Yazidi girl kidnapped by ISIS at age 11 and sold into sexual slavery, rescued ten years later in Gaza after she was caught begging for help on TikTok

Details have emerged about the rescue via TikTok of a young Yazidi girl who was kidnapped by ISIS, sold into sexual slavery, and then smuggled to Gaza.

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

After years of isolation from her family, a 21-year-old Iraqi woman fled Gaza and returned home to an emotional reception from her loved ones.

The end of her decade-long ordeal was catalyzed by a TikTok she posted pleading for freedom, but her troubles began in her home in northern Iraq, where ISIS fighters kidnapped her in 2014 and sold her into sexual slavery in the country’s capital, Mosul.

Within a year, she was given to two different ISIS fighters and raped multiple times.

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

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

She gave birth to two children, one boy and one girl, while she was his forced bride.

However, in 2018, Sido’s captor was killed while fighting for ISIS, which by then had been driven out of Iraq by the Kurds, supported by the Western coalition.

After spending time in Al-Hawl, a cramped camp in northeastern Syria where ISIS wives were held and where 100 women still live today, she was brought to Gaza after being smuggled out of Egypt thanks to her kidnapper’s brother.

After arriving in Rafah in 2020, she was so unhappy at the hands of her 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 posted on TikTok a request to contact Nadia Murad, a Yazidi activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

“Help me,” she said. “I’m really tired. Not only their men, their women and children also harass me… They can attack me, kill me… It’s really overwhelming.”

After her story received wide coverage in the Arab world, it was taken up by Steve Maman, a Moroccan-born Canadian who makes a living selling vintage cars to collectors and also runs a charity that aims to free girls and women kidnapped by ISIS.

Known as the “Jewish Schindler,” he claims to have saved 140 Yazidi women from ISIS.

He told the Los Angeles Times: “The rescue of Fawzi was the most difficult and complex of all Holocaust rescues. The geopolitical situation really complicated things.

Known to Israeli, American, Jordanian and Iraqi officials from his previous work, he managed to convince the Iraqi consulate in Jordan to issue travel documents on Sido’s behalf in absentia, an unusual step considering that Iraq and Israel do not maintain diplomatic relations.

But this job took months and Sido became more and more desperate.

Eventually the IDF was called in to make contact and extract her. On October 1, in the early morning hours, she was taken by car from Rafah.

She was monitored for hours in the IDF control room. 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 mapped its route to avoid roads where Hamas and criminals operated.”

It took her about 90 minutes to get her to the intersection where his team and an ambulance were waiting.

“It was a major operation, but it didn’t matter how much money we invested because we have a Hebrew saying: ‘If we save one life, it is as if we saved the whole world.’

“I’m glad she’s safe and if there are any other cases like this in Gaza, I encourage them to contact us.”

Once in safe hands, she was taken to Jordan, where she was turned over to the Iraqi consulate, then flown to Baghdad, north to Erbil for debriefing, and finally to her home in Sinjar, where she was reunited with her family.

While it should have been a happy time for them, her father had tragically died of a heart attack just two months earlier and was never able to see his daughter past the age of 11.

Moreover, their family home was destroyed by ISIS.

Even though Sido has returned to her family, her life will still be extremely difficult.

“The family is very poor and Fawzia spent half her life in captivity and was extremely impressed by what she went through,” said Ahmed Qasim of Nadia’s Initiative, an organization founded by Nadia Murad, who visited her after her return.

Moreover, Steve Maman said that she now regrets leaving her two children in Gaza.

“She loved these children. Now she is free, she thinks about them and feels why she couldn’t bring them too, he admitted

“But these are Hamas children. There was no way they would let her take them… The Yazidis wouldn’t take her with them either.