Diplomats have requested that Baghdad grant exit visas to the captives who fell into government hands after fierce fighting.

Some of the children are babies and toddlers born to German mothers or fathers whose only birth certificates were issued by Isis bureaucrats.

An estimated 1,000 radicals left Germany to fight with Islamic State over the past few years, 20 per cent of them women.

German officials would rather have the infants and women returned so they can be re-educated about their support for radical Islam rather than run the risk of them indoctrinating a new generation.

“We see the danger of children who socialised with and were indoctrinated by jihadists returning to Germany from the war zones,” the chief of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, Hans-Georg Maassen, said last month. “This could allow a new generation of jihadists to be raised here.”

The captives in Iraq include four children in Erbil and a pregnant woman. The most famous POW is Linda Wenzel, 16, from a small town near Dresden.

She was captured in the ruins of Mosul in the summertime after leaving Germany in 2016 to marry a Jihadist in Syria later killed in the fighting.

She is alleged to have been a member of Islamic State’s notorious Sharia Brigade, an all-female force that carried out beatings and torture of women found violating the strict Islamic laws imposed by the caliphate.

Iraq has so far rebuffed all approaches to return her or any of the other captives.