How Isil jihadists beat and brainwashed boy hostages The boys were repeatedly beaten as well as indoctrinated, according to the accounts given to The Telegraph, and a Human Rights Watch report released yesterday/Tuesday. But the jihadists" tactics may also have worked, judging by the account Jan gave to The Telegraph in Turkey, where his family have sought refuge from the war. The jihadists released the girls within a few hours, but brought the boys to nearby Manbij, he said. "At first they took us to a mosque and told us they just wanted to check if we were good Muslims, and that we would be released after one day," he said. But the next day we were taken to a school. All aged between 13 and 15, the boys were kept 15 to a locked room, and the jihadists assigned one hostage in each cell the role of "emir" or leader. They then began a carefully calculated programme of religious indoctrination. "We prayed five times per day, including the 4am morning prayer, reading the Koran, having religious lessons and special classes in Islamic State ideology," he said. The plan was enforced using a mix of kindness and brutality, no doubt designed to play with the teenagers" minds. The boys' teacher was a Jordanian named Surukhan al-Tabuki, a man in his 30s who tried to befriend the students and become their confidant: "He was kind to us, unless someone made a mistake in his lessons or behaved badly and then he was ordered to send us for punishment." The "punishments" were conducted by other men, jihadists with no names who wore black face masks. Many of the jailers were foreign, including from Saudi Arabia and Tunisia. When Jan used the Kurdish word for God instead of the Arabic "Allah" he was tortured: "They strung me up by my arms. Hanging me by a rope that was tied to my writes. They practiced karate and kick-boxing on me," he said. Another boy, who asked The Telegraph to call him Ivan, said that when he accidentally dropped a notebook where he had been writing Koranic verses on the floor close to the classroom's paper bin, his captors beat him. The violence was random, Jan said. "Once the jihadists told me, "we want to kill you,"" he said. ""How would you like to die? Here in front of your friends or alone?"" Shortly after they were kidnapped, a group of boys managed to escape, scaling a ladder onto the school roof and then hopping over the wall. Ivan said this was his most frightening moment: "The boys escaped from my cell. I stayed behind because I didn't want to leave my cousin who was in another classroom. I was punished for that. After that the kidnappers tried to turn the boys against each other "recruiting" some of them as "spies," the boys said. Sometimes the boys were allowed to play football, but at others they were made to watch videos showing massacres of "kaffirs" - unbelievers - by Isil jihadists. Some of boys were occasionally allowed to speak to their parents on the phone. The kidnappers used these conversations to tell families that if they wanted to see their children again they had to rally against the YPG, the Kurdish militia fighting Isil in Kobane. The children were slowly released in groups as the months progressed, often with little explanation. Jan said: "They told us they were teaching us to be real Muslims. And that only then would they set us free. Fifteen boys were apparently exchange for Isis fighters held by the YPG. Jan and Ivan were among the last group of 25 children to be freed last week. Both boys said most of the captives had also come to believe in Isil's ideology and that five had even chosen to stay and join the fighting. Part of Jan still remembers the liberal upbringing that his parents chose to give him. For this reason he said he has not become an Isil soldier, but he was clearly still beguiled by the ideology, and felt compelled to support it: "Sometimes I am confused in my mind," he said. But everything they said they proved using passages from the Koran. In the Koran it tells us that [Muslims] will rule the world. Isil are right: there will be a global Islamic caliphate.