A Yazidi woman kidnapped by ISIS in Iraq has escaped to Gaza a decade later, officials said

A Yazidi woman who was kidnapped from her home by ISIS terrorists in Iraq when she was just 11 years old has been reunited with her family. after years of being trapped in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, Iraqi and Israeli officials said Thursday.

The woman, identified by the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs as Fawzia Amin Sido, is now 21 years old they were kidnapped along with thousands of other Yazidi women from Kurdistan in northern Iraq in August 2014. According to a report by the Jerusalem Post, she survived years of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of the Palestinian ISIS and was forced to marry, and that she moved to Gaza. a few years ago.

Sido returned to Iraq and was reunited with his mother and the rest of his surviving family in Sinjar, northwestern Iraq, on Wednesday.

Steve Maman, a Canadian Jewish businessman sometimes called “Jewish Schindler” for his efforts to help Yazidis escape ISIS captivity, posted a video on social media Thursday showing a family being reunited after 10 years.

“I made a promise to Fawzia a Yazidi who was kidnapped by Hamas in Gaza that I would bring her home to her mother in Sinjar,” Maman wrote in her book X. “To her it seemed impossible and impossible but not to me. My only enemy was time.”

David Saranga, director of the Digital Diplomacy Bureau at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told another newspaper that Sido was “finally rescued by the Israeli Defense Forces,” without providing details on the operation.

The Israel Defense Forces said on Thursday that the operation was led by the Ministry of Defense, Coordination of Government Activities in the Regions in cooperation with the American Embassy in Israel.

Iraq’s Foreign Ministry did not mention Israel’s involvement in its statement, but said Sido was freed “through joint efforts between [Iraqi] The Department of Foreign Affairs and the National Intelligence Service” in collaboration with the US embassy in Baghdad and Amman and Jordanian authorities. The department said the process lasted four months.

Maman told the Jerusalem Post that Sido escaped from his Palestinian captor’s family in late 2023 after he was killed in an Israeli attack. He then asked for asylum in a safe house “far away” from IDF forces, but spent a month waiting for permission to leave Gaza, he told the newspaper.

The IDF said Sido “was recently rescued from a secret mission from the Gaza Strip via the Kerem Shalom Crossing” and then crossed into Israel and into Jordan before returning home to Iraq.

The Free Yezidi Foundation estimates that more than 2,600 Yazidis are still missing ten years later ISIS’ written about genocide against a small religious group.

ISIS fighters are believed to have abducted more than 6,000 Yazidi women and girls when they fled the Sinjar mountains in northern Iraq in 2014. Many were sold as sex slaves and then sold or traded among terrorists during their years in control of large swaths of Iraq. and Syria.

Yazidi women are still generally spared from the crowded al-Hol displacement camp in northern Syriawhere they have continued to live caught among ISIS fighters.