Islamic State Group Develops Antiaircraft Heat-Seeking Missile

In an unprecedented revelation, the Islamic State group is reportedly developing its own weapons in labs in Syria, including land-to-air missiles for targeting military jets and civilian airplanes as well as self-driving car bombs, according to videos obtained by Sky News.

Inside #IS Terror Weapons Lab: #ISIS now producing ground-to-air missiles capable of downing a jet pic.twitter.com/Ic5DuLPpNn

— Warfare Worldwide (@WarfareWW) January 6, 201

The United Kingdom-based Sky News released video footage showing a lab believed to belong to the Islamic State group and located in Raqqa, the group’s stronghold in Syria, where engineers of several nationalities could be seen experimenting with different weapons and hi-tech tools.

Sky News says the video was provided to it by fighters of the anti-government Free Syrian Army.

RELATED: Document Shows Islamic State Group Laying Grounds for Statehood

The video shows that the Islamic State group could potentially use thousands of missiles deemed by Western governments as outdated. The main problem with those missiles and rockets is that their thermal batteries are expired, making their heat-seeking warheads useless.

However, the footage shows that the militants have found a way around the problem and created their own functional thermal batteries.

Heat-seeking warheads can be used to attack passenger and military aircraft. They are 99 percent accurate once locked on.

RELATED: Islamic State Group Threatens to Destroy Saudi Prisons

The video also shows that the extremist militants have been producing self-driving cars that can be used as bombs in countries where recruiting suicide bombers would be difficult.

The ISIS "driverless" car bomb. Home made surface-to-air missiles. And other modern wonders https://t.co/I0IyOXcK2g pic.twitter.com/LQn5DItL2Z

— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) January 6, 201

But in order to escape sophisticated scanning machines that protect military and government buildings in the West, the car bombs would be equipped with dummy drivers or mannequins with self-regulating thermostats to produce the heat signature of humans.

A Mannequin fitted with thermostats aim to evade car bomb security scanners. | Photo: Screenshot from Sky News video

The raw footage obtained by Sky News seems to be intended for internal use and as training videos for members of the extremist groups in other countries.

OPINION: Islamic State Group: A Political Agency

“Their advanced knowledge of weapons engineering, coupled with their seemingly limitless ability to reverse engineer and recondition weapons (which until now intelligence agencies had considered obsolete and beyond repair) kept me awake all night,” U.K. Major Chris Hunter, former special forces bomb technician, wrote in a commentary on the video.

Sky News said it had identified engineers from Turkey, Syria, Pakistan and other countries as working on the weapon development programs.

WATCH: The World Today - An Appeal to Reason