The Yazidi slave held for years in Gaza and recently rescued in a complex operation involving Israel and the US has spoken out about her time in captivity.

Fawzia Amin Sido, who was kidnapped at the age of 11 by Isis in Iraq and later taken to Gaza, told Voice of America Kurdish (VOA) that she tried to commit suicide many times while being held in the Strip. 

“Because of what I saw in my life, I tried to commit suicide by taking pills,” she told VOA.

Fawzia told VOA she tried to get in touch with her family back in Sinjar until Hamas terrorists took her cell phone, accusing her of being an Israeli mercenary.

“After I left the hospital, I was taken to a judge. The judge said, 'I will imprison you for two years because you tried to commit suicide’, I asked him ‘why are you putting me in jail? I want to go back to my family’, he said, ‘So who told you to come here?’, he didn't know my story because Hamas threatened me not to tell anyone,” Fawzia told VOA.

"I saw everything in Hamas. I was tired of all their torture and decided to leave. I went to two friends and lived with them. I contacted several Israelis, Americans and Canadians," Fawzia said, “I was also posting messages on TikTok that I wanted to leave Gaza,” she added.

The Israeli military reported that Sido, now 21 years old, was able to escape after her captor in Gaza was killed, likely during an airstrike amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.

The Yazidis are a religious minority primarily residing in Iraq and Syria and Fawzia was taken on August 3, 2014, when ISIS terrorists assaulted Sinjar, in northern Iraq. While the majority of the local men were executed, women under a certain age were captured to be sold as sex slaves.

Fawzia was raped by Isis terrorists before being moved to Raqqa, Syria, and then sold in 2015 to a terrorist who had come to fight for the terror group.

She remained captive in Syria for years, during which she had two children from forced pregnancies.

Steve Maman, a Jewish Canadian benefactor who initiated the rescue of Fawiz told the JC, “She’s strong but she is having a hard time. Now that she is free, she’s thinking about her children.

“But they are Hamas children. There’s no way they would have let her take them. If they knew she was attempting to escape with her children, she would not be alive today.

“I hope she is strong enough to overcome the pressures and the emotions and that it doesn’t push her towards minimizing the validity and value of her own life.”

Fawzia’s family reached out to Maman, who has long been involved in large-scale operations to rescue Yazidis, in November 2023, a month after Hamas’s October 7 massacre of 1,200 in Israel and just days after the IDF launched its ground operation to destroy the Palestinian terror group in Gaza.

After her abductor died in 2019, the Palestinian terrorist’s relatives smuggled her along with her children to Turkey and then through tunnels in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula to Gaza in 2020.

“Fawzia’s family was convinced that if I were involved, being known as the ‘Jewish Schindler," the Israeli government would accept [to become involved],” Maman told the JC.

“I told her she’d be free. She said it wasn’t possible. Fawzia didn’t understand the concept of freedom. That girl was 11 years old when she was enslaved, she doesn’t know what it’s like to do what she wants to when she wants. Half of her life has been suffering, beatings and sexual abuse,” Maman added.

Ten years ago, Maman, a Moroccan Jew who immigrated to Canada at an early age, entered a business venture in Iraq and soon after witnessed the Islamic State’s massacres of Yazidis.

“I was born in Morocco, a country where diversity is omnipresent and where all religions were tolerated,” he said. “The children that were being sold out of cages in Mosul broke my heart.

“How does one wear an expensive watch or pair of shoes and witnesses the potential purchase of a human being, who will be raped and most probably beheaded, without doing anything,” he added.

Since then, Maman's team has spearheaded the liberation of 140 Yazidis and Christians, while assisting 25,000 others with humanitarian assistance.

“Many in my position would have acted as I did. God just picked me,” Maman said.

“At first, I thought it would be a simple rescue of a few people. I told my wife it would be a six-month project at most. We’re in the tenth year now,” he continued.

"Fawzia’s rescue was probably the most difficult of all. Israel has no diplomatic relations with Iraq, an enemy state, it complicated everything,” he added.

Maman lobbied the Iraqi government, diplomatic missions and Israeli and U.S. officials to plan and conduct the rescue mission in Gaza.

“The Iraqi consulate in Jordan printed a ‘laissez-passer” in absentia, based on an ID card Fawzia was issued when she was 9 and a picture from one of our Skype conversations,” he explained.

“We managed to move her out of her captors’ house without her children around May. We sent money to Gaza to make sure she had the funds to move around and get a cellphone,” he said.

Fawzia was originally supposed to leave Gaza through the Kerem Shalom Crossing with Israel on a bus filled with Palestinian children seeking medical attention at Israeli hospitals, but was bumped off the list at the last minute.

After numerous setbacks, including a tragic incident in which Fawzia was raped by several Palestinians while walking on a beach in northern Gaza, she was evacuated out of Gaza in a UN ambulance, driven to the crossing where she was ferried by Israeli authorities to the US Embassy in Jerusalem.

From there, she was driven to Israel’s Allenby Crossing with Jordan and to the Iraqi Consulate in the kingdom before being flown back to Iraq.

Last week, Reuters published an article saying Hamas rejected Fawzia’s rescue as "a false narrative and fabricated story".

“I have written to her everyday for the past four months," said Maman. "I made sure she wore a headscarf in Gaza, remained discreet and did not tell anyone she was Yazidi. She’d be as good as dead if they knew who she was.

“We kept her alive and in good spirits until the Americans picked her up," he continued. "Sadly, it took a gang rape to expedite the process. Still, I am very proud that Israel opened its door to her. It was the right thing to do by Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamine] Netanyahu, U.S. President Joe Biden and all those involved."

Nevertheless, Maman expressed concerns regarding to Fawzia’s wellbeing.

“We see a lot of Yazidi girls committing suicide. Survivors face a very difficult uphill battle and this applies to Fawzia. She was 11-years old when she was taken. She did not have the tools to be able to fight the monster inside of here and the emotions coming at her,” he added.