Jerusalem: Two weeks after being rescued by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from Gaza, Yazidi survivor Fawzia Amin Sido shared the painful story of her time as a captive under ISIS.
Fawzia, now a young woman, was just nine years old when she was taken along with her brothers in 2014. They were part of a group of Yazidis forced to march from Sinjar to Tal Afar by ISIS fighters. What followed was a series of unimaginable horrors.
We were served food after 3 days: Survivor
Fawzia remembered how the group was starved for three days. When they were finally given food, the meal consisted of rice and meat. However, the relief of being fed soon turned to horror when they were told that the meat was the flesh of Yazidi babies, as reported by Jerusalem Post.
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Fawzia said, “They made rice and gave us meat to eat with it. The meat had a strange taste, and some of us had stomach aches afterwards. When we finished eating, they showed us pictures of beheaded babies and told us that we had eaten their meat.”
The shock was overwhelming and one woman in the group suffered a heart attack and died. Fawzia also recalled how a mother recognized the remains of her own baby due to the familiar appearance of its hands. “They forced us to eat it. It’s very hard to live with that knowledge, but we had no choice,” Fawzia said.
Survivor reveals her ordeal
Fawzia Sido was one of many Yazidi women captured and enslaved by ISIS during its rise to power in 2014. The Yazidis, a religious minority in northern Iraq, were particularly targeted by ISIS, enduring extreme cruelty and violence. Many Yazidi women and girls were enslaved, while the men were killed or forced to flee.
The disturbing practice of feeding human flesh to captives had been previously mentioned by Yazidi parliamentarian Vian Dakhil in 2017, but Fawzia’s testimony gives a personal and powerful confirmation of this horrific act.
Fawzia’s suffering did not end with that meal. She was held in captivity for nine months in an underground prison, alongside 200 other Yazidi women and children, as reported by NDTV. During that time, many of the children died because of contaminated water. Fawzia was also sold to multiple jihadi fighters, including a man named Abu Amar al-Makdisi, with whom she had two children.
After enduring years of torment, Fawzia was finally rescued in a joint operation involving the IDF and the U.S. Embassy. She returned to her family in Iraq, but her two children remain in Gaza with her captor’s family, where they are being raised as Arab Muslims. “Until I got back to Iraq, I was always a ‘sabaya’,” she said, using the Arabic term for a woman held captive and exploited for sex.
