According to Zainab Bangura, a senior United Nations official, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is circulating a slave price list for captured women and children.

Bloomberg reports Bangura, the UN special envoy sexual violence in conflict, says she received a copy of the pamphlet on a trip she made to Iraq back in April.

The catalog of captured women and children shows that the youngest slaves garner the highest prices. “The girls get peddled like barrels of petrol,” said Bangura. Elaborating on the details of the slave purchases, the official writes that, “One girl can be sold and bought by five or six different men. Sometimes these fighters sell the girls back to their families for thousands of dollars of ransom.”

The bidders involved in the purchase of ISIS captives are culled from a group that includes ISIS fighters as well as wealthy Middle Easterners. 

Despite Bangura’s charges, the list, which came to light around eight months ago, has been described by some as an example of anti-Islamic propaganda. The pamphlet, if genuine, reveals that ISIS considers Christian children between the ages of 1 and 9 to be the most valuable, fetching an individual price of around $165.

As reported by the Independent, the biggest clue that the price list might be a fake is that on the top of the right hand corner the pamphlet refers to ISIS as the "Islamic State of Iraq," not, as it would be typically called, the "Islamic State."

As Bangura notes, dealing with the Islamic State, which currently covers appproxiamtely 80,000 square miles of Iraq and Syria, is not like countering any insurgent group the UN has tried to handle before. 

“It’s not an ordinary rebel group,” said Bangura. “When you dismiss them as such, then you are using the tools you are used to. This is different. They have the combination of a conventional military and a well-run organized state.”