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A Yazidi woman testifies to the abuses of Hamas, ISIS in Gaza and Iraq

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A Yazidi woman testifies to the abuses of Hamas, ISIS in Gaza and Iraq

It has now been two weeks since the rescue of Yazidi hostage Fawzia Amin Sido from captivity in Gaza by the IDF, in a joint operation also involving the US Embassy.

Fawzia has been returned to her family in the Sinjar area of ​​northern Iraq. This week, he sat down for his first filmed interview since his release.

Alan Duncan, a former British soldier and volunteer fighter with the Iraqi Kurds who is now a documentary filmmaker, was among a small group of people in Israel who learned of Fawzia’s plight in July. She participated in subsequent efforts to pressure the Israeli authorities to act to free her. (Full disclosure: I was part of this group too.)

Because of this involvement, the Sido family decided to grant Fawzia’s first recorded interview to Duncan.

Parts of the interview were published by The Sun UK-based newspaper this week. Because of my own involvement in the matter, I have also been able to view the entire two-hour recording of the conversation between Duncan and Fawzia Sido.

Coffins with remains of people from the Yazidi minority, who were killed by Islamic State militants and exhumed from a mass grave, are seen during a funeral in Kojo, Iraq, on February 6, 2021. Image taken on February 6, 2021. (credit: REUTERS/Charlotte Bruneau)

More details emerge about the Yazidi children

It contains new details of her story that are immensely informative both in terms of Fawzia’s personal situation and the experiences of Yazidi children enslaved by the Islamic State in 2014.

Throughout the interview, Fawzia Sido’s tone is calm and matter-of-fact. She recounts, however, as will be explained here, details of an encounter with evil of a nature almost beyond the capacity of the human mind to process. At certain points in the interview, Duncan, a former combat soldier and veteran of more than one war, can hardly continue. Fawzia remains calm throughout, pausing to share jokes with her family members.

Nine-year-old FAWZIA SIDO was captured with two of her brothers by the Islamic State in the summer of 2014. After her capture, she and one of her brothers, Fawaz, were forced to participate in a forced march from Sinjar to Tal Afar, then under the control of the Islamic State. The journey lasted three or four days, during which time the Yazidis were not given food by their captors.

Upon arriving in Tal Afar, according to Fawzia, “they told us they would give us food. They made rice and gave us meat to eat with it. The meat had a strange taste and some of us had stomachaches afterwards.

“When we finished, they told us this was the meat of Yazidi babies.

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“They showed us pictures of decapitated babies and said, ‘These are the children you ate now.’ One woman suffered heart failure and died shortly afterwards. The mothers of these babies were also there. her own baby by her hands.”

And before the silent sounds of horror from the interviewer, she continues: “It’s very hard, but it wasn’t our fault. They forced us. But it is very difficult to know what happened. But it was not in our hands.”

The charge that the Islamic State fed human flesh to Yazidi captives has been made before, although it has never become one of the best-known elements of ISIS’s history in the West. Perhaps the human mind simply and instinctively recoils from such depravity and as a result does not register.

Vian Dakhil, a Yazidi member of the Iraqi parliament, was the first to reveal details of this practice by IS, in 2017. Dakhil related a testimony she had collected similar in its details to that given by Fawzia Sido. Dakhil revealed these details in an interview given to the Egyptian channel “Extra News”, which was later translated by Memri.

After Tal Afar, Fawzia’s story is more in line with the known details of Yazidi girls’ experiences at the hands of ISIS. She was held for nine months in an underground “prison” along with about 200 other Yazidi women and children. Some of the children held there died from drinking contaminated water, he tells Duncan. During that time, he had no contact with his jihadi captors, except that he remembers that they would occasionally come to pick up older girls who they obviously found attractive from the vault.

After nine months, she was taken to a building that she remembers looked like a school. From there, she and four other Yazidi girls were bought by a man named Abu Mohammed al-Idnani. The girls were then forcibly converted to Islam. Beatings were administered to anyone who refused to obey.

Fawzia was given to a man who first raped her when she was 10 years old. She recalls being sold five times, to “a Syrian, a Saudi, another Syrian” and finally to the jihadist fighter in Gaza who “married her”. He knew him by his nom de guerre of Abu Amar al-Makdisi. “Makdisi” is the generally preferred term among jihadis for a Palestinian Arab Muslim. It is related, of course, to the Islamic term for Jerusalem “Bayt al-Makdis”. Fawzia’s “husband”, however, was from Gaza, not Jerusalem.

Fawzia was apparently 15 or 16 when she married the Gazan jihadist. As a result of the repeated rapes, she gave him two children, a boy and a girl. Contrary to earlier reports, Abu Amar al-Makdisi was not killed in the last IS battle in Baghouz, in the lower Euphrates River Valley, in 2019. Rather, he was captured by coalition forces. and imprisoned in one of the prisons run in Syria by the US-aligned Syrian Democratic Forces.

Fawzia and her children were taken to the SDF-controlled prison camp for ISIS families in al-Hawl. From there, the jihadists took them on the run to the Islamist-controlled, Turkish-backed province of Idlib. She and her children were then taken through a tunnel from Idlib to Turkey. There, the Islamic State network issued her a fake Jordanian passport, and her “husband’s” family took her and the children to Cairo, and then to Hamas-controlled Gaza.

In Gaza, Fawzia was kept as a kind of domestic slave by her “husband’s” family. At one point, she appears to have been “married” to one of her brothers, who later died in the fighting between Israel and Hamas.

For a time, she resided with other young women at the Shuhada al-Aqsa hospital in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, a facility controlled by Hamas gunmen, according to her testimony. Finally, as is now well known, thanks to the efforts of her family, a Canadian Jewish philanthropist, her supporters in Israel and the IDF, she was rescued in early October and returned with her family to Iraq.

Their children remain with Makdisi’s family in Gaza, where they have been raised as Arab Muslims.

Fawzia concludes her testimony in simple and clear terms: “Until I returned to Iraq, I was always a ‘sabaya’, also in Gaza.” “Sabaya” is an Arabic term that refers to a young woman who is detained and sexually exploited.

Fawzia seems, on every occasion I have seen her speak, like a young woman of exceptional strength and dignity.

Chaim Nachman Bialik, writing in response to the Kishinev pogrom in 1903, famously recorded that “revenge for the blood of a child, Satan himself has not yet invented.” The proper revenge for the things that Fawzia Sido experienced and witnessed must surely be hidden even deeper and deeper.



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