“When she was an 11-year-old girl,” Miller explained, she was “kidnapped by ISIS in Iraq, sold, and forced to marry a Hamas fighter in Gaza” and then “moved to Gaza against her will.” Miller explained
Washington and Baghdad announced, on Thursday that a young Yezidi woman had been reunited with her family, after her captor, a Hamas fighter, was killed, presumably by an Israeli air strike, during the war in Gaza.
Fawzia Amin Sido was 11 years old, when she was kidnapped by ISIS a decade ago, as the terrorist group emerged in the midst of Syria’s civil war and then burst across the border, seizing one-third of Iraq, as the Iraqi army collapsed.
In Sinjar, the Yezidi homeland, ISIS declared that the women were legitimate targets of their rapacity, because of their religion. They killed the men and raped and enslaved the women.
A decade later, Hamas fighters would commit similar atrocities against Israelis, triggering the war with Israel that is about to enter its second year. Ironically, that war has now led to the freedom of a Yezidi woman.
Briefing journalists on Thursday, State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller explained that the U.S. had helped evacuate Sido from Gaza, “so she could be reunited with her family in Iraq.”
“When she was an 11 year-old girl,” Miller explained, she was “kidnapped by ISIS in Iraq, sold, and forced to marry a Hamas fighter in Gaza” and then “moved to Gaza against her will.”
“The recent death of her captor in Gaza allowed her to escape, and we were contacted by the Iraqi government, which was made aware of the fact that she escaped, that she was alive, and that she wanted to come home to her family,” Miller continued.
So the Iraqi government “asked us to do whatever we could to get her out of Gaza, to get her safely home, obviously with the Government of Israel and with other partners as well, to get her out of Gaza” and “home to her family,” he added.
Gaza is a densely populated area, and as Mark Dubowitz, head of Washington’s Foundation for Defense of Democracies, observed, “Sometime in 2014,” a Palestinian, with ties to both Hamas and ISIS, “turned up back in the Gaza Strip with an underaged sex slave who would have looked and sounded foreign to anyone bothering to take an interest.”
“Yet she would spend another decade being raped and tortured, unsure of the condition of her family” or “of her prospects of ever seeing them again,” he said.
Yet once free of her captor, Sido obtained a cell phone, and she made a video describing her predicament. She then posted it to TikTok–marking the first time, perhaps, that social media has been used to free an innocent, imprisoned person.
That is how those who would rescue her became aware of her plight. Steve Maman, is a Canadian-Moroccan-Jewish businessman, the great-grandson of the Jewish mayor of Amismiz, Morocco.
He was born in Casablanca, but his family soon emigrated to Canada, and he grew up there. Nonetheless, retaining the traditions of Moroccan culture has been important to him, as his website explains.
In 2015, Maman established a non-profit organization dedicated to rescuing Christian and Yezidi women and children forced into sexual slavery by ISIS: The Liberation of Christian and Yezidi Children of Iraq, or CYCI.
The U.S., Israeli, Jordanian, and Iraqi governments were all involved in helping Sido return home, as was Maman. Once out of Gaza, she was taken through Israel and the West Bank into Jordan, and then traveled on to Iraq. In Sinjar, she was reunited with her family, and Maman tweeted an emotional video of their reunion.