When he is old enough they will tell him their story. They will tell him of how they, his young parents while still in their early twenties, suffered terrible hardship and privation and saw things no human being should ever see.

Above all else they will tell him of how in the small hours of the morning on the 13th July 2016, he gave them such joy, despite entering this world in the shadow of a cruel occupation by barbarous men and women.

It is raining outside. The patter of the raindrops on the canvas of the tent roof and the occasional buffeting by the wind sweeping off the barren desert plain, acts as rhythmical accompaniment to the story Salim and his wife Shaima are telling me.

Lying on a tattered mattress swaddled in warm clothes and a bright blue beanie hat as guard against the biting chill, seven-month-old Abdu Rahman, their son, is innocently oblivious to the nightmarish story his parents are recounting.

“That day Daesh brought a man and tied him to a pole in the street,” says Salim, adopting the commonly used Arabic acronym here for the jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) group.

“Daesh had their women with them, muhajireen,” Salim continued, using the Arabic term for ‘migrants’ or in this case foreign women who were members of the group.

“Once the man was tied, they fired bullets into the air as a signal for people in our neighbourhood to gather and watch.”

What followed next the young couple said, was a barbaric act that for over two and a half years they were forced to watch repeated with grotesque variations.

“It was a woman, one of the muhajireen, that this time slaughtered the man,” Salim explained.

The use of that word, ‘slaughter,’ is significant in the Middle East, implying as it does the ritual slaughter of livestock carried out with a single cut to the throat and the animal dying slowly of blood loss.

“My cousins too were slaughtered,” Shaima interrupts momentarily. She describes how her cousin and his young brother were similarly tied to a pole. On their chest hung cardboard signs declaring their alleged crime of “telling the Americans where to bomb” IS fighters.

They too met their grisly end in the Mosul neighbourhood where previously they grew up happy and carefree like Salim and Shaima, until IS and its cruel cadres came into their lives.

As Salim and Shaima speak, they cast the occasional glance down at tiny Abdu Rahman who lies on his back burbling. He’s safe from such horrors now their looks seem to say. The little boy is wearing a brightly coloured one piece jumpsuit adorned with pictures of Minnie Mouse, and his huge brown eyes are like mocha coloured marbles.

I ask them to tell me about the day he was born and their faces break into wide grins before they speak simultaneously and excitedly, clearly savouring this particular memory.

“We were living in such frightening and bad conditions, but I was so happy when I gave birth to Abdu Rahman,” says Shaima.

“It was 3 o’clock in the morning, when I arrived at the hospital,” she recalls, before explaining how Salim had to stay at his father’s house as it was too dangerous for him to be out so late.

“The doctors and hospital staff were all local people, and did what Daesh told them to do,” Shaima explained.

“If one of them disobeyed or tried to leave or escape, Daesh would take their house and possessions, or it might mean them being slaughtered too.”

Even at this moment of happy recollection that word slaughter is never far from Shaima’s vocabulary.

She recalls how happy everyone at the hospital was at the arrival of Abdu Rahman, the conditions there being so dire and medicines and equipment in short supply. Increasingly besieged by advancing Iraqi forces, almost every commodity in Mosul by then was scarce and prices had jumped enormously.

“We couldn’t afford to buy him milk like this, it was very expensive,” said Salim, reaching for an already opened packet of dried milk they were now using.

“One packet cost 11,000 Iraqi dinars (£8), can you imagine,” he added.

Before IS had come to Mosul, Salim had worked in a tile making factory earning a modest income, but by the time Abdu Rahman was born and IS ruled, he like many others had no work or pay and every cost incurred was an enormous burden for him and his wife.

“Even this, though only 5,000 Iraqi dinars (£4) was a problem for us, but it’s so important to have,” Salim tells me, pulling a small piece of paper from a wallet that turns out to be Abdu Rahman’s birth certificate.

Once back home from hospital the proud parents and now their new born son, continued their struggle for survival amidst the IS gunmen, zealots and executioners.

Among friends and relatives they borrowed money and food and lent the same in return when they had it.

Forcing people to increasingly stay home was a deliberate IS policy, leaving some people with no choice but to go to the group and offer to join or support them in order not to starve.

“One of our neighbours joined Daesh for this reason, he was a good man and desperate to feed his family, but now he is arrested by the Iraqi Army, ” Salim tells me. He is convinced that at no time did his neighbour fight but simply performed menial duties for the jihadist fighters.

I ask if Salim himself ever felt he might be compelled to do the same?

“I could never be one of them,” he replied emphatically. Salim was equally unequivocal when asked if any of the IS members he met ever displayed kindness or seemed reasonable.

“None, they were all the same,” he told me bluntly. By then the situation for the couple and so many others like them in their Mosul neighbourhood, had pushed them to near breaking point. What they felt, Salim said was more than fear, it was a terror inside them that made their waking hours a living hell.

There was no single worst moment he insists, but rather that their entire lives had become one long bad moment, and only the existence of their son gave them the inspiration to hang on and continue.

“If we were happy for half an hour, then we would be sad for a long time afterwards,” was how he summed up those darkest of times as IS oppression remained relentless.

“Daesh would still come to our house and force us to attend the killings otherwise we would be arrested and put in one of their jails,” Salim explained, with Shaima adding that it was like living through a recurring real time horror movie.

One day as Salim watched, the executioners prepared to throw a man to his death from the top of a building

“I just wanted to rescue him, but I couldn’t, there was nothing we could do,” Salim said, shaking his head, the image of that terrible day clearly still indelibly etched in his mind’s eye.

Faced with the prospect that they themselves might suffer a similar fate, and with no sign their hellish existence would improve anytime soon, I asked whether he and Shaima had ever contemplated an attempted escape?

There was an interminably long pause before Salim eventually replied.

“Yes, we tried with a group of family and friends, but were caught and forced to return.”

“After taking our ID and some of our other personal documents, they lashed and beat us,” he continued quietly, glancing momentarily at his wife who by now as if seeking comfort from the thought of that time, was cradling Abdu Rahman in her arms.

By that period in their ordeal the couple said they felt as if their existence was like some slow form of claustrophobic suffocation, as every aspect of ordinary life came under the diktats of their IS rulers. For Shaima and other women it was ‘haram’ forbidden to go outside alone unless it was with Salim.

No mobile phones, no smoking, strict rules on men having beards and what both men and women could wear had long been the norm.

Increasingly Salim and Shaima’s thoughts of escape diminished as even the smallest breaches of IS law carried the ultimate penalty.

Increasingly people were executed for using mobile phones recalled Shaima of this time, as more people who had hidden the handsets made use of them to connect with the outside world.

With television and satellite dishes banned from the start of the IS occupation, the only news from beyond Mosul most people were able to access, came from radios that the jihadists had inexplicably allowed them to keep.

Salim can offer no explanation as to why this was permitted, but by now IS had other more pressing challenges to contend with, as the Iraqi Army and Kurdish peshmerga forces had begun mobilising in an effort to liberate Mosul.

“When they liberated Ramadi, Tikrit and Fallujah, we were more hopeful that our time was near and Daesh would be finished in Mosul and our freedom would come,” Salim recalls.

When that moment did come, Salim, Shaima and Abdu Rahman were living in one basement room, the sounds of explosions and gunfire reverberating around them as the Iraqi Army fought IS street by street.

“The fighting was fierce and at one point it become so intense just before the Iraqi Army liberated our street, and we came out with our white banner,” says Salim.

With Abdu Rahman in their arms the couple seized the moment making the perilous but comparatively short journey to the Hassansham camp for those displaced by the fighting that sits just east of Mosul.

The camp is home to thousand of families facing a similar plight to that of Salim, Shaima and Abdu Rahman, and sits on a flat desert plateau that is baking hot in summer and bitterly cold in winter.

All around sit villages and towns of bomb blasted ruins through which the fighting between the Iraqi Army and IS swept as it moved further into east Mosul.

Outside the family’s tent sits line upon line of others.

In the sky above flutter makeshift kites made from sticks and plastic bags and flown by children only a few years older than Abdu Rahman. The sight of the kites is not lost on my translator, an Iraqi Kurd called Twana Anwer, who helps manage the camp for the Kurdish humanitarian organisation the Barzani Charity Foundation (BCF).

When not surrounded by desperate people seeking his help, he studies English literature in his little spare time. Right now he is in the throes of researching his university thesis on the novel, The Kite Runner by the Afghan writer, Khaled Hosseini, another tale set against a backdrop of refugees and Islamist extremism.

Twana tells me of the trauma so many of the children here have suffered and of how he once came across some youngsters playing in the camp.

Three boys had made a mud outline of a figure on the ground on which one boy was acting out the slaughtering of the figure with a pretend knife and crying “Allahu Akbar” - God is Great.

So many of the children who have witnessed such horrors in real time during years of IS rule are now in desperate need of psychological counselling and support.

If there is one consolation for Salim and Shaima from their harrowing ordeal, it’s that Abdu Rahman will remember nothing of what he and they went through. The same, sadly, cannot be said of his young parents.

“We are always thinking about what happened both when awake and in our nightmares when sleeping,” admits Salim. “We cannot wipe out the sight of all those we saw killed in front of own eyes.”

Asked if they will return to their neighbourhood in Mosul that lies such a short distance away, both insist they will never go back. For them Mosul, the place they once called home, will forever be haunted by what they witnessed.

What do they hope for now, and will they have more children I ask, will little Abdu Rahman have brothers and sisters?

Once again the smiles break out across their faces this time they laugh.

“We wish we will have a good life and a good life for our baby and maybe two more children then “Khallas” finished, Shaima jokes.

And what of the little boy whose first seven months of life were spent in the shadow on death, what of Abdu Rahman, I enquire?

“When he is old enough we will tell him our story,” they quietly assure me, still smiling.