ISIL terrorists have conducted systematic sexual crimes against Yazidi women and girls, Human Rights Watch said.

ISIL terrorists have conducted systematic sexual crimes against Yazidi women and girls, Human Rights Watch said.

The rights group interviewed 20 women and girls who managed to escape after their ethnic minority sect was targeted by ISIL last summer.

They described how the hostages became the victims of a mass program of sexual slavery, with girls as young as eight being traded between the terrorists or given as "gifts".

In August, 2014, the ISIL Takfiri militants took several thousand Yazidi civilians into custody in the northern Iraqi province of Nineveh, separated the girls and women from their families, and transferred them to different strongholds of the terrorist group in Iraq and neighboring Syria.

The Izadi girls and women told the HRW that the Takfiri group is holding the Yazidi captives in multiple locations across northern Iraq, including Mosul, Tal Afar, Tal Banat, Ba’aj, Rambusi, and Sinjar, and in areas it controls in eastern Syria, including Raqqa and Rabi’a.

Jalila, 12, whose name has been changed for her own protection, told of being separated from her mother and sister and taken to a house in an Isil-controlled part of Syria that had become a "market" of Yazidi women.

The interviews collected by Human Rights Watch supported the findings of a United Nations investigation last year, which reported the jihadists giving the captured Yazidi women "price tags for the buyers to choose and negotiate the sale".

As many as 3,000 people, mainly Yazidis, remain in ISIL captivity, according to the UN. The terrorists attacked the northern Iraqi province of Sinjar last August, overrunning the towns of the Yazidi ethnic minority.