Her two children remain in captivity.
One TikTok video from ISIS sex slave kidnapped as a child has led to a covert rescue operation to free her from captivity.
The Sunday Times reports on this.
21-year-old Fawzia Amin Seidu almost despaired of rescue after ten years of brutal captivity in ISIS.
The life of a young Yazidi girl turned into horror at the age of 11 when she was kidnapped in Iraq in 2014. That year, the extremist group won victories across the country, including capturing Mosul and Tikrit.
Now Fawzia's rescuers – a car dealer nicknamed the “Jewish Schindler” and an Israeli soldier – have revealed details of the dramatic operation for the first time.
But a dark cloud hangs over Fawzia's freedom, as her two children remain in captivity.
Fawzia's TikTok Videos
After ten years of captivity, rape, abuse, and being forced to marry a militant more than a decade her senior, Fawzia made a brave TikTok video asking for help.
In a video posted in September last year, she asked for someone to contact Yazidi activist Nadia Murad, pleading with viewers to “help her.” She said: “I am very tired, I am being harassed not only by their men, but also by their women and children… They can attack me, kill me… It is really unbearable.”
Fawzia's mother believed her child had long been killed until she came across an interview with him on a Kurdish TV channel that aired after the TikTok video. Miraculously, Fawzia survived years of imprisonment and being transported across borders by her abusers.
How an 11-year-old girl became the wife of an ISIS fighter
Fawzia’s childhood was cut short when the Islamic State terrorized his home region of Sinjar in northern Iraq. In August 2014, ISIS militants killed men and kidnapped thousands of young women and girls, and Fawzia was taken to a slave market in Mosul. According to the newspaper, she was repeatedly raped and sold to different militants. After marrying a 24-year-old Palestinian from Gaza, who was allegedly a member of Hamas, she was taken to the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa. The young girl was forced to “sleep with him” and pumped full of painkillers, she told Kurdish TV channel Rudaw.
A year after her abduction, she gave birth to a boy, and then daughter.
When her husband was killed during fighting between the Islamic State and Kurdish forces in late 2018, Fawzia was taken to the Islamic State's infamous Al-Hawl wives' camp.
Fawzia and her children ended up in Gaza after the family of an ISIS fighter organized passage through secret tunnels from Egypt into the illegally blockaded Gaza Strip.
Desperate to get out of the camp to save her children's lives, Fawzia agreed. However, in the city of Rafah in Gaza, she faced even more abuse from her husband's family, which led to her overdose.
The Hardest Rescue
Fawzia posted her video on TikTok weeks before the deadly Hamas attack on October 7, which was followed by Israeli airstrikes that devastated Gaza and killed tens of thousands of civilians.
At that time, Steve Maman sprang into action to try to get Fawzia out of Gaza after her family contacted him. Maman, a Moroccan-Canadian vintage car dealer and businessman, had been dubbed the “Jewish Schindler” for rescuing 140 Yazidi women and girls from ISIS. But getting Fawzia to safety was “the most difficult and challenging of all the rescues,” he told the newspaper. He compared the mission to “something like the Holocaust,” adding that “the geopolitical situation actually made it more difficult.” The situation is made even worse by the fact that Israel and Iraq do not have diplomatic relations.
He said: “You would think that countries would put aside their differences to help a little girl who was kidnapped at 11 and is suffering. But the most beautiful thing is that in the end they did.”
Maman was able to obtain a temporary travel document for Fawzia in absentia through the Iraqi consulate in Jordan, using her photo from one of their Skype chats, and lobbied for her release in the Israeli parliament. He was able to get Fawzia a phone and some money when the family moved to northern Gaza.
At this point, IDF officer Brigadier General Elad Goren and his team contacted her to find out how to get her out. They had three options: Fawzia could go to the Kerem Shalom crossing herself, send an IDF soldier to escort her, or send “a trusted person from Gaza to secretly pick her up.” The team settled on the latter option.
Early on the morning of October 1, Fawzia was told to be ready six hours before she would be picked up and sent on a nerve-wracking journey.
Observing the trip from the control tower, Goren said, “We sent drones to follow the vehicle from the air and planned its route so that it avoided roads where Hamas militants and criminals operate.”
The officer said that “there is a difference between Palestinians and foreigners, between locals and those who sold out to Hamas,” when asked about the thousands of Palestinian women and children killed and wounded in Israeli airstrikes, including the school attack.
“We evacuated more than 4,000 Palestinians who needed medical care,” he told the newspaper.
For Fawzia, Return Marred by Death her father just two months before her rescue, the destruction of her family home in Gerasik, and the future of the children left there. Maman explained: “She loved those children. Now she is free, she thinks about them and feels why she couldn't take them with her. But they are Hamas children. They would never have let her take them… And the Yazidis wouldn't have accepted her with them.”
Recall that recently in Kiev The SBU detained an ISIS member. He had been hiding from justice for seven years.
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