In the last few months, a quiet project has set up rat runs for the thousands of people still held as hostages - or worse - by Isil. Gradually, the Yazidis are coming home.

By Richard Spencer, Wednesday 19 August 2015

The column of escaping women appeared on the hillside as the sun was starting to sink in the sky. There were 21 of them, from babes in arms to the middle-aged, and they had been dodging Islamic State patrols from three o’clock that morning.

For Ibrahim Mirza, the Iraqi police officer who was waiting for them on the mountain in his Kia Sorento car, it was a bitter-sweet moment. Among the group were his mother, one of his teenage sisters, and a baby niece. Until that afternoon, when his sister managed to get a phone call through to him, he had not known whether they were alive or dead.

“I was so happy to see them," he said. But he was still fearful; he did not yet know what had happened to them in the weeks they had been missing. Moreover, there were just these three: there was still no sign of his father or the twenty or so other members of his immediate family who had been kidnapped by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant three weeks before.

He piled all 21 women into and on to his Kia, and set off up the hill away from the front lines. “There are still dents in the roof,” he told me.