WHITFIELD: An unexpected development in Iraq this weekend. ISIS suddenly released hundreds of civilian hostages including children and the elderly. Here now is CNN's Ivan Watson.</s>IVAN WATSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Fred, the Iraqi Kurdish government and Kurdish activists are trying to take care of an enormous number of prisoners from the Yazidi religious minority who were released without really any explanation by ISIS militants on Saturday after they've been held for months in ISIS captivity. These members of the Yazidi religious minority described by one activist I talked to as almost entirely elderly men and women. Many of them filthy and hungry and sick after months in captivity, some of them mentally or physically disabled. We don't know why they were released, they were dumped by an ISIS front line and sent walking, those who could, towards Kurdish Peshmerga positions near the northern Kurdish held city of Kirkuk. Their release underscores a much bigger problem, the fact that when ISIS launched its military offensive last summer in northern Iraq, they took thousands of members of the Kurdish religious minority hostage, many of them girls and women, who have basically, according to some survivors that I've talked to, been sold into slavery, modern- day slavery, where they have been used in many cases as effectively sex slaves. ISIS has been very public about this. They have justified this along religious grounds. And they've even issued instructions for what age, for example, someone can begin to have sex with their Yazidi slave, under what conditions they can trade or sell their slaves. This has been a devastating development for members of this religious minority, some of whom have been forced to try to gather up money to pay ransoms to win back the release of their missing loved ones, still believed to be missing and held hostage, in the thousands at this date -- Fred.</s>WHITFIELD: A horrible situation. Thank you so much, Ivan Watson. All right, meantime in this country, a nationwide manhunt is over. Two teens on the run after allegedly going on a cross-country crimes spree are now in custody. Now how police found them, next.
ISIS Releases Hundreds of Civilian Hostages