Fawzia Amin Sido, a young Yazidi woman who was abducted by ISIS as a child in 2014 and ended up in Gaza said she had endured starvation, abuse and rape.
She was rescued by Israeli forces and returned to her family. In an interview with Britain's The Sun, Sido recounted the chilling events from a decade ago when she, along with other Yazidi women and girls, was forcibly taken to Tal Afar. There, they were deprived of food for four excruciating days until their captors finally fed them upon reaching northwestern Iraq. Some of the details ahead are painfully graphic.
Liberated by Israel
"They cooked rice and meat and gave it to us to eat. We were so hungry that we immediately ate everything on the table," Sido recalled. "We knew something was wrong because the taste was strange, but we were starving. After we finished, we all had stomach aches and felt unwell. Then they told us that the meat we ate was from babies."
She described how one woman succumbed to a heart attack and died instantly. They showed us pictures of babies whose heads were decapitated and said, 'These are the children you ate.' It was very difficult, but it's not our fault. They forced it on us. It wasn't in our hands," she said. In a chilling description, Sido added that mothers of babies cried and screamed at that moment because they understood why they were separated from their babies. "One of them even recognized her son in the pictures they showed her."
In early 2015, Fawzia was transferred to al-Raqqa, where she was held underground for nine months in degrading conditions alongside roughly 200 other women. "We were in darkness all the time, we didn't see sunlight," she said. "We did nothing, we couldn't go outside. We drank dirty water, some girls died. It was a very difficult time."
She said men occasionally entered their holding area, "choosing a girl they fancied and taking her with them." Fawzia herself was bought and sold five times by ISIS militants during her years in Syria. The fifth man to purchase her was a Palestinian ISIS fighter, ten years her senior. He used drugs to rape her when she was just 14, and he was 24.
"At first, I hid in the bathroom while he slept because I didn't know what he wanted from me," she said. "I was scared and didn't want him to do anything. When he noticed I was hiding, he gave me drugs and put me to sleep, and then he raped me." He abused her until she was 15, and she bore him a son and a daughter.
By 2018, as the Islamic State was pushed out from Syria, she lost contact with her captor. She was subsequently sent to the notorious Al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria, home to ruthless ISIS militants and their families, including Western Muslims who joined them. "ISIS women were very mean to me and forced me to work for them," she said. "I always did what they told me because I was so young and scared. They also tried to force me to be Muslim."
Eight months later, she learned her Palestinian captor was imprisoned in Idlib, Syria. Fearing for her children's future, she traveled to Gaza to live with his family. She was taken there via Turkey and Egypt with a forged passport, finally arriving in 2020. Along the way, she traversed an underground tunnel in Idlib, where some people died from lack of oxygen, before walking 31 hours to her next stop in Turkey.
Fawzia hoped her husband's family in Gaza would respect her as the mother of his children, yet she faced humiliation there too. Regularly beaten, she was effectively imprisoned in her home under Hamas rule. Meanwhile, she was informed that her husband had been killed. Contrary to reports, she did not remarry his brother. "I was never free to do what I wanted in Gaza. Had I been, I would have left much sooner. I couldn’t leave; I was constantly under their control. Once, Hamas members held a gun to my head when I went outside with a friend. They told me I wasn’t allowed to."
She said that, in reality, Hamas treated her like a slave. After the massacre on October 7, she was sent to work as a slave in a hospital, saying that "all hospitals served as Hamas bases. Everyone was armed. Weapons were everywhere." Only on October 1 this year was she finally released from Gaza after months of diplomatic efforts between the U.S., Iraq, and Israel, risking her life in the process.
Following her release, Hamas claimed she lived in Gaza willingly and only wanted to leave because of the war. "That is an outright lie," she said. "I was never free there. I was compelled to stay at home. When I was in Israel and knew there was no more Hamas, I was overjoyed. I could breathe again. They are very evil; they killed people and forced me to stay there. Why would I want to stay there? They claim the experiences I describe didn’t happen to me; they should have been there instead of me. There’s no difference between Hamas and ISIS. I didn’t believe I would be saved until it actually happened."
Fawzia is reluctant to discuss her children, now aged five and six, whom she hasn't seen for several months. Her lawyer mentioned, "We don’t discuss her children much; they were taken from her long before she left Gaza. Not taking them with her wasn’t her choice. She had no option to reunite with them. She hopes to build a new life, but she doesn’t want to do it in Iraq, where she still fears. What she describes is only 15%-20% of all she endured. She needs a lot more time."
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