Hello this is assignment on the BBC World Service. I'm Tim Hewell and I'm in

Northern Iraq with a boy in a bright yellow football jersey called Zahad.

Zahad.

Zahad's 14, though looking at him,

you'd think he was much younger.

For more than three years, he was a captive of the self-proclaimed

Islamic State, trained as a child soldier, what they called a lion cub of the califet.

All that time, they were teaching you guns and they were teaching you about the Quran.

What were they telling you about the Quran? That we were the ones who were right and that if we died in the front line we'd go to heaven.

That God would recognize what we'd done and reward us. that we were right and everyone else was wrong,

and that 70 countries were fighting against us.

What did you think about all that?

I didn't think anything. You didn't think it was true.

But did they if you didn't say the right things what what did they do did they

how did they punish you?

They'd have killed me. Sahad came back to his father in this refugee camp just 20 days ago.

And what he wants to do most now is play football like the

other boys here. The game was banned he says under IS the group that murdered and

kidnapped thousands in Iraq and Syria, whose campaign of death and destruction

has forced more than 3 million people from their homes in Iraq alone,

is almost finished on the battlefield. It's three months since it lost its bigger city,

Mosul. But children that I.S. held in its grip are still being rescued every day. There are Iraqi

...