OAN Staff Blake Wolf
11:08 AM – Thursday, October 3, 2024
A young woman was finally freed from ISIS captivity thanks to a joint effort involving Israel, the United States, Iraq, and the National Intelligence Service. Israeli forces worked in tandem with the other nations in the U.S.-led operation.
After being held by ISIS and Hamas terrorists for 10 years, she is finally able to reunite with her family.
Fawzia Amin Sido, now 21, was abducted at the age of 11.
Surfacing footage shows the grateful but traumatized young woman speaking with her family members and receiving a warm embrace in her native country of Iraq.
Iraq and Israel do not have any diplomatic ties.
In 2014, Sido was reportedly kidnapped by ISIS members as they were attacking Yazidi communities in Iraq. Soon after, Sido was then sold to a man living in Gaza and she has been living with the Hamas member ever since, as he took her as his wife.
“Fawzia, a Yazidi girl kidnapped by ISIS from Iraq and brought to Gaza at just 11 years old, has finally been rescued by the Israeli security forces,” wrote David Saranga, the director of the digital diplomacy bureau for Israel’s foreign ministry.
The IDF announced that the “terrorist who had been holding her” had been recently killed by an Israeli strike in the ongoing war, allowing Sido to escape. She reportedly fled to a hideout somewhere inside the Gaza Strip.
“The young girl was extracted from the Gaza Strip in recent days in a secret operation through the Kerem Shalom crossing. After crossing into Israel, she was taken to Jordan via the Allenby Crossing and then on to her family in Iraq,” the IDF continued.
Sido is a member of the Yazidi religious minority group who had been mostly living in Iraq and Syria and saw over 5,000 members murdered, with thousands more kidnapped in a 2014 ISIS attack. The United Nations have characterized that particular attack as a genocide.
Many of the women and girls captured were sold into sex slavery, while the boys were indoctrinated into the jihadi ideology, given firearms, and trained as child soldiers.
Over 3,500 of those captured have since been freed, however, there are still roughly 2,600 missing, according to Iraqi authorities.
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