ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The rescue this week of a Yazidi woman from the war-torn Gaza Strip, ending more than a decade of Islamic State (ISIS) captivity, was an international effort with Iraqis, Americans, a Moroccan-Canadian, Israel, and a Kurdish journalist all playing a role.
The rescue of Fawzia Amin Sido was announced on Thursday.
The incredible rescue story began in 2023, when Rudaw journalist Nasir Ali met in Duhok a Yazidi woman who had been held captive by ISIS. She said she was in contact with another Yazidi woman who was being held in Palestine by the family of her ISIS husband.
She agreed to connect the journalist with the young woman.
At first the young woman was hesitant to speak to Ali, saying that her new religion, Islam, would not allow such contact with a male journalist. She finally agreed to an on-camera interview in August if she wore a niqab, a face veil. She also used a pseudonym - Mariam.
Iraqi government officials in Baghdad saw Rudaw’s interview with “Mariam” and set in motion a plan to rescue her.
Khalaf Shingali, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani's advisor for Yazidi affairs, said that information obtained from Rudaw’s interview was key to locating her.
Baghdad reached out to the Americans for help, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters on Thursday.
“We were contacted by the Iraqi government, who was made aware of the fact that she escaped, that she was alive, 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,” he said.
“Over the past few weeks, we worked with a number of our partners in the region to get her out of Gaza, to get her safely home, obviously, with the Government of Israel and with other partners as well,” he added.
According to Miller, Sido’s captor had recently been killed in Gaza, which allowed her to escape and, eventually, be rescued.
Sido had told Rudaw that when she was first brought to Palestine, she was in the city of Nablus in the West Bank and her husband had been killed in Syria. It is not clear how she ended up in Gaza or who was the “captor” who was recently killed.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement that it coordinated an operation with the US embassy in Jerusalem and other international actors to rescue Sido.
“At 11-years-old, Fawzia was trafficked by ISIS to a Hamas terrorist in Gaza, who was presumably killed during IDF strikes. She fled to a hideout in which she was rescued in a secret mission through the Kerem Shalom Crossing,” read the IDF statement.
Captain Ella Waweya, the IDF’s Arabic spokesperson, wrote in a post on X that Sido’s captor was killed during Operation Iron Swords - Israel’s ongoing war against the Palestinian Hamas movement in Gaza.
“During Operation Iron Swords, the terrorist who had apparently held her captive was killed following IDF attacks in the Gaza Strip, and she fled to a safe place in the Gaza Strip,” she said.
The IDF claimed that the case of Sido and her captivity “is further proof of the connection between Hamas and ISIS.”
Rudaw English could not independently verify this alleged link.
The Iraqi government announced on Thursday that Sido was freed through joint efforts between its foreign ministry and intelligence service.
“Fawzia was with an ISIS militant who is from the Gaza Strip in Palestine. The militant has been killed. It has been four years since the mother of the killed militant took Fawzia to the Gaza Strip with her,” Sarab Elias, director general for Survivors Affairs at the Iraqi Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, told Rudaw.
Iraq has not mentioned an Israeli role in the operation. The two countries do not have diplomatic relations. Baghdad does not recognize the state of Israel.
Steve Maman, a Moroccan-Canadian businessman and the head of the non-profit Liberation of Christians and Yazidi Children of Iraq (CYCI), said his team reunited Sido with her family in Shingal.
“I made a promise to Fawzia the yazidi who was hostage of Hamas in Gaza that I would bring her back home to her mother in Sinjar. To her it seemed surreal and impossible but not to me, my only enemy was time. Our team reunited her moments ago with her mother and family in Sinjar,” he said in a post on X on Thursday, sharing the video of the moment she returned to her hometown the night before.
Her story
When ISIS attacked northern Iraq in 2014, it committed genocide in Shingal. The terror group abducted 6,417 Yazidi women and children, forcing a large number of them into sexual slavery and labor. So far, 3,581 have been rescued, Hussein Qaidi, head of the Office for Rescuing Abducted Yazidis, which is affiliated with the Kurdistan Region Presidency, told Rudaw in August.
According to unofficial figures from Qaidi, between 120,000 and 130,000 Yazidis have left Iraq since ISIS swept through Shingal. Iraq has failed to provide the community with protection and prosperity and a huge number of Yazidis no longer consider the country home.
In her interview with Rudaw in 2023, Sido recounted the miseries she experienced when ISIS attacked Shingal and during her captivity by ISIS.
She said was married off to a Palestinian member of ISIS in Syria at a very young age following an order by the terrorist group’s emirs.
“I did not want the marriage and I was too young but they would not understand because my Arabic was poor. I didn't even know what marriage was,” she recounted.
She had a son and a daughter with him. Her husband was killed in Idlib in 2018, one year before ISIS was defeated in Syria by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the US-led global coalition against ISIS.
The family of her deceased husband helped her leave Syria and join them in Palestine after the defeat of ISIS. She had been living with them since then.
She said the family of her husband were good to her. They rented her a house in Nablus and financially supported her at the beginning. However, after her husband’s family stopped supporting her, she depended on the generosity of a philanthropist.
She said she converted to Islam when she was in Syria and remembers only a little about Yazidism. From her correspondence and behavior, it appeared that she was saying this under pressure from her husband’s family.
She was still in contact with her family in Kurdistan Region’s Duhok province while in Palestine, but said she would not return until she was certain that her children would be safe.
It is not clear if she has returned to Iraq with her children or alone.
The children of Yazidi mothers and ISIS fathers has been a controversial issue in the Yazidi community. For some, they are a reminder of the genocide and under Iraqi law they would be considered Muslim. Yazidi spiritual leaders in 2019 decided children born of rape by ISIS militants would not be welcomed into the faith.
Nadia Murad, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and a survivor of ISIS atrocities, said Sido was not the only Yazidi woman being held in Palestine and that Iraqi authorities and the international community “have failed to rescue Yazidi women and girls from captivity in Gaza, Syria, and other parts of the region.”
Murad Ismael, a Yazidi activist, said in a post on X that there are thousands of Yazidi captives around the world.
