Islamic State using women to create an 'unborn army'

Thousands of women are being used by Islamic State to breed a new generation of child soldiers, according to a report published to coincide with International Women's Day.

More than 31,000 women living in IS-controlled areas are pregnant with the children of militants, says the United Nations-endorsed report, released yesterday by the counter-extremism group Quilliam.

It also found that as many as 50 children from the UK are growing up in the so-called caliphate. The boys attend jihadist training, which includes shooting, weaponry and martial arts, while the girls are confined to the home and taught to look after husbands.

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"Children's prolonged exposure and desensitisation to violence affects their physical and psychological well-being, both in the short term and in the long term," says the report. "Children assist in meeting the present needs of the 'caliphate' and can continue to propagate the state's existence and expansion once they grow up."

IS regards children as "better and more lethal fighters than adults", says The Independent. "Rather than being converted into radical ideologies, they are a 'blank slate' which allows them to have extreme values indoctrinated from birth."

Rape and sexual slavery are used as weapons of war by IS militants and the UN's envoy on sexual violence, Zainab Bangura, says abducted women and girls are openly sold in slave markets for as little as a pack of cigarettes.

If they are not sold, the girls, who are often from the Yazidi minority, are forced to marry militants.

Amnesty International estimates more than 200 girls have managed to escape, but hundreds, "possibly thousands," remain.

In 2014, so-called jihadi brides published a guide to life for women under IS rule that laid out a strict dress code, said girls as young as nine can get married and stated that women should only leave the house in exceptional circumstances.