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Children and girls are being stripped naked at slave auctions and raped by ISIS fighters who pass the girls around like cattle.

A UN expert who travelled to the Middle East to meet victims of this vile trade has spoken of the horrors faced by the innocent women and children - including one who had been temporarily married over 20 times, after each occasion forced to undergo surgery to repair her virginity.

Zainab Bangura, the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, say sexual violence is widespread and used as a weapon of terror.

“Girls are literally being stripped naked and examined in slave bazaars,” she said, describing how they were “categorized and shipped naked off to Dohuk or Mosul or other locations to be distributed among ISIL leadership and fighters.”

She added children born of rape could become “a generation of stateless children” who could provide a fertile recruiting ground for the killers.

(Image: Reuters)

Ms Bangura’s trip lasted from 16 to 29 April and took her to Syria and Iraq, as well as the neighbouring countries of Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, where she met directly with women who escaped the ISIS captivity and survived sexual violence.

She described how such practices were encouraged for fighters as part of Jihad and used as a “protection” mechanism for families with no other means of providing for or ensuring the safety of their young girls.

She said “Women and girls are at risk and under assault at every point of their lives.

She added that the threat of brutality followed them “every step of the way…in the midst of active conflict, in areas under control of armed actors, at check-points and border crossings, and in detention facilities.

(Image: Wikipedia)

“ISIL (another name for ISIS) have institutionalised sexual violence and the brutalisation of women as a central aspect of their ideology and operations, using it as a tactic of terrorism to advance their key strategic objectives,”

Women are promised to fighters and the terror group raise funds through trafficking, prostitution and ransoms.

Sexual violence is also used to displace populations, to punish, humiliate and demoralise dissenters, to extract information for intelligence purposes and to dismantle communities, she said.

It was recently reported that doctors are performing illegal abortions on pregnant girls as young as nine who were kidnapped and raped by twisted Islamic State fighters.

The traumatised children are from the Yazidis religious minority community, it is estimated some of 40,000 them were taken at gunpoint by ISIS thugs in August last year.

Thousands of girls and women torn from their homes in Iraq were raped, tortured, forcibly married and enslaved.

Now many of the traumatised victims have now found their way back to their families in Kurdistan; battered, broken, humiliated and several of them pregnant.

Dozens are reportedly having illegal abortions and many are also secretly seeking surgery to reverse the loss of their virginity, the Sunday Times reports.