In areas of Mosul cleared of Islamic State fighters life is returning to normal, but there are fears about the trauma suffered by children who have grown up under the militants.

In Chamakor camp, which was clean, spacious and carefully laid out, there are 11,800 refugees from west Mosul, 6,600 of them children.

A camp official told me he saw some of them, aged six or seven, cutting the head off a mud figure.

"One of them had a knife and started beheading it, shouting 'Allahu Akhbar'," he said.

"There is manhood, they told me, in cutting the head off."


Image: Displaced Iraqi children are given food after their arrival at a camp south of Mosul

I had travelled to the camp with the global head of UNICEF, Anthony Lake, who is visiting from New York.

He said: "If we are not educating the heads and healing the hearts of children who are cutting off the heads of mud dolls, then in the next generation we're going to replicate the same conflicts.

"It breaks my heart.

"What we have to do is provide the quiet miracle of a normal life."

UNHCR: Take care of refugees to counter IS message

Bruno Geddo, Iraq representative at the UNHCR, said the trauma among those who had been in Mosul was "one of the toughest issues we are going to have to deal with".

He told Sky News: "It will require enormous care, expertise, to try and turn around that level of trauma.

"People who have been made to watch unspeakable atrocities... they go into small details precisely because the trauma is too deep, even to think about what they are seeing, let alone to speak about it."

Image: Ahmed gets water for his family in Mosul and says he wants Islamic State out of the city

Education is a priority.

The UN has erected temporary tented classrooms.

Shamil Ahmed-Taha, 14, said: "I feel like I have a new life.

"There was no education under Islamic State, just how to kill, how to grow long beards and wear short trousers."

Cropped trousers helped followers trek across deserts under 7th century Islamic teaching, to which Islamic State strictly adheres.

Image: Displaced Iraqis from Mosul walk towards refugee camps, which are struggling to cope

The Iraqi government and aid agencies, like UNICEF, are encouraging people to leave the city's 17 refugee camps - which are struggling with the exodus of malnourished, desperate people from the besieged west - and return to their homes in east Mosul.

The newly opened markets of eastern bustle against the backdrop of airstrikes and mortar fire heard from the west.

But as the people return, water is key. UNICEF trucks in more than two million litres a day, from seven boreholes, with 153 tanks now erected in 30 east Mosul neighbourhoods.

Image: Anthony Lake, head of UNICEF, says children need the 'quiet miracle of a normal life'

In Samar, the children came with donkeys and jerry cans.

One of the children, Ahmed, told me the work was tiring, but life was better now.

His uncle was taken by Islamic State and is still missing.

"It was bad, we were terrified," he said. "We hope they never come back.

"Never, never, never.

"We want them out of Mosul."

There is a battle raging across the Tigris.

Image: Federal police officers carry weapons as the offensive pushes into the Old City

But in eastern Mosul, 341 schools have re-opened for more than 300,000 children.

And, for the children of this generation who have grown up under Islamic state, it is time to move on.