Details have emerged of how a young Yazidi woman who was kidnapped by ISIS and sold into sex slavery before being trafficked to Gaza was rescued thanks to a TikTok.
Fawzia Amin Sido was just 11 years old when she was forced to marry a Palestinian ISIS fighter and lured to Gaza.
After years of isolation from her family, the Iraqi woman, now 21, escaped Gaza and returned home to an emotional welcome from her loved ones.
The end of her decade-long torment was catalyzed by a TikTok she posted pleading for her freedom, but her troubles began at her home in northern Iraq, where ISIS fighters kidnapped her in 2014 and sold her into sex slavery in Mosul. , the capital of the country. .
Over the course of a year, she was handed over to two different ISIS fighters and repeatedly raped.
She was then transferred to the Syrian city of Raqqa, where she was married to a 24-year-old Palestinian ISIS member who she claimed also belonged to Hamas.
Sido, now 21, told Kurdish television: ‘He told me I had to sleep with him. On the third day he went to a pharmacy and bought a medicine that makes part of the body numb. “He gave me the drug and I cried.”
Fawzia Amin Sido (pictured) was just 11 years old when she was forced to marry a Palestinian ISIS fighter and lured to Gaza.
After years of isolation from her family, the Iraqi woman, now 21, escaped Gaza and returned home to an emotional welcome from her loved ones.
The end of his decade-long torment was catalyzed by a TikTok he posted pleading for his freedom.
She gave birth to two children, a boy and a girl, during the time she was his forced wife.
But in 2018, Sido’s captor was killed while fighting for ISIS, which at the time had been driven out of Iraq by Kurdish forces backed by a Western coalition.
After spending some time in Al-Hawl, a narrow camp that housed ISIS wives in northeastern Syria and where 100 women still live to this day, she was taken to Gaza after being trafficked from Egypt. in the best hands of his captor’s brother.
After arriving in Rafah in 2020, he became so miserable at the hands of his family that he attempted to take his own life.
They beat Sido and forced her to cook and clean.
Shortly before the October 7 attack, he made a TikTok asking the public to contact Nadia Murad, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Yazidi activist.
“Help me,” he said. “I’m really tired, it’s not just your men, your women and children are also harassing me… They could attack me, kill me… it’s really overwhelming.”
After her story caused a sensation in the Arab world, it was picked up by Steve Maman, a Moroccan-born Canadian who makes a living selling vintage cars to collectors and also runs a charity dedicated to freeing girls and women kidnapped by ISIS.
A video has been shared that appears to show Fawzia reuniting with her family after her escape.
Canadian Jewish philanthropist Steve Maman shared a touching video that he said showed Fawzia reuniting with her family.
Known as the ‘Jewish Schindler’, he claims to have rescued 140 Yazidi women from the hands of ISIS.
He told the Times: ‘Rescuing Fawzia was the most difficult and complex of any rescue, like something similar to the Holocaust era. The geopolitical situation really complicated things.’
Known to Israeli, American, Jordanian and Iraqi officials from his previous work, he was able to persuade the Iraqi consulate in Jordan to issue travel documents in Sido’s name in absentia, a notable step given that Iraq and Israel do not have diplomatic relations.
But this work took months and Sido was getting desperate.
Eventually, the IDF was called to make contact and rescue her. In the early hours of October 1, she was picked up in Rafah in a car.
In an IDF control room, she was monitored for hours. Brigadier Elad Goren, in charge of the expulsion mission, told the Sunday Times: “We sent drones to escort the car from the air and directed their route to make sure they bypassed the roads where Hamas and criminals operated.”
It took her about 90 minutes to reach the intersection where her team and an ambulance were waiting.
“It was an important operation, but it didn’t matter how many resources we invested, because we have a Hebrew saying: ‘If we save one life, it is as if we saved the whole world.'”
“I am glad that he is safe and if there are other similar cases in Gaza, I encourage you to contact us.”
Once she was in good hands, she was taken to Jordan, where she was handed over to the Iraqi consulate, before being flown to Baghdad, north of Erbil for interrogation and finally to her home in Sinjar, where she was reunited with her family.
Although it should have been a happy time for them, her father had tragically died of a heart attack just two months earlier, and he was never able to see his daughter after she was 11 years old.
In addition to this, ISIS had destroyed his family home.
Although Sido has returned to his family, his life will continue to be incredibly hard.
“The family is very poor and Fawzia has spent half her life in captivity and quite traumatized by what happened,” said Ahmed Qasim of Nadia’s Initiative, the organization created by Nadia Murad, who visited her upon her return.
In addition to this, Steve Maman said he now regrets leaving the two children behind in Gaza.
‘She loved those children. Now she is free, she is thinking about them and feels why she couldn’t have brought them too,” he admitted.
‘But they are Hamas children. There was no way they would have allowed her to take them… Nor would the Yazidis have accepted her with them.’