A spokesman for the Mosul arm of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, Saeed Mamuzini, told news website Rudaw on Thursday that the Mother of Aid church, part of the Caldean Catholic Church which stretches across Iraq and Syria, was thousands of years old.
It was not immediately clear how the children died.
The extremist group’s lightning assault on Mosul last year forced many of the 60,000-strong Christian population – once one of several minorities in Sunni-majority Mosul – to flee in fear of their lives.
Their empty homes have been confiscated with the letter N for ‘nasrani’, or Christian’, daubed on each gate.
Isil has also destroyed Sunni and Shia mosques, reducing huge structures to smashed rubble. The jihadists have destroyed shrines and other ancient sites across the region, labelling them as idolatrous.
Irina Bokova, head of the UN cultural agency Unesco, said last week that one fifth of Iraq's estimated 10,000 official sites had been heavily looted under Isil control. She described the damage as “cultural cleansing”.
As Isil consolidates its reign of fear over residents in cities across northern Iraq, forces aligned against the militants are divided over how to dislodge them.
The United States’ had initially urged the Iraqis to focus on reclaiming Mosul, but later changed tack, arguing for a focus on the Isil-held city of Ramadi, the capital of Sunni-majority Anbar province which extremists overran two months ago.
But Hashed al-Sha'abi, a coalition of mostly Shia militias, has been calling the shots in Anbar and have moved instead on the nearby city of Fallujah, an offensive which continued on Thursday.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/11729410/Isil-militants-kill-four-children-during-destruction-of-historic-Iraq-church.html