How one TikTok video led to the rescue of sex slave Isis, who was kidnapped at age 11 | World news

One TikTok video showing an Isis sex slave kidnapped as a child led to a secret rescue operation to free her from captivity.

After spending ten years in brutal ISIS captivity, 21-year-old Fawzia Amin Seydou had almost lost all hope of being rescued.

A young Yazidi girl’s life turned into a nightmare at the age of 11 when she was kidnapped in Iraq in 2014. This year, the extremist group achieved successes across the country, including: captured Mosul and Tikrit.

Now Fawzi’s rescuers – a car dealer nicknamed the “Jewish Schindler” and an Israeli soldier – have revealed details of the dramatic operation for the first time.

However, a dark cloud hangs over Fawzi’s freedom as her two children remain in captivity.

Fawzia’s video on TikTok

After ten years of captivity, rape, abuse and forced marriage to a militant more than ten years her senior, Fawzia made a brave video on TikTok asking for help.

In a video posted last September, she asked someone to contact Yazidi activist Nadia Murad, asking viewers to “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.”

As The Sunday Times reported, Fawzi’s mother had long assumed her child had been murdered until she came across her interview on Kurdish television following a TikTok appeal.

Miraculously, Fawzia survived years of captivity and transportation across borders by her captors.

How an 11-year-old girl became Isis’s wife

Fawzi’s childhood came to a cruel end when the Islamic State terrorized her home region of Sinjar in northern Iraq.

In August 2014, ISIS fighters killed men and abducted thousands of young women and girls, taking Fawzia to a slave market in Mosul.

According to the newspaper, she was repeatedly raped and trafficked between various militants.

After marrying a 24-year-old Palestinian from Gaza. allegedly a member of Hamas, she was taken to the ISIS stronghold in Raqqa.

As she told Kurdish television station Rudaw, the young girl was forced to “sleep with him” and given numbing drugs.

A year after the kidnapping, she gave birth to a boy and later a daughter.

When her husband Isis was killed in late 2018 during fighting between the Islamic State and Kurdish forces, Fawzia was taken to the infamous Al-Hawl camp for Isis’ wives, the newspaper reports.

Fawzia and her children ended up in Gaza after the family of an ISIS fighter organized passage through secret tunnels from Egypt to the illegally blocked Gaza Strip.

She desperately wanted to get out of the camp to save her children’s lives, so Fawzia agreed.

However, in Gaza’s Rafah city, she faced more abuse from her husband’s family, which led her to overdose.

“The most complicated of all rescue operations”

Fawzia posted her TikTok video weeks before the deadly October 7 Hamas attack, which was followed by Israeli airstrikes that devastated Gaza and killed tens of thousands of civilians.

That’s when Steve Maman launched an effort to try to get Fawzia out of Gaza after her family contacted him.

Maman – a Moroccan-Canadian antique car dealer and businessman – is dubbed the “Jewish Schindler” after rescuing 140 Yazidi women and girls from Isis.

But getting Fawzi to safety was “the most difficult and complex of all rescue efforts,” he admitted to The Sunday Times.

He compared the mission to “the times of the Holocaust,” adding that “the geopolitical situation really complicated things.”

To make matters even more difficult, Israel and Iraq do not maintain diplomatic relations.

He said: “You would think that countries could put aside their differences to help a young girl who was taken away at the age of 11 and who is suffering. But the most beautiful thing is that they finally succeeded.

Maman managed to obtain a temporary travel document for Fawzi in absentia through the Iraqi consulate in Jordan, using a photo of her taken from one of his Skype chats, and then lobbied the Israeli parliament for her release.

He managed to get Fawzi a phone and some money when the family moved to northern Gaza.

That’s when IDF officer Brigadier General Elad Goren and his team contacted her to figure out how to get her out.

They had three options – Fawzia went to the Kerem Shalom crossing on her own, sent an IDF soldier to escort her, or sent “a trusted person we know from Gaza to pick her up secretly,” he told The Sunday Times.

The team decided on the latter option.

In the early morning hours of October 1, Fawzia was told she would be ready for pickup in six hours, which would take her on a stressful journey.

Goren, who monitored the trip from the control room, said: “We sent drones overhead to escort the car from the air and mapped its route to make sure it avoided roads where Hamas and criminals were operating.”

He said he was “happy that she is safe” and added that “if there are other such cases in Gaza, I encourage them to contact us.”

Asked about the thousands of Palestinian women and children killed and injured in Israeli airstrikes, including the school attack, the officer said, “there is a difference between Palestinians and foreigners, and between locals and someone sold to Hamas.”

“We have evacuated over 4,000 Palestinians who need medical assistance,” he told the agency.

For Fawzi, the return is marred by the death of her father just two months before the rescue, the destruction of the family home in Gerasik, and the future of the children left behind.

Maman explained: “She loved these children.

“Now she is free, she thinks about them and feels why she couldn’t bring them too.

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

Contact our news team by emailing [email protected].

For more stories like this, check our news page.

MORE: Baby needed a respirator and we found worms in his throat

MORE: A year after she was kidnapped, my daughter finally learned to smile

MORE: Gaza a year later: ‘My children’s hunger is a knife that cuts me’

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.