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(Daily Express) GIRLS as young as nine are being raped and tortured by Islamic State militants, according to aid workers in Iraq.
Hundreds of Yazidi women and children who were taken hostage by the brutal regime were released this week after more than eight months in captivity.
But volunteers in huge make-shift refugee camps have given a distressing account of trauma and abuse at the hand of the jihadist group, which continues to wage a bloody war across the region.
Charity workers said one nine-year-old girl, who was left pregnant after being raped by at least 10 different men, was so young and weak she was likely to die during childbirth.
“Even a caesarean section is dangerous,” Yousif Daoud, a Canadian-based aid worker who recently returned from the region, said.
“The abuse she has suffered left her mentally and physically traumatised.”
The freed group of 200 girls and women was taken hostage last summer after intense fighting in northern Iraq.
Tens of thousands of Yazidis – a minority group based mainly in the Kurdistan region of the country – were attacked and besieged on a mountain side in August 2014.
Hundreds were killed during the fighting and estimates put the number of girls still being held by extremist fighters at up to 4,000.
Aid workers said releasing the 200-strong group of girls and women this week might have been done simply to shame them when they returned to their families.
“Sending back those girls and women is a way of shaming the whole community,” Mr Daoud said.
“I don’t know what the future would be for their babies.
“The girls and women don’t want them. They have suffered so much they just want to forget.
“If they are married, their husbands won’t take them back if they are pregnant. And it’s clear that the babies will never be accepted.”
There are fears that some of the pregnant women will attempt to have an abortion, but healthcare provisions are so poor that many will die in the process, aid workers claim.
