ISIS burn 19 Yazidi girls to death in iron cages after they refused to have sex with jihadists

ISIS jihadis executed 19 Yazidi girls in Iraq by locking them in iron cages and then burning them to death in front of hundreds of people. The victims were taken hostage by the terror group to be used as sex slaves but were put to death in Mosul for refusing to have sex with the militants. ISIS took over the Yazidi region in

northern Iraq in August 2014 causing the displacement of nearly 40,000 people.

The terror group also slaughtered many of the Yazidi people and took women and kept women and young girls as sex slaves.

And local media activist Abdullah al-Malla told the Kurdish-run ARA News: 'They were punished for refusing to have sex with ISIS militants.'

While an eyewitness told the agency: 'The 19 girls were burned to death, while hundreds of people were watching.

'Nobody could do anything to save them from the brutal punishment.'

It is estimated more than 3,000 Yazidi girls have been taken as sex slaves by ISIS after they took over northern Iraq.

Thousands of them remain trapped on Mount Sinjar and according to local and military sources, they have suffered mass killings, rape and kidnappings.

In territories occupied by ISIS anybody who opposes their religion can be turned into slave, and they are often considered as 'devil worshippers' by the terror group.

And Human Rights Watch has said that the treatment of the Yazidis by ISIS amounts to genocide.

They said in a report: 'Many of the abuses, including torture, sexual slavery, and arbitrary detention, would be war crimes if committed in the context of the armed conflict, or crimes against humanity if they were part of ISIS policy during a systematic or widespread attack on the civilian population.

'The abuses against Yezidi women and girls documented by Human Rights Watch, including the practice of abducting women and girls and forcibly converting them to Islam and/or forcibly marrying them to ISIS members, may be part of a genocide against Yezidis.'

The Yazidi are an ancient group who have lived on the Ninevah Province, in Iraq, for hundreds of years.

The Yazidi faith has elements of Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Islam. A a result, Islamic State militants consider them to be devil-worshippers.

Most of the Yazidi population, numbering around half a million, remains displaced in camps inside the autonomous entity in Iraq's north known as Kurdistan.-Dailymail