihadists in their own countries.
The training videos, which span eight hours, were obtained from individuals in the Free Syrian Army, who got them off of an ISIS trainer captured in Turkey. The ISIS training facility is allegedly located in Raqqa, Syria, which Sky News determined using aerial and satellite imagery.
The trainees who appear in the videos came from various countries, including Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Tunisia, Egypt, and Pakistan. According to an ISIS defector based in Turkey, the Raqqa training program is meant to prepare militants to attack in Europe and Western nations.
The intended targets of the attacks for which the trainees are practicing in the videos are not specified.
Fears of terrorist attacks on the United States and European countries have heightened in the wake of the coordinated shootings and suicide bombings in Paris last November. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks in France, which killed 130 people and wounded hundreds of others. The terror group also inspired the December gun attack in San Bernardino, California, during which a radicalized married couple who pledged support for ISIS killed 14 people.