Syrian Kurds on Saturday repatriated  25 women and children from Iraq’s Yazidi minority after freeing them  during the final push against the Islamic State group, a local official said.

The US-backed fighters say they rescued some 300 Yazidi women  and children during the fight to take the jihadists’ last scrap of  territory in eastern Syria.

“Today, we will hand over 25 people —10 women and 15 children — to the Yazidi council in Sinjar,” said Ziyad Rustam, an official  with the Kurdish-run group Yazidi House, which reunites rescued Yazidi  children with surviving relatives.

“They will be sent to their families,” he told AFP. At the Yazidi House headquarters, women wearing colourful robes  collected children scampering around the compound before boarding  busses bound for Sinjar, the Yazidi heartland.

“The fate of my three sisters remains unknown... I don’t know anything  about them,” said 17-year-old Jamila Haidar.”I hope we will be reunited soon.”

Iraq’s Yazidis are a symbol of the suffering caused by the Islamic  State group during its rein over vast swathes of Syria and Iraq. The jihadists stormed through Iraq’s northwest in 2014 slaughtering  thousands of men and boys and abducting women and girls to be abused  as sex slaves.

But they have since lost all of the once-sprawling cross-border  “caliphate” to multiple offensive.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces last month announced the  defeat of the IS proto-state after tens of thousands of people streamed  out of the jihadists’ last patch of territory, around the village  of Baghouz near the Iraqi border.

Rustam said SDF had in total liberated 850 Yazidi women and children  during its battles against IS since 2015.But 3,040 Yazidis are still missing, he said, adding that the search  for them was ongoing.

Rustam said the jihadists had “sold many of them to people inside  Syria, in places like Idlib”, most of which is held by a former Al-Qaeda  affiliate.

Some of the Yazidis extracted from IS’s last sliver of territory  are being held at the Kurdish-run Al-Hol camp, which also houses  jihadist family members.