The girl who burnt herself alive to escape so-called Islamic State rapists

They are perhaps among the cruellest injuries from the so-called Islamic State's terror and butchery in Syria.

A teenage girl was left so traumatised by rape and abuse at the hands of the terror group that she set herself on fire in the hope of making herself too unattractive to touch.

Yasmin, aged 18, is a member of the Syrian minority Yazidi sect, which has been targeted as unbelievers by IS. Many have been taken into sex abuse by the terror group who treat them as "spoils of war".

She was left so terrified by her treatment that she poured gasoline of herself in a desperate attempt to escape being raped again.

In fact, Yasmin has escaped IS and was living as a refugee in Iraq when she made the frantic attempt on her own life.

She was so tormented by her memories that she could not eat and believed she heard the voices of jihadists coming to recapture her.

"I was crying all the time. And most of the time I was able to hear the voice of the Daeshis," she said.

"I was so scared, I couldn't take it anymore. And this is what happened to me."

Yasmin is now being treated for her devastating injuries at a refugee camp in Germany, where doctors are trying to heal both her body and help her overcome the mental wounds of her capture.

Jan Ilhan Kizilhan, the trauma psychologist treating Yasmin, described his shock the first time he entered her tent to see a young woman with "no eyes, no nose, no ear, nothing".

He said she had suffered a nightmare in which she believed that a gang of IS members were outside her tent.

"The only idea and thinking she had was 'how I can be ugly [to] not to be raped again'," he said.

"And for that she took a can full of benzin and burnt herself."

Around 3.200 Yazidis are believed to be being held by Isis, who frequently slaughter the men and boys in a captured community and take woman and girls as slaves.

Many former slaves have said their treatment was so brutal that death would have been preferable.