A Yazidi woman who was abducted by Islamic terrorists at age 11 has given a harrowing account of her years in captivity and the brutality she endured as a sex slave by ISIS before being smuggled to Gaza.
Fawzia Amin Saydo, now 21, was snatched from her home in Sinjar, Iraq, along with dozens of other children and women, whose babies she said had been slaughtered by the terrorists.
The group went hungry for four days before they were given plates of meat and rice, Fawzia said. Desperate for food, they ate what was on the table, but soon developed stomach pains and nausea.
“When we finished, they told us it was the meat of the babies,” Fawzia said. “There was one woman who had a heart attack at that moment and died.”
She told me in The Sun that the ruthless terrorists taunted the group with pictures of decapitated children and babies, saying: “These are the children you ate.”
One of the women reportedly recognised her own baby from the pictures, Fawzia said in her gruesome testimony.
Fawzia Amin Saydo, now 21, was taken from her home in Sinjar, Iraq, as a child in 2014
Fawzia Amin Sido is seen in a photo shared by Iraqi authorities after she returned home
A video has been shared showing Fawzia being reunited with her family after her escape
File photo from a propaganda video released by the Islamic State on March 17, 2014
Fawzia was taken from her family in 2014 and spent ten years in captivity, first bought and sold as a slave in Syria.
According to Israeli media, she was forced to marry a 24-year-old Palestinian ISIS supporter in 2015, when she was 12. The child bride lived in Raqqa and had two children, a boy and a girl.
In 2019, her husband was reportedly killed during the final battle of the Islamic State in the Euphrates Valley.
Fawzia and her children were sent with other families to the Al-Hawl camp in northern Syria, a place that at the time housed some 10,000 people and where conditions were notoriously bad.
From there, she was smuggled to Turkey with the help of ISIS to be under the ‘protection’ of her late husband’s family, who then allegedly sent her to Gaza via Egypt in 2020.
Fawzia said she was treated horribly by her husband’s family, who regularly beat her and restricted her freedom.
She also told The Sun that she had been treated like a ‘sabaya’ – or slave – by Hamas.
During this time, she was separated from her two young children, according to her German lawyer Zemfira Dlovani, who said they had been ‘taken away’ from their mother.
Steve Maman shared a photo of himself speaking to Fawzia after saying he was involved in her rescue
“Of course it hurt her, every mother knows how it feels to be away from her children. It was not her choice. It is not an option for them to be reunited,” Dlovani said.
Other reports suggest that Fawzia’s children were also smuggled to Gaza, but had to be abandoned by their mother in her desperate attempt to escape, knowing they would not be accepted into the Yazidi community as the product of rape.
In August 2023, after suffering for almost a decade without her family, Fawzia managed to get help through an online plea.
In an emotional TikTok video, in which she wore a hijab and covered part of her face with a crying emoji, she reportedly said: “I hope you can save me from this place… If anyone enters Palestine, no matter where they are, I will go to them.”
She was put in touch with a lawyer and other intermediaries, who helped organize an operation to get her out of Gaza.
Led by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Cogat, the Israeli agency that works in Gaza and the West Bank, it involved meticulous planning.
A fully veiled woman holds her baby as civilians fleeing the besieged Islamic State group Baghouz walk through a field on February 13, 2019
On October 1, Fawzia finally got the call she had been waiting for: help was on the way.
She was ordered to flee to a shelter to be picked up by a vehicle that would take her away.
“The young girl was taken from the Gaza Strip in the past few days in a covert operation through the Kerem Shalom border crossing,” the IDF said in a statement earlier this month.
“After entering Israel, she was taken to Jordan via the Allenby Crossing and then to her family in Iraq.”
Canadian Jewish philanthropist Steve Maman, dubbed by some as the “Jewish Schindler” for his efforts to rescue Yazidis from ISIS captivity, said he was among those who helped organize this incredible feat.
Maman shared a heartwarming video after news of her rescue broke. According to him, it shows Fawzia being reunited with her family shortly after the news of her rescue was announced.
Young woman hugs her loved ones after reportedly spending 10 years in captivity
Canadian Jewish philanthropist Steve Maman shared a heartwarming video saying Fawzia has been reunited with her family
“I promised Fawzia the Yazidi, who was being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza, that I would bring her back to her mother in Sinjar,” Maman wrote on X.
“For her it seemed surreal and impossible, but not for me: my only enemy was time. Our team reunited her with her mother and family in Sinjar a few moments ago.”
Fawzia’s rescue was said to have come after several failed attempts, as well as years of diplomatic talks and planning.
After her rescue was confirmed, Hamas released a statement claiming that Fawzia was living in Gaza voluntarily — and only wanted to leave because of the war.
She hit back, calling this “a lie” and saying she is now happy and can finally “breathe again.”
More than 6,000 Yazidis were captured by ISIS in Iraq’s Sinjar region in 2014. Many were sold as sex slaves or trained as child soldiers and smuggled across the border, including to Turkey and Syria.
According to Iraqi authorities, more than 3,500 have been rescued or released over the years, while some 2,600 remain missing.
Many are feared dead, but Yazidi activists say they believe hundreds arec.