Gaza authority refutes Israeli claims about rescued Yazidi woman

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Hamas-held government in Gaza Strip on Friday denied Israeli claims of assisting in the rescue of a Yazidi woman more than a decade after she was kidnapped by the Islamic State (ISIS) from her home in northern Iraq. 

Multiple countries and organizations have issued statements about their involvement in her rescue and there are some contradictions between their accounts.

The media office of the Palestinian government in Gaza said the Israeli army “promoted false narrative and a fabricated story about the Yazidi girl who was in the Gaza Strip, and narrated fabricated events that have no basis in truth.”

It was referring to an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) statement on Thursday that claimed their forces rescued a 21-year-old Yazidi woman from Gaza in coordination with other international actors after killing her captor. 

The Iraqi government said the woman, Fawzia Amin Sido, was rescued after they saw an interview she did with Rudaw last year. US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that Washington was involved in the operation after Baghdad asked for help. The Iraqi government did not mention an Israeli role in the rescue.

Sido was a child when she was one of thousands of Yazidi girls and women abducted by ISIS during their genocidal reign of terror in northern Iraq a decade ago and forced into sexual slavery and labour.

She told Rudaw in the August 2023 interview that ISIS emirs married her off to a Palestinian member of the terror group who raped her when she was only ten years old. She gave birth to a son and a daughter.

The Gaza authority claimed that Sido married a Palestinian man who was in Syria “while he was fighting in the ranks of the opposition forces” and that she lived with him and his mother there until he was killed. She and her husband’s family then legally left Syria for Palestine, travelling through Turkey and Egypt after the death of her husband. Sido told Rudaw last year that the journey was done on fake passports. 

In the accounts of her rescue that were published on Thursday, there were several mentions of an unidentified “captor” who was killed. The statement from the Hamas government said that Sido had married her brother-in-law and it was this “husband” who they named as her “captor.” The Gaza authority confirmed that he was killed in an Israeli strike. 

The Gaza government said that it provided Sido with a home and saw to all of her needs after her husband died, and that they facilitated her return to Iraq through Jordan when she said she felt unsafe during Israel’s attacks and wanted to be reunited with her family. 

“The occupation [Israel] did not free her, as it lied to public opinion and tried to mislead it in its false statement,” the Hamas statement said.

Sido had told Rudaw that her in-laws were good to her. They rented her a house and financially supported her at the beginning. However, after her ISIS-linked husband’s family stopped supporting her, she depended on the generosity of an unnamed philanthropist. She did not mention a second marriage.

Sido is now in Shingal with her family, trying to recover from everything she has lived through in the past decade. 

So far, 3,581 of the 6,417 abducted Yazidi women and children have been rescued, Hussein Qaidi, head of the Office for Rescuing Abducted Yazidis, which is affiliated with the Kurdistan Region Presidency, told Rudaw in August.

According to unofficial figures from Qaidi, between 120,000 and 130,000 Yazidis have left Iraq since ISIS swept through Shingal. Iraq has failed to provide the community with protection and prosperity and a huge number of Yazidis no longer consider the country home.

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