As ISIS forces clash with militants in Damascus, Long War Journal editor Bill Roggio explains what will be required to defeat the jihadi insurgency around the globe. Photo: Aamaq News

A NINE-YEAR-OLD sex slave is pregnant after being gang-raped by 10 Islamic State militants in Iraq, an aid worker said.

“The abuse she has suffered left her mentally and physically traumatised,” Canadian-based aid worker Yousif Daoud, who recently returned from the region, told The Toronto Star.

“This girl is so young she could die if she delivers a baby. Even caesarean section is dangerous.”

The girl, a member of the persecuted Yazidi Christian minority, has been flown out of Iraq by a Kurdish aid agency and is receiving treatment in Germany.

Daoud said the girl was found in “very bad shape”.

“She was sexually abused by no fewer than 10 men. Most of them were frontline fighters or suicide bombers who are given girls as a reward,” he said.

ISIS released more than 200 Yazidis on Wednesday, mostly women and children, after holding them captive for eight months.

Daoud said ISIS released the abused women and girls “to shame the whole community”. He said the victims faced the humiliation of lost chastity.

The news comes as IS militants are holding hostage at least 50 civilians, almost half of them women, seized in a raid on a village in central Syria.

They were kidnapped from the village of Mabujeh in Hama province on March 31, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

News of the kidnappings had been kept quiet because of ongoing negotiations for their release, but the talks have since faltered, said Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman.

Ten of those taken, including six women, are Ismailis, a minority sect that is an offshoot of Shiite Islam. The remaining 40 are Sunni Muslims, including at least 15 women.

“There are fears that the women are being taken as slaves,” Abdel Rahman told AFP.

He said the Ismailis were kidnapped because IS considers them “infidels,” and that the Sunnis — although from the same sect as IS fighters — were taken because IS viewed them as “loyal to the Ismailis”.

Mabujeh, east of the provincial capital Hama, has a population of Sunnis, Ismailis and Alawites, another offshoot of Shiite Islam that is the sect of President Bashar al-Assad and his clan.