Two weeks after being rescued by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from Gaza, Yazidi survivor Fawzia Amin Sido has shared harrowing details of the atrocities she experienced during her captivity in ISIS.
When she was only nine years old, Sido and her brothers were captured and forced to march from Sinjar to Tal Afar. During this time, she and others were starved for three days, after which they were given rice and meat, which they later learned was the meat of Yazidi children.
“They prepared rice and gave us meat with it. The meat had a strange taste and some of us had stomach pains afterwards,” he recalls.
“When we finished, they told us it was the meat of Yazidi children. They showed us pictures of beheaded children and said, ‘These are the children you have eaten now.’
“One of the women suffered from heart failure and died shortly afterwards,” Sido added. In a painful moment, she described how a mother recognized her own child by his hands.
“They forced us. But it’s very hard to know that it happened. But it wasn’t in our hands,” she said.
Fawzia, a Yazidi girl kidnapped by ISIS from Iraq and brought to Gaza at the age of just 11, was eventually rescued by Israeli security forces.
She was held captive for years by a Palestinian member of Hamas-ISIS.
Now she is reunited with her family. Her story is… pic.twitter.com/nkVotqYdov
— David Saranga (@DavidSaranga) October 3, 2024
Fawzia Sido was one of many Yazidi women enslaved by ISIS in 2014 during the group’s brutal campaign against the Yazidis, a religious minority in northern Iraq. Sido’s account is one of the clearest confirmations of past accusations that ISIS feeds its captives human flesh, a practice first brought to the attention of Yazidi parliamentarian Vian Dakhil in 2017.
For nine months she was held in an underground prison along with approximately 200 other Yazidi women and children. Some children died due to contaminated water.
Sido was also sold to a number of jihadists, including Abu Amar al-Maqdisi, with whom she had two children.
Recently rescued in a joint IDF-US embassy operation, Sido has returned to her family in Iraq, but her children remain in Gaza with her captor’s family, where they are being raised as Arab Muslims.
Reflecting on her experiences, she said: “Until I returned to Iraq, I was a ‘sabaja’ all the time, including in Gaza,” using the Arabic term for a young woman held captive and sexually abused.
Published:
October 20, 2024
