ISIS executes 19 women for refusing to have sex with its militants

The Islamic State executed 19 women after they refused to have sex with the militants, the Mirror reports. Scores of women taken hostage from the villages siezed by ISIS have been raped by its militants. The 19 women were being held hostage in Mosul in Iraq.

An official spokesman of the Kurdish Democratic Party in Mosul reportedly told Iraqi News: "The penalty decision came on the background of the refusal to participate in the practice of sexual jihad”.

According to the report, most of the hostages were Yazidis or Christians.

The report also detailed the horrific sex trade set up by the ISIS where militants sell the captives with girls between the ages of one and nine fetching the highest price.

A UN envoy is currently investigating ISIS' sex trade. She told the Mirror that the militatns sell the girls back to their families for exhorbitant amounts. She also says that Yazidi virgins are sent to slave auctions in Syria's Raqqa where they are sold to highest bidder.

In 2014, an adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government on gender issues revealed that women and girls from the minority Yazidi community, captured by the Islamic State (IS), "were treated like cattle".

Nazand Begikhani, a researcher at the UK-based University of Bristol's Gender and Violence Research Center, also said that the women abducted by the terror group have been subjected to physical and sexual violence including, "systematic rape and sex slavery," according to CNN report.