‘I was desperate to get away but I was too terrified: they threatened to chop my son's head off and put it in a suitcase, and then kill me and my mum.
'I knew they would do it, too. They're not human,' she said. 'I have no doubt they would have killed me and done it painfully and slowly.’
This is not the testimony of a refugee fleeing a particularly vicious outbreak of retaliatory warfare in Syria, or a victim of a salafi kidnap attempt in Somalia – scenarios from the bottom of the world that sadden each day’s newspaper trawl.
