“Children of minorities have been captured in many places ... sold in the market place with tags, price tags on them, they have been sold as slaves,” Renate Winter, an expert on the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, told reporters yesterday. 

Winter’s comments were timed with the release of the U.N. watchdog’s report on a range of human rights issues in Iraq that have surfaced over almost two decades. 

The report was issued as the world reacted in horror to the Islamic State’s brutal treatment of a captured Jordanian pilot, who was burned alive in a cage.

Strikingly, this U.N. report detailing attacks on children has not received anywhere near the same level of global attention. However, President Obama, during an address today at the annual National Prayer Breakfast, attacked ISIS. Obama also said he was looking forward to Pope Francis' visit to Washington in September.

The panel of experts who contributed to the review addressed “the systematic killing of children belonging to religious and ethnic minorities by the so-called ISIL, including several cases of mass executions of boys, as well as reports of beheadings, crucifixions of children and burying children alive.”

The report concluded that children from the “Yazidi sect or Christian communities,” were most at risk in territory controlled by Islamic State, but young people from all religious groups had suffered at the hands of the militants.

Mentally challenged children have been used as suicide bombers, and others had been placed as human shields for ISIS fighters seeking protection from U.S. air raids. 

The UN group reported that the militants had imposed “systematic sexual violence,” including “the abduction and sexual enslavement of children.”