Yazidi woman held in Gaza escapes – with Israel’s help

Fawzia Amin Sido had been sold by ISIS to a Hamas member who fought alongside them in Iraq and Syria.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

An Iraqi Yazidi woman held against her will in Gaza for four years escaped last week and is now home thanks to the efforts of a Canadian Jew who is known for rescuing Yazidis and the fact that IDF forces killed one of her captors.

At age 11, Sido had been kidnapped and enslaved among thousands of other women and girls of her religio-ethnic minority by the Muslim extremist group ISIS when it took over the Sinjar region of Iraq in 2014.

She spent several years of her captivity in Syria, she told CNN in an interview last week. That was where she was bought by a Hamas member who had fought alongside his fellow terrorists in their drive to establish a brutal caliphate throughout the Middle East.

In 2020 he brought her to Gaza through Egypt using a fake Arab ID for his victim, who had been forced to have his children.

Her family became aware that she was still alive in November when they saw a clip of her on TikTok that Kurdish news network Rudaw publicized. They contacted Steve Maman, who has become known in their persecuted community as the “Jewish Schindler” for having managed to free some 140 Yazidis from captivity due to his contacts around the world.

In an interview with i24News, Maman said that Sido had “gathered her courage” to make and upload the video appealing for help after the brother of her “owner” was killed in a battle with the IDF, and she wasn’t being watched so carefully.

“She was brutally beaten” after her captors’ family saw the news show, he said.

In a separate interview, Maman told Ynet that it took months of work on two separate levels for the operation to succeed.

First, there were months of behind-the-scenes political and diplomatic maneuvering with Iraqi, Israeli and American officials, although Iraq refused to work with Israel directly.

For one, Maman said it took some hard work by both American and Israeli officials to obtain a temporary travel document for the Iraqi woman in lieu of a passport so that she could at the end enter Jordan through the Allenby crossing.

They also worked with Sido herself. Maman said that for months his group “trained her to make contact with the IDF, identify fences, and spot potential crossings.”

At one point, he noted, his team made a direct attempt to extract her through a tunnel from Rafah into Egypt. Intermediaries offered to pay Hamas the $5,000 smuggling fee, he said, but “just as we were close to executing the plan, Egypt tightened its border control with Gaza, making it very difficult to cross. The fighting intensified, and Israel moved into the area.”

In commenting on the incident Thursday, the IDF stated, “In a complex operation coordinated between Israel, the United States, and other international actors, [Sido] was recently rescued in a secret mission from the Gaza Strip through the Kerem Shalom Crossing.”

The Iraqis acknowledged the release without mentioning either Maman, Israel or even where Sido had been held, saying it had been accomplished “via a joint effort with the international intelligence service.”

“It was the hardest rescue operation I’ve ever done,” Maman said, due to all the actors that needed to be involved.

The businessman-cum-philanthropist also noted to i24 News that according to his sources, there are at least a few other Yazidi women in Gaza whom Hamas fighters and their families are holding against their will.

gaza striphamas terroristIDF rescueYazidis