Yazidi sex slave rescued from Gaza in rare, internationally collaborative mission --[Reported by Umva mag]
Washington — The State Department has confirmed to VOA the success of a complicated mission to rescue an Iraqi national and former Islamic State sex slave from Gaza via Israel. Because of a long-running diplomatic rift between Israel and Iraq, it took months of vigorous efforts by humanitarian activists and direct intervention from U.S. diplomatic missions in the region to coordinate the young woman’s rescue. Cooperation among Israeli, Jordanian, Iraqi and United Nations officials was involved. “On October 1, 2024, the United States helped to safely evacuate from Gaza a young Yazidi woman to be reunited with her family in Iraq,” a State Department spokesperson told VOA on Wednesday, adding that the young woman’s story “is heartbreaking, and we are glad that she will be reunited with her family in Iraq.” Enslaved by Islamic State Now 21, Fawzia Amin Saydo was kidnapped by Islamic State militants from her hometown of Sinjar in August 2014, just a month before her 11th birthday. She and two of her brothers, aged 7 and 10 at the time, were among thousands of Yazidis enslaved by IS due to their religious beliefs. Although the brothers found a way to escape, Saydo spent years suffering violence, injustice and rape by IS fighters. By early 2015, she was taken to the Syrian city of Raqqa where she was imprisoned and raped before being forcibly “married” to a then 24-year-old Palestinian IS fighter. "He told me that I had to sleep with him. On the third day, he went to a pharmacy and brought a drug that numbs part of the body. He gave me the drug and I cried,” Saydo recounted in an August 2023 interview from Gaza with the Kurdish media outlet Rudaw. About a year after her arrival in Raqqa, Saydo’s life took another turn when she gave birth to a boy, the first of two children she would have with the Palestinian IS fighter. Saydo decided to dedicate her life to her children, despite the husband turning more abusive, especially after he married another woman. By the end of 2018, when the U.S.-led Kurdish forces squeezed IS out of the group’s territories in Syria, Saydo, then 15 years old, lost contact with her Palestinian captor, who had escaped from northeast Syria to the rebel-held Idlib province in northwest Syria. In early 2019 she was driven to Idlib to be returned to her captor, but their reunion was brief, as the Palestinian militant was soon reported dead. No cause of death was reported. Fearing that her community back in Sinjar, Iraq, might not accept her children — Yazidi spiritual leaders that same year had issued a decree stating that children of rape by IS militants would not be welcomed into the faith — Saydo decided to move in with the Palestinian man’s family in Gaza, where she arrived in 2020. Stuck in Gaza Humanitarian activists who followed Saydo’s case told VOA that her circumstances in Gaza presented a gut-wrenching choice: stay with her children and endure the Palestinian family that became abusive just as their late son had been, or escape — alone and without her children — in the hopes of reuniting with long-lost family in Sinjar. Her resolve to leave was strengthened by Hamas’ deadly October 7 attack on Israel. “This has been by far the most complicated case I have worked on,” said Steve Maman of the Montreal-based Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq. It took Maman and a small team of Iraqi activists several months of lobbying Iraqi, U.S., and Israeli officials. While waiting for a final decision from Israel, Maman and his supporters helped her escape the Palestinian family’s home and hide in a house about 2 kilometers away from the Israeli army at Kerm Shalom crossing. The rescue process, which VOA has followed since early September, was slow and rescheduled several times due to the difficulty of navigating the Israel-Iraq diplomatic rift. “I have no idea why every party was so hesitant to act on such a humanitarian case. Now I can finally get my much-needed sleep,” one of Maman’s supporters who asked that his name be withheld, told VOA. Another activist from Sinjar, Sufyan Waheed Hammo, told VOA, “The Iraqi officials were very helpful when it came to preparing paperwork, but they couldn’t do much diplomatically because of the Iraqi law.” Iraq's parliament in May 2022 passed legislation that criminalized any ties with Israel. According to Maman, what finally triggered U.S. officials in the region to make a final push to rescue her was “a deeply troubling incident” that occurred just a day before her rescue. “She was walking alone when a group of men abused her.” Complicated handoff In the early morning of October 1, a “personnel team” whose individual identities are known only to U.S., U.N. and likely Israeli officials, drove Saydo to Israel via Kerm Shalom crossing in a U.N. ambulance. According to Maman’s supporters, Saydo arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem that day before moving on to Jordan via the Allenby Brid
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