Israel rescues Yazidi woman from Gaza after her kidnapping by ISIS at age 11

A Yazidi woman who was kidnapped from Iraq by ISIS in 2014 at the age of 11 and trafficked to the Gaza Strip has been rescued and reunited with her family.

The rescue and return home of Fawzi Amin Sido was announced separately by the foreign ministries of Israel and Iraq.

Israel’s foreign ministry said Sido was taken from her family in 2014 amid ISIS attacks on Yazidi communities in Iraq, as the terror organization known for its brutalities took control of vast swaths of the country. She was then sold off to a Gazan man who was visiting Iraq at the time. Israeli security forces recently extracted Sido and returned her home.

In a later statement, the Israel Defense Forces, said that Sido was rescued in a complex operation in that was coordinated by the IDF’s COGAT and the US Embassy in Jerusalem, together with “other members of the international community.”

The IDF said that the “terrorist who had been holding her” was recently killed, apparently in an Israeli strike during the fighting in Gaza, allowing her to flee to a hiding place in Gaza.

“The young girl was extracted from the Gaza Strip in recent days in a secret operation through the Kerem Shalom crossing. After crossing into Israel, she was taken to Jordan via the Allenby Crossing and then on to her family in Iraq,” the IDF said.

The military said the incident provided further proof of the “connection between the Hamas terror group and the Islamic State and further evidence of the crimes against humanity that the murderous terror group was carrying out in Gaza.”

In a statement, the Iraqi Foreign Ministry said Sido had been released through joint efforts “in high coordination” with the US embassies in Baghdad and Amman along with Jordanian authorities. It made no mention of Israeli involvement.

A US State Department spokesperson said the US on October 1 “helped to safely evacuate from Gaza a young Yazidi woman to be reunited with her family in Iraq.”

The spokesperson said she was kidnapped from her home in Iraq at the age of 11 and sold and trafficked to Gaza. Her captor was recently killed, allowing her to escape and seek repatriation, the spokesperson said.

Jewish philanthropist Steve Maman, dubbed by some as the “Jewish Schindler,” shared a video of her reuniting with her family Wednesday night, and alluded to his involvement in her release.

“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,” Maman wrote on X. “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.”

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.

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

— David Saranga (@DavidSaranga) October 3, 2024

David Saranga, Director of the Foreign Ministry’s Digital Diplomacy Bureau, commented on her release, saying: “For years, she was held captive by a Palestinian Hamas-ISIS member. Her story is a reminder of the brutality faced by Yazidi children, taken without a choice.”

The woman is a member of the ancient Yazidi religious minority mostly found in Iraq and Syria which saw more than 5,000 members killed and thousands more kidnapped in a 2014 campaign that the UN has said constituted genocide.

The Yazidis are a Kurdish-speaking group hailing from northern Iraq.

More than 6,000 Yazidis were captured by Islamic State terrorists from their native Sinjar region in Iraq in 2014, with many of the women and girls sold into sexual slavery and boys indoctrinated in jihadi ideology and trained as child soldiers and taken across borders, including to Turkey and Syria.

Over the years, more than 3,500 have been rescued or freed, according to Iraqi authorities, with some 2,600 still missing.

Many are feared dead but Yazidi activists say they believe hundreds are still alive.