By NYT –
She was returned to her family in Iraq after a complex operation involving the United States, Jordan and others.
The Israeli military said on Thursday that it had rescued a 21-year-old Yazidi woman who had been held in captivity in the Gaza Strip after being captured by ISIS in Iraq as a child more than a decade ago, describing the operation as a “complex operation” involving the United States, Jordan and others.
The woman, Fawzia Amin Sido, appeared to be “more or less” in fine physical shape but was “not in a good mental situation,” Brig. Gen. Elad Goren, who leads the Israeli military’s humanitarian-civilian effort in the Gaza Strip, said in a briefing with reporters on Thursday.
He said that she had endured significant trauma over a long period, including rape and abuse. She received food and basic treatment in Israel, he said, and U.S. officials then escorted her to Jordan by car, from which she was returned to her family in Iraq. An Israeli diplomat, David Saranga, posted a video on social media showing Ms. Sido’s return, and said her captor was “a Palestinian Hamas-ISIS member.” The New York Times has not verified the video.
Ms. Sido and her family could not be contacted for comment.
General Goren said that the Israeli military had learned about her situation based on intelligence, and that the Israeli authorities engaged the United States for more information. Israel and the United States then began planning the operation, which added the cooperation of Jordan, and other unnamed international partners, he said.
Ms. Sido was sold by an ISIS operative more than 10 years ago to a member of Hamas who took her to the Gaza Strip, possibly through the Rafah crossing at the Egyptian border, General Goren said. That timing suggests she was initially captured when ISIS overran northern Iraq in 2014 and carried out what the United Nations has deemed a genocide against the Yazidi, an ethno-religious minority.
Her captor in Gaza was killed, General Goren said, most likely by an Israeli airstrike, and Ms. Sido fled and hid. He did not specify when that occurred, but said that it was at that point that the Israeli authorities learned of her existence, confirmed it with Americans and planned the rescue operation. She was taken out of Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing, another entry point at Gaza’s southern border.
The Hamas-run Government Media Office in Gaza responded to the Israeli military account in a statement on Friday, calling it “a false narrative.” The statement referred to Ms. Sido as “the Yazidi woman,” and said she had married a Palestinian man from Khan Younis who had been fighting in Syria, and had lived in that country with her husband and mother-in-law until he died.
The statement said that she and her mother-in-law then traveled to the Gaza Strip, where she later married her deceased husband’s brother. When her second husband died, Hamas said, she sought shelter from the local government and made contact with family in Iraq, and it was they who secured the cooperation of the Jordanian government, which facilitated her passage with Israeli authorities.
The Yazidis were targeted by the Islamic State, or ISIS, in August 2014, when ISIS captured about one-third of northern Iraq and large areas of territory in neighboring Syria. Up to 10,000 Yazidis were killed; about 400,000 were displaced from their homes in Iraq’s remote, mountainous Sinjar district; and more than 6,000 were enslaved, most of them women and children, according to Yazda, a nonprofit group created in the wake of the onslaught to aid Yazidis. Some of the women escaped, telling of a system of forced marriages, orders to convert to Islam and repeated rape.
Many of the enslaved Yazidis were sold in slave markets in Syrian cities, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, a humanitarian agency.
In 2015, Sinjar was captured from ISIS by Kurdish forces and Yazidi fighters with the backing of American air power.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/03/world/middleeast/yazidi-woman-gaza-rescued.html
Photo: A screen grab from a video posted on Thursday on the X account of an Israeli diplomat, showing Fawzia Amin Sido, 21, reuniting with her family in Iraq.
