Mick Hartley

A report from Alex Crawford at Sky News on the mainly Kudish Syrian Democratic Forces, still hunting IS in the refugee camps on the Syrian-Iraq border, and rescuing Yazidi women like Kovan:

Kovan, who is 24 years old, told her rescuers that IS took her captive alongside her family when they stormed Sinjar. She was just 14, the eldest of four sisters with an older brother. She was taken to the Al Hol camp after the extremist group collapsed, where, she says, IS families abused her for being Yazidi.

Within days of her capture, Kovan was paraded in front of IS fighters who bought her and then took her home to be raped and beaten. Sold multiple times, she was moved around IS territory from Mosul to Raqqa and then to Baghouz.

The first man who bought her was twice her age. She hadn't even started menstruating. As she recalls the horrific abuse she suffered, there is a mix of anger and sorrow in her voice. When she tried to run away, he dragged her back by her hair and beat her. "He said he'd kill me and bury me in his backyard if I didn't do what he wanted."

"I was raped every day for two years," she says. Her tone is matter-of-fact but her eyes indicate a deep pain. Her two children were born of rape by two separate IS men, both of whom are now believed to be dead.

During that time, she also witnessed a 10-year-old child being raped.

Now, Kovan wants the men who defiled her, and the IS wives who helped them, to be held accountable for their actions.

"The women were just as bad," she says. "They knew what their husbands were doing. They dressed us and put makeup on us so we could be raped by their husbands"….

Kovan's freedom is bittersweet. Upon her return, her surviving family showered her with sweets, sang and hugged her in delight and relief on having her returned to them. But her smile seemed skin-deep. Her trauma will take years to overcome, if she can conquer it at all. And she knows that. She has survived a genocide, a massacre and unthinkable brutality.

Only justice will bring her peace but so far there has been only a handful of persecutions worldwide for what Britain, and many other countries, now recognise as genocide against the Yazidis.