Yazidi girl kidnapped by ISIS when she was 11 and sold into sex slavery rescued a decade later in Gaza after being spotted pleading for help on TikTok

Details have emerged about how a young Yazidi girl kidnapped by ISIS and sold into sex slavery before being trafficked to Gaza was saved thanks to a TikTok.

Fawzia Amin Sido was only eleven when she was forced to marry a Palestinian ISIS fighter and lured to Gaza.

After years of isolation from her family, the Iraqi woman, now 21, fled Gaza and returned home, where she was met with an emotional welcome by her loved ones.

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

For a year, she was given to two different ISIS fighters and raped repeatedly.

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

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

She gave birth to two children, a boy and a girl, during her time as his forced bride.

But in 2018, Sido’s kidnapper was killed while fighting for ISIS, which at the time had been driven out of Iraq by Kurds backed by a Western coalition.

After spending time in Al-Hawl, a cramped camp holding ISIS women in northeastern Syria, where a hundred women still live to this day, she was taken to Gaza after her brother’s advice. her kidnapper had been smuggled in from Egypt.

After she arrived in Rafah in 2020, the family made her feel so miserable that she tried to commit suicide.

They beat Sido and forced her to cook and clean.

Shortly before the October 7 attack, she made a plea via TikTok for the public to contact Nadia Murad, the Nobel Prize-winning Yazidi activist.

“Help me,” she said. ‘I’m really tired. It’s not just their husbands, but also their wives and children who harass me… They could attack me, kill me… it’s really overwhelming.”

After her story made waves in the Arab world, it was picked up by Steve Maman, a Moroccan-born Canadian who sells vintage cars to collectors for a living and also runs a charity dedicated to the liberation of girls and women kidnapped by ISIS.

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

He told the Times: ‘Rescuing Fawzia was the most difficult and complex of all rescues, like something out of the Holocaust era. The geopolitical situation has really complicated things.”

Known to Israeli, American, Jordanian and Iraqi officials for his previous work, he convinced the Iraqi consulate in Jordan to issue travel documents in absentia in Sido’s name, a notable move considering that Iraq and Israel have no diplomatic relations maintain relations.

But this work took months and Sido became desperate.

Eventually the IDF was called in to contact her and retrieve her. In the early hours of October 1, she was picked up by car from Rafah.

She was watched for hours in an IDF control room. Brigadier General Elad Goren, in charge of the exfil mission, told the Sunday Times: “We sent drones over us to guide the car from the air and determine the route so that they avoided roads where Hamas and criminals were active.”

It took about 90 minutes before she was taken to the intersection where his team and an ambulance were waiting.

“It was a big operation, but it didn’t matter how many resources we invested, because we have a Hebrew saying: ‘If we save one life, it’s like saving the whole world.’

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

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

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

Moreover, their parental home had been destroyed by ISIS.

Although Sido has returned to her family, her life will still be incredibly difficult.

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

In addition, Steve Maman said she now regrets leaving the two children in Gaza.

“She loved those kids. Now that she is free, she thinks about them and feels why she couldn’t have taken them too,” he admitted

‘But they are Hamas children. There was no way they would have let her take them…And the Yazidis wouldn’t have accepted her either.”