V A Yazidi woman enslaved for years in Gaza and recently rescued in a complex operation involving Israel and the US has said that she tried to kill herself in captivity.
Fawzia Amin Sido, who was kidnapped by Islamic State in Iraq in 2014 when she was just 11 and later taken to Gaza, told Voice of America Kurdish (VOA) that she tried to take her own life 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 said.
Fawzia, who is now back in Iraq, told VOA she tried to get in touch with her family in Sinjar in northern Iraq 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.
“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.”
The Israeli military reported that Sido, now 21, was able to escape after her captor in Gaza was killed, probably during an airstrike amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.
The Yazidis are a religious minority from Iraq and Syria. Fawzia was taken on August 3, 2014, when Isis terrorists attacked Sinjar.
While most local men were executed, young women were captured to be enslaved, sold and used for sex.
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 time 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.”
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.”
Ten years ago, Maman, a Moroccan Jew who emigrated to Canada at an early age, entered a business venture in Iraq and soon after witnessed Isis’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 witness 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.
