ERBIL - The Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG) Coordinator for International Advocacy has responded to a Human Rights Watch report accusing the Kurdish security forces of mistreating young Islamic State (IS) detainees.

HRW released a report on Tuesday in which it claimed that the Kurdistan Region security (Asayish) has tortured children between the ages of 14 to 17 into giving untrue confessions during interrogations, also accusing the Kurdish authorities of not giving the young detainees the access to attorneys.

It claimed that it had interviewed 20 children who were convicted of having ties with the jihadist group at the Women and Children's Reformatory in Kurdistan Region's Erbil province in November, last year.

"KRG security authorities in Erbil have not received any complaints of ill-treatment and torture from the ISIS child detainees," Dindar Zebari, the KRG’s Coordinator for International Advocacy, said in a statement on his Twitter account on Tuesday.

Zebari stressed that they will not tolerate any such mistreatment towards the detainees and that there has not been any so far.

"Ill treatment of children or juveniles on behalf of the security or police department is not tolerable or permissible."

The official further explained that when the militant group of IS overran a vast area in Iraq, hundreds of IDPs and Syrian refugees fled to the Kurdistan Region and that it was hard to differentiate between the ordinary civilians and those who had secret ties with the IS.

"For this reason, we had to take certain security measures in order to ensure the security of the people of Kurdistan Region, civilians, the IDPs, and the Syrian refugees as well, but some local and international organizations repeatedly accused the region of mistreating the detainees," he concluded.