Mothers who have returned to Iraq without their children say they would rather be back in the hell of their former lives
As bombs crunched into the ground around them in February last year, three young Yazidi women cowered in holes dug in the eastern Syrian desert, cradling their terrified children.
In the month that followed, hundreds of people hiding near them were killed by devastating barrages that destroyed what was left of Islamic State’s so-called caliphate and freed the former slaves and their toddlers from five years in the terror group’s clutches.