IS enslaved child 'price list' confirmed as genuine

A United Nations official has confirmed that the child slave "price list" circulating among Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria and Iraq is genuine.

The list surfaced online in November last year, but reports suggested it was fake.

However, following her trip to Iraq in April, Zainab Bangura, the UN's Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Sexual Violence in Conflict, has confirmed that the document is real.

Girls get peddled like barrels of petrol - Zainab Bangura

The captured children are mainly Yazidis, a religious sect viewed as apostates by the Islamic State extremists.

Monday marked the one year anniversary of the brutal attack launched on Yazidi communities around Sinjar mountain.

In August 2014, an estimated 50,000 Yazidis fled to the mountains following attacks by IS forces on the Iraqi city of Sinjar, which fell into the control of the extremists on August 3.

The group killed over 500 men, women and children as part of an effort to "instill terror".

Hundreds of women and girls were seized and sold off for fighters’ sexual gratification, Human Rights Watch said.

A report released in December 2014 by human rights group Amnesty International found that women and girls from the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq were becoming so desperate to escape captivity, they began committing suicide.

Amnesty said that many women had suffered "catastrophic" damage.

"The physical and psychological toll of the horrifying sexual violence these women have endured is catastrophic. Many of them have been tortured and treated as chattel. Even those who have managed to escape remain deeply traumatised" Donatella Rovera, Amnesty's senior crisis response adviser, said in a statement. 

Speaking to Bloomberg about the shocking document, UN's Bangura said the girls get "peddled like barrels of petrol".

Young children, from the ages of one to nine, fetch around $165, while adolescents and women fetch lower prices as they get older, the official also said, adding that they are offered to IS leaders first, then put up for sale to foreign buyers - often wealthy men from other parts of the Middle East - for thousands of dollars, before being offered to fighters for these lower prices.

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