Islamic State selling sex slaves, the younger the better, claims UN official

1	Yazidi Kurdish women chant slogans against the Islamic State's invasion on Sinjar a year ago.
2	Thousands of Yazidi Kurdish women and girls have been sold into sexual slavery and forced to marry IS militants.
3	New York: Islamic State is circulating a slave price list for captured women and children, and the group's ongoing appeal and barbarity pose an unprecedented challenge, a senior United Nations official says.
4	The official, Zainab Bangura?, said that on a trip to Iraq in April she was given a copy of an Islamic State pamphlet, which included the list, showing that captured children as young as one fetch the highest price.
5	The bidders include the group's own fighters and wealthy Middle Easterners.
6	The list shows the group's view of the value of those it captures and surfaced some eight months ago, though its authenticity came under question.
7	Mrs Bangura, who is the UN special envoy on sexual violence in conflict and was also in Jordan and Turkey, said she has verified that the document came from Islamic State and reflects real transactions.
8	Yazidi Kurds at a protest in Dohuk, Iraq, against the Islamic State's invasion on Sinjar city a year ago.
9	"The girls get peddled like barrels of petrol," she said in an interview last week in New York.
10	"One girl can be sold and bought by five or six different men. Sometimes these fighters sell the girls back to their families for thousands of dollars of ransom."
11	Thousands of Yazidi Kurdish women and girls have been sold into sexual slavery and forced to marry Islamic State militants, according to Human Rights organisations, Yazidi activists and observers.
12	For Islamic State fighters, the prices in Iraqi dinars for boys and girls aged one to nine are equal to about $US165 ($230), Mrs Bangura said.
13	Prices for adolescent girls are $US124 and it's less for women over 20.
14	Women hold a banner at a demonstration on Monday at the UN European headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, marking the first anniversary of Islamic State's surge on Yazidis of the town of Sinjar.
15	The militia's leaders first take those they wish, after which rich outsiders from the region are permitted to bid thousands of dollars, Mrs Bangura said.
16	Those remaining are then offered to the group's fighters for the listed prices.
17	Mrs Bangura, a Muslim and former foreign minister of Sierra Leone, said that Islamic State, which rules some 210,000 square kilometres across swaths of Iraq and Syria, is unlike other insurgent groups and challenges all known models of fighting them.
18	Zainab Bangura, the United Nations special representative on sexual violence in conflict.
19	Officials and scholars have struggled to understand Islamic State's success despite breaking what are widely seen as rules for insurgents ? to be sure to mingle with local populations, not take on established militaries or try to hold territory.
20	The group has broken all those rules and draws thousands of foreign fighters despite its well-publicised savagery.
21	"If you and your group are doing something that is considered taboo, your doing it together forms a bond," she said.
22	"Sexual violence does really create fear within a population."
23	Sexual abuse by soldiers has a long history including the so-called rape camps in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, she said.
24	Islamic State has made a particular practice of enslaving communities it has conquered those that are not Sunni Muslim?
25	Yazidis and Christians, for example.
26	It portrays such conquests as God's work, drawing disaffected Muslims from around the world.
27	Mrs Bangura said the international community and the UN have been taken aback by such practices because they do not resemble those of village militias in other countries.
28	"They have a machinery, they have a program," she said.
29	"They have a manual on how you treat these women. They have a marriage bureau which organises all of these 'marriages' and the sale of women. They have a price list."