Yazidi woman kidnapped by ISIS in Iraq escapes from Gaza a decade later, officials say

A Yazidi woman kidnapped from her home by ISIS terrorists in Iraq when she was just 11 years old has been reunited with her family after years stranded in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, Iraqi and Israeli officials said Thursday.

The woman, identified by Iraq’s Foreign Ministry as Fawzia Amin Sido, now 21, was abducted along with thousands of other Yazidi women from northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region in August 2014. According to a report in the Jerusalem Post, she survived years of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of a Palestinian ISIS militant she was forced to marry, and that she was moved to Gaza several years ago.

Sido returned to Iraq and was reunited with her mother and the rest of her surviving family in Sinjar, northwest Iraq, on Wednesday. 

Steve Maman, a Jewish Canadian businessman sometimes referred to as “the Jewish Schindler” for his efforts to help Yazidis escape ISIS captivity, posted a video on social media Thursday showing the moment the family was reunited after 10 years.

“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 in his post on X. “To her it seemed surreal and impossible but not to me, my only enemy was time.”

David Saranga, the director of the Digital Diplomacy Bureau at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a separate post that Sido had “finally been rescued by the Israeli security forces,” without providing any details of the operation. 

The Israel Defense Forces said on Thursday that the operation was led by the defense ministry’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories in collaboration with the US Embassy in Israel.

The Iraqi Foreign Ministry did not mention Israeli involvement in its statement, but said Sido had been freed “through joint efforts between the [Iraqi] Foreign Ministry and the National Intelligence Service” in coordination with the U.S. embassies in Baghdad and Amman and with Jordanian authorities. The ministry said the process had taken four months. 

Maman told the Jerusalem Post that Sido escaped from her Palestinian captor’s family in late 2023 after he was killed in an Israeli airstrike. She then sought refuge in a safe house within “walking distance” of IDF forces, but spent a month waiting for permission to leave Gaza, he told the newspaper.

The IDF said Sido “was recently rescued in a secret mission from the Gaza Strip through the Kerem Shalom Crossing” and crossed through Israel into Jordan before traveling home to Iraq. 

The Free Yezidi Foundation estimates that more than 2,600 Yazidis remain missing a decade after ISIS’ documented genocide against the religious minority group. 

ISIS militants are believed to have kidnapped more than 6,000 Yazidi women and girls as they overran the Sinjar mountains in northern Iraq in 2014. Many were sold as sex slaves and then sold or traded between the terrorists during their years in control of large swathes of Iraq and Syria.

Yazidi women are still rescued with some regularity from the sprawling al-Hol displacement camp in northern Syria, where they have continued to live trapped among ISIS fighters.