“Sir sir, he insulted my parents,” the young boy complains to one of his carers at the orphanage after a petty playground row.

Zahar al-Atheel waits for the child to leave his office before breaking into a fit of laughter. “There isn’t a curse word rude enough for his parents,” he jokes. “They were Isil.”

All the children at the Al-Zahour Centre in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul - once Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s largest stronghold - are the sons and daughters of jihadists.

Last year’s bloody battle to liberate Mosul levelled half the city, and in the process left hundreds, possibly thousands, orphaned.

Zahour is the test-case for the enormous challenge Iraqi authorities face to reconcile the surviving relatives with society and prevent history repeating itself.

One-year-old Hamoudi lies asleep in one of the wooden cots that fill the centre’s nursery. The right sleeve of his babygrow hangs down over his arm where a hand should be.

His carers say his father, an Isil fighter, left him out in the rubble of the Old City as bait for the Iraqi army.