Fawzia Amin Sido

Fawzia Amin Sido is a Yazidi woman who was captured by ISIS in Iraq during the Yazidi genocide, when she was ten years old. She had two children with an ISIS militant who enslaved her. After her children's father died, his family talked her into moving to the Gaza Strip with her children. In 2024, when she was 21 years old, the Israeli Air Force bombed the home where she lived with his family, and she escaped. The war made it difficult to leave the Gaza Strip, but she eventually returned to her family in Iraq in early October.

 Background 

 Yazidi genocide 

ISIS committed genocide against the Yazidi people in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017. They killed 3000 to 5000 men and teenage boys, and they sold 6000 to 10,000 Yazidi women in slave markets. Sometimes young boys were also sold as slaves.

The Yazidi community quickly welcomed the Yazidi women who had been taken as slaves, but they rejected the children who had been born as a result of sexual slavery and from genocidal rape.

 ISIS in the Gaza Strip 

The IDF and Israeli government often say that Hamas and ISIS have a lot in common or work together, but most people who study terrorism say Hamas and ISIS are very different and attack each other. Hamas and ISIS disagree about a lot of things.

In 2017 two Hamas guards were killed by an ISIS bomber at Rafah crossing, when the guards were trying to stop him getting into Egypt. Hamas responded by arresting supporters of ISIS in the Gaza Strip. In 2018, Palestinians who had joined ISIS in the Sinai Peninsula "declared war on Hamas". One of their goals was to free one of their members from a prison in the Gaza Strip.

 Capture 

When Fawzia was nearly 11 years old she was captured by ISIS and sold as a slave to one of their militants. The militant who bought Fawzia was a Palestinian foreign fighter from the Gaza Strip. There were 30,000ַ foreign fighters who joined ISIS. She was forced to marry him and she gave birth to two children feathered by him.

 Tavel to the Gaza Strip 

The ISIS militant who bought her died in Syria. After he died, his family pressured her to move to the Gaza Strip and bring the children to live with the family. Fawzia took the long journey to Palestine because she worried her own family and community would not accept the children of the ISIS militant.

Fawzia and her children arrived in the Gaza Strip in 2020.

 Disagreement about how she left the Gaza Strip  

The government of Iraq approached intermediaries asking that she be evacuated from Gaza.

In 2024, during the Israel–Hamas war she left the Gaza Strip and returned to her family in Iraq. Diplomatic conflict between Israel and Iraq complicated the process of her return home.

The IDF claimed that a person who was holding her captive had died in the war in Gaza in 2024.

 Related pages 
 Yazidi genocide
 Kurdistan Region
 Rudaw Media Network
 Hamas–ISIS conflict
 Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
 Sheikh Omar Hadid Brigades
 Gaza humanitarian crisis (2023–present)
 Wartime sexual violence

References

 Other websites 


Category:Yazidis
Category:Kidnapped people