Children liberated from Mosul, Iraq have recounted the horrors they endured under the Islamic State terrorist group, including being forced to mutilate and kill prisoners..
One 11-year-old girl, Hadya told Dateline, ISIS forced her, along with her two brothers, Shadi, five, and Fadi, nine, to attack a captive with a machete. The militants told her that if she refused, they would kill her family.
"He came along and said, 'You cut off a foot, you cut off an arm, and you slash his face with a knife. Otherwise I'll take you away from your mother and kill you all'", the little girl recalled a soldier telling her.
"We were scared to refuse, we were each given a machete," she said. "I had to cut his hand off. I did it. [Fadi] had to cut his feet off. Shadi had to cut his face with a knife."
The man died after Shadi was forced to stab him in the eye, the children revealed.
Another little boy, Ayad, revealed he was just 12 when he was kidnapped by ISIS and forced to become a child soldier.
"We were woken up at 4am," he said. "We had to wash and pray. After prayers, we had circles to read the Koran and then came training. We were taught to plant explosives.
"It was introductory training. They said that with bombs, your first mistake would be your last. They'd beat us with electric cable if we didn't learn our lessons. They fired close to our feet to make us run faster."
Ayad, a Kurdish Yazidi, was taken to the front lines to fight against his own people and was forced to feature in a propaganda video for the terrorist group.
Dateline notes that use of young children from these camps in battle has been corroborated by those on the front lines.
"IS sends children at our troops to blow themselves up in suicide bombings," said one Iraqi soldier, adding that many of the children are between the ages of 10 and 15.
Under ISIS' rule, hundreds of young girls were kidnapped to become as sex slaves or domestic servants, according to reports. An informant who managed to escape the caliphate showed Dateline a flyer circulated by the terrorist group: "Deflowered slave for sale, age 13," one of the ads reads. "Body: slim, tall. Price: $9,000."
ISIS swept into Mosul in the summer of 2014 and issued an ultimatum: convert to Islam, pay a hefty tax, or die. The city, formerly home to thousands of Christians, was this week liberated from the terror group after a months-long battle. Thousands of civilians are feared to have died during the fighting, and almost one million people are believed to have fled their homes.
The liberation of Mosul effectively marks the end of the caliphate in Iraq; however, on Tuesday, coalition spokesman Col Joe Scrocca told the BBC: "Right now, there are a handful of holdout ISIS [Islamic State group] terrorists that the Iraqi security forces are still trying to root out of the Old City."
There were also a "countless number of explosive devices that still have to be dismantled before people can start returning home," he said.
Sally Becker, from the Road to Peace, a charity helping children access medical care in war zones, recently told the Evening Standard that the devastation in Mosul was the "worst thing I have seen."
"There were snipers, suicide bombers, mortars, chemical attacks, drones. The people are suffering from malnutrition, dehydration, the water is not safe," she said.
"There is no baby formula. People are traumatized, even the kids - it's just a complete and utter nightmare. Apparently, they have been living in the dark like rats so a lot are suffering from rickets from lack of vitamin D, and they are so thin."
