Yazidi sex slave kidnapped by ISIS at 11 rescued decade later in Gaza

Details of how a young Yazidi girl who was kidnapped by ISIS and sold into sex slavery before being trafficked to Gaza was rescued thanks to a TikTok have emerged. 

Fawzia Amin Sido was just 11 when she was forced to marry a Palestinian ISIS fighter and lured into Gaza.

After years of isolation from her family, the Iraqi woman, who is now 21, escaped Gaza and returned home to an emotional welcome from her loved ones.

The end of her decade-long torment was catalysed by a TikTok she posted begging 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 country's capital. 

Over the space of a year, she was given to two different ISIS fighters and repeatedly raped. 

She was then moved to the Syrian city of Raqqa, where she was married off to a 24-year-old Palestinian ISIS member who she said also belonged to Hamas. 

Sido, now 21, told Kurdish TV: 'He told me that I had to sleep with him. On the third day, he went to a pharmacy and bought a drug that numbs part of the body. He gave me the drug and I cried.' 

She gave birth to two children, one boy and one girl, during her time as his forced bride. 

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But in 2018, Sido's captor was killed while fighting for ISIS, which at the time had been driven out of Iraq by Kurdish forced backed by a Western coalition. 

After spending some time at Al-Hawl, a cramped camp that held ISIS wives in northeast Syria that 100 women still live at to this day, she was brought to Gaza after being smuggled in from Egypt at the best of her captor's brother. 

After arriving in Rafah in 2020, she was so miserable at the hands of the family that she tried to take her own life. 

They beat Sido, and forced her to cook and clean. 

Shortly before the October 7 attack, she made a TikTok pleading for the public to contact Nadia Murad, the Nobel peace prizewinning Yazidi activist. 

'Help me,' she said. 'I'm really tired, it's not just their men, their women and children also harass me… They might assault me, kill me… it's really overwhelming.' 

After her story made waves in the Arab world, it was picked up by Steve Maman, a Moroccan-born Canadian who sells vintage cars to collectors for a living and also runs a charity dedicating to freeing girls and women kidnapped by ISIS. 

Known as the 'Jewish Schindler', he claims to have rescued 140 Yazidi women from ISIS' hands. 

He told the Times: 'Rescuing Fawzia was the hardest, most complex of any rescue, like a Holocaust-era kind of thing. The geopolitical situation really complicated things.'

Known by Israeli, American, Jordanian and Iraqi officials for his previous work, he was able to persuade the Iraqi consulate in Jordan to issue travel documents in Sido's name in absentia, a remarkable step given that Iraq and Israel have no diplomatic relations.

But this work took months, and Sido was getting desperate. 

Eventually, the IDF was called in to make contact and extract her. In the early hours of October 1, she was collected from Rafah in a car. 

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In an IDF control room, she was monitored for hours. Brigadier-General Elad Goren, in charge of the exfil mission, told the Sunday Times: 'We sent drones overhead to escort the car from the air and directed its route to make sure they bypassed roads where Hamas and criminals were operating.'

It took about 90 minutes for her to be brought to the crossing where his team and an ambulance were waiting.

'It was a major operation but it didn't matter how many resources we invested as we have a Hebrew saying, 'If we save one life, it's as if we save the whole world.' 

'I'm happy she's safe and if there are other such cases in Gaza I encourage them to contact us.'

Once she was in safe hands, she was driven to Jordan where she was handed over to the Iraqi consulate, before being flown into Baghdad, north to Erbil for debriefing and finally to her home in Sinjar, where she was reunited with her family. 

Though it should've been a happy time for them, her father had tragically died of a heart attack just two months prior, never able to lay eyes on his daughter past the age of 11. 

On top of this, their family home had been destroyed by ISIS. 

Though Sido has been returned to her family, her life will still be incredible hard. 

'The family is very poor and Fawzia has spent half her life in captivity and quite traumatised by what she went through', said Ahmed Qasim of Nadia's Initiative, the organisation set up by Nadia Murad, who visited her after her return.

On top of this, Steve Maman said that she now regrets leaving the two children behind in Gaza. 

'She loved those children. Now she is free, she's thinking about them and feeling why couldn't she have brought them too', he admitted

'But they are Hamas children. There's no way they would have let her take them … Nor would the Yazidis have accepted her with them.'