Updated

The Yazidi community in Iraq says it will accept the survivors of the Islamic State group's campaign of enslavement and welcome the children conceived through rape into the minority community.

The decision, issued by the Yazidi Supreme Spiritual Council, will help Yazidi women taken as slaves by the militants earlier this decade to return to their community in Iraq, along with the children they had through rape, said Eido Baba Sheikh, a community leader, on Thursday.

Several freed Yazidi captives say they have been forced to leave their children in Syria because their community in Iraq would refuse to accept them.

Some 3,000 Yazidis are still missing after IS militants stormed their communities in northwest Iraq in 2014 and enslaved, raped and killed thousands of them.