It is now two weeks since the rescue of the 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, she sat for her first filmed interview since her liberation.
Alan Duncan, a former British soldier and volunteer fighter with the Iraqi Kurds who is now a documentary filmmaker, was part of a small group of people in Israel made aware of Fawzia’s plight in July. He was involved in subsequent efforts to lobby the Israeli authorities to act to free her. (Full disclosure: I was also a part of this group.)
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 newspaper, based in the UK, this week. Because of my own involvement on the matter, I have also been able to view the full two-hour recording of the conversation between Duncan and Fawzia Sido.
More details emerge about Yazidi children
It contains new details of her story which are immensely informative both regarding Fawzia’s personal plight, and with regard more generally to the experiences of the Yazidi children enslaved by Islamic State in 2014.
Throughout the interview, Fawzia Sido’s tone is calm and matter of fact. She relates, nevertheless, as will be outlined here, details of an encounter with evil of a nature almost beyond the ability of the human mind to process. At certain times during the interview, Duncan, a former combat soldier and veteran of more than one war, is almost unable to continue. Fawzia remains calm throughout, pausing to share jokes with members of her family.
FAWZIA SIDO, aged nine, was captured with two of her brothers by Islamic State in the summer of 2014. Following their capture, she and one of her brothers, Fawaz, were made to take part in a forced march from Sinjar to Tal Afar, at that time under the control of Islamic State. The journey took three or four days, during which time the Yazidis were given no food by their captors.
On arrival to Tal Afar, according to Fawzia, “They told us that they would give us food. They made rice and they gave us meat to eat with it. The meat had a weird taste, and some of us had stomach aches afterwards.
“When we were done, they told us that this was the meat of Yazidi babies.
“They showed us pictures of beheaded babies, and said ‘these are the kids that you ate now.’ One woman suffered heart failure and died shortly after. The mothers of these babies were there also. One mother recognized her own baby because of its hands.”
And to the interviewer’s mute sounds of horror, she continues “It’s very hard, but it wasn’t our fault. They forced us. But it’s very hard to know that it happened. But it was not in our hands.”
The accusation that Islamic State fed human meat to Yazidi captives has been made before, though this has never become one of the widely known elements of the ISIS story in the West. Perhaps the human mind simply and instinctively recoils from such depravity, and as a result it goes unrecorded.
Vian Dakhil, a Yazidi member of the Iraqi parliament, was the first to reveal details of this practice by ISIS, 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 “Extra News” Channel, which was then translated by Memri.
After Tal Afar, Fawzia’s story conforms more closely to the known details of the experiences of Yazidi female children in the hands of ISIS. She was held for nine months in an underground “jail” along with around 200 other Yazidi women and children. Some of the children held there died from drinking contaminated water, she tells Duncan. During that time, she had no contact with her jihadi captors, except that she remembers that, from time to time, they would come and take older girls whom they evidently found attractive from the vault.
After nine months, she was taken to a building that she remembers resembled a school. From there, she and four other Yazidi girls were purchased by a man named Abu Mohammed al-Idnani. The girls were then forcibly converted to Islam. Beatings were administered to any who refused to obey.
Fawzia was given to a man who first raped her when she was 10 years old. She remembers being sold on five times, to “a Syrian, a Saudi, another Syrian,” and then finally to the Gazan jihadi fighter who “married her.” She knew him by his nom de guerre of Abu Amar al-Makdisi. “Makdisi” is the generally preferred term among the jihadis for a Palestinian Arab Muslim. It relates, of course, to the Islamic term for Jerusalem “Bayt al-Makdis.” Fawzia’s “husband,” however, was a Gazan, not a Jerusalemite.
Fawzia seems to have been 15 or 16 when married to the Gazan jihadi. As a result of repeated rapes, she bore him two children, a boy and a girl. Contrary to earlier reports, Abu Amar al-Makdisi was not killed in the Islamic State’s last stand at Baghouz in the lower Euphrates River Valley, in 2019. Rather, he was captured by Coalition forces and imprisoned in one of the jails 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 at al-Hawl. From there, the jihadis transferred them in an escape to Islamist-controlled and Turkish-supported Idlib province. She and her children were then taken through a tunnel from Idlib into Turkey. There, the Islamic State network issued her a false Jordanian passport, and she and the children were taken by her “husband’s” family to Cairo, and then into Hamas-controlled Gaza.
In Gaza, Fawzia was kept as a kind of domestic slave by her “husband’s” family. She appears at a certain point to have been “married” to one of his brothers, who was later killed in the fighting between Israel and Hamas.
For a while, she was resident with other young women at the Shuhada al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir el-Balah, in central Gaza, a facility controlled by armed Hamas men, 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 to her family in Iraq.
Her children remain with Makdisi’s family in Gaza, where they are being raised as Arab Muslims.
Fawzia concludes her testimony in simple and clear terms: “Until I got back to Iraq, I was all the time a ‘sabaya,’ also in Gaza.” “Sabaya” is an Arabic term referring to a young woman held captive and exploited sexually.
Fawzia appears, on all the occasions I have seen her speak, to be a young woman of exceptional strength and dignity.
Chaim Nachman Bialik, writing in response to the Kishinev pogrom in 1903, recorded famously that “revenge for the blood of a child, Satan himself has not yet invented.” Appropriate vengeance for the things Fawzia Sido experienced and witnessed must surely lie hidden yet further, and deeper.