The teenager who defied Islamic State

A slight, gentle-faced boy, Ahmed al-hardani is a survivor. Two years ago, aged 14, he was captured by Islamic State, in northern Iraq. The militants were rounding up thousands of Yazidi men; most were killed, and Ahmed has not seen his father since. He, however, was taken to the city of Tal Afar, where he was interrogated for 15 days, then sent to live in a house seized from a Shia family. One day, the militants came for him: an informant had told them that he had kept hold of his mobile phone. He’d been using it to send messages to his mother. They tortured him for days, demanding to know where he had hidden it. “They whipped me around 250 times over a few days, until the skin began to fall off my back. But I wouldn’t tell them. I would rather have died than have no way to communicate with [my mother], to tell her I was still OK,” he told Josie Ensor in The Daily Telegraph. From there, he was sent to an IS training camp, where around 200 Yazidi boys, some as young as eight, were shown graphic videos of beheadings, and trained to use explosive vests. When Ahmed (pictured) realised he was about to be sent on a mission, he escaped. Now, he lives in a refugee camp, with his mother, grandmother, sister and brother. He works in a shop to support them, though he bears the scars of the beatings, and has trouble with his breathing. “I still hear their voices in my head and think from time to time about w whatat cou couldd haveave happened. But ut I am strong and I think they would never have broken me.”