The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced on Wednesday that it has rescued a 21-year-old Yazidi woman named Fawzia Amin Sido from captivity by the terrorists of Hamas.
Sido was kidnapped by the Islamic State in Iraq when she was just 11 years old. She was sold as a slave and trafficked to Gaza, where she has been held by Hamas for years.
Sido’s recovery was celebrated by Canadian Jewish businessman Steve Maman, who has helped rescue large numbers of Yazidis from the Islamic State, earning the nickname “The Jewish Schindler” in honor of the famed German industrialist and rescuer of Jews, Oskar Schindler:
The Yazidi are a religious minority who dwell primarily in the Sinjar region of Iraq. Some Muslims hold them in contempt as heretics and devil worshipers due to their religious traditions.
The Islamic State was exceptionally brutal to the Yazidis, driving them to the brink of genocide and capturing some 6,000 of them as hostages and slaves. Many of the female prisoners were sexually abused, while ISIS pressed Yazidi children into service as child soldiers.
Quite a few of the Islamic State’s prisoners were trafficked across national borders. To date, only about 3,500 of the 6,000 Yazidis captured by ISIS have been rescued. Yazidi activists are firmly convinced many of the missing are still alive, as proved to be the case with Fawzia Sido.
IDF officials said the Hamas terrorist who “owned” Sido was killed by one of Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza four months ago. Sido fled to a hiding place in Gaza, from which the IDF made several attempts to extract her, hindered by the poor security situation in the area.
Israeli media reported the IDF was finally able to rescue Sido in a “complex” operation involving coordination between “Israel, the United States, and other actors in the international community.”
“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 announced on Thursday.
“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,” Israeli Foreign Ministry digital director David Saranga said.
“Remember, there are still 101 Israelis being held hostage in Gaza,” he added.
The U.S. State Department confirmed that American officials “helped to safely evacuate from Gaza a young Yazidi woman to be reunited with her family in Iraq.”
The Iraqi Foreign Ministry also reported Sido’s rescue, praising “high coordination” between the U.S. embassies in Baghdad and Amman, Jordan, as well as Jordanian officials – but the Iraq announcement did not mention Israel or the IDF at all.
The office of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said the prime minister discussed Sido’s situation with U.S. officials at the U.N. General Assembly in New York last week. Iraqi officials were reportedly in communication with the Yazidi woman for months before she was rescued.
Iraqi Foreign Ministry chief of staff Silwan Sinjaree said Sido was in good physical condition, but traumatized by her long captivity and the difficult “humanitarian situation” in Gaza.
