Fawzia Amin Sido, a Yazidi girl, was just 11 years old and living in Iraq when she was captured by “a Palestinian Hamas-ISIS member" and brought to Gaza. For ten years, she endured unspeakable treatment, including rape and beatings.
She was rescued on Thursday in a "complex operation" involving the IDF, the U.S., Jordan, and other nations. On Friday, she was driven in a U.S. embassy car to Jordan and ultimately, home to Iraq where she joyously reunited with her family.
Fawzia, a Yazidi girl kidnapped by ISIS from Iraq and brought to Gaza at just 11 years old, has finally been rescued by the Israeli security forces.
— David Saranga (@DavidSaranga) October 3, 2024
For years, she was held captive by a Palestinian Hamas-ISIS member.
She has now been reunited with her family. Her story is a… pic.twitter.com/nkVotqYdov
ISIS ruthlessly and systematically hunted Yazidis a decade ago. The terrorists saw them as less than human and treated them accordingly.
ISIS trafficked some of the Yazidi like Fawzia and sold them into slavery. Others were brides for ISIS fighters. Others, along with the men, were simply butchered.
The ordeal Fawzia went through cannot be believed. She was trafficked several times to different masters in several different countries.
“We ended up in Al-Hol camp (in Syria) before we were smuggled to Idlib in 2019, and from there, we went to Turkey. In 2020, they arranged a passport for me in Turkey so I could fly from Istanbul to Hurghada, Egypt, and then to Gaza,” she said.
She told CNN that she stayed in Rafah where life was "unbearable."
“Hamas constantly harassed me due to my Yazidi background and contact with my family, even going so far as to format my phone [erase its contents] during their investigations. After a year, they moved me to a guest house.”
When the war broke out in Gaza in 2023, she says she moved around quite frequently. Then, on October 1, she was rescued by an NGO.
The IDF said that her captor was killed, “presumably during IDF strikes” in Gaza, allowing her to flee to a hideout, from where she was rescued and taken to the Kerem Shalom border crossing.
Fawzia did not mention a strike when she spoke to CNN about her ordeal, saying only that she was rescued by an NGO - which she couldn’t recall the name of - in Rafah.
“From there, American officials took me and helped return me to Baghdad,” she said.
U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller echoed the Israeli account that “the recent death of her captor in Gaza allowed her to escape.”
“We were contacted by the Iraqi government, who was made aware of the fact that she escaped, that she was alive, and that she wanted to come home to her family. And the government of Iraq asked us to do whatever we could to get her out of Gaza and get her home. So over the past few weeks, we worked with a number of our partners in the region to get her out of Gaza,” Miller said at a press briefing on Thursday.
Miller's account suggests Fawzia was on her own for a few weeks dodging bombs in Gaza until finally rescued by an NGO.
This young woman is a survivor. To endure 10 years of torture and abuse and then have the wits to survive a war zone says a lot about the human spirit and the incredible courage of this woman.
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