How one TikTok video led to the rescue of Isis sex slave kidnapped at 11
One TikTok video from an Isis sex slave kidnapped as a child led to a secret rescue operation to get her out of captivity.
Fawzia Amin Seydou, 21, had almost lost all hope of ever being rescued after a decade in brutal Isis captivity.
The young Yazidi girl’s life turned into a nightmare at the age of 11 when she was kidnapped in Iraq in 2014. The year saw the extremist group make gains across the country, including the capture of Mosul and Tikrit.
Now Fawzia’s rescuers – a car dealer nicknamed ‘the Jewish Schindler’ and an Israeli soldier – have revealed details of the dramatic operation for the first time.
But a dark cloud is cast over Fawzia’s freedom as her two children are left behind and remain in captivity.
Fawzia’s TikTok video
After a decade in captivity, rape, abuse and being forced to marry a fighter more than ten years her senior, Fawzia made a brave TikTok video asking for help.
In the video posted last September, she asked someone to contact the Yazidi activist Nadia Murad, pleading with viewers to ‘help me.’
She said: ‘I’m really tired, it’s not just their men, their women and children also harass me … They might assault me, KILL me … it’s really overwhelming.’
Fawzia’s mother had assumed her child had been killed a long time ago until she came across her interview on a Kurdish TV channel following the TikTok plea, The Sunday Times reports.
Miraculously, Fawzia had survived years in captivity and being transported across borders by her abusers.
How the 11-year-old ended up as an Isis wife
Fawzia’s childhood came to a cruel end when Islamic State terrorised her home area of Sinjar in northern Iraq.
In August 2014, Isis fighters killed men and abducted thousands of young women and girls, taking Fawzia to a slave market in Mosul.
She was repeatedly raped and traded between different fighters, according to the newspaper.
After being married to a 24-year-old Palestinian from Gaza. who was allegedly a member of Hamas, she was taken to the Isis stronghold of Raqqa.
The young girl was forced ‘to sleep with him’ and he was plied with numbing medications, she told the Kurdish TV channel Rudaw.
A year after her abduction, she gave birth to a boy, and then later to a daughter.
When her Isis husband was killed in late 2018 during fighting between the Islamic State and Kurdish forces, Fawzia was taken to the infamous Al-Hawl camp for Isis wives, the outlet reports.
Fawzia and her children ended up in Gaza after the Isis fighter’s family organised a passage through the secret tunnels from Egypt into the illegally blockaded Gaza strip.
She had been desperate to get out of the camp to save her children’s lives, so Fawzia agreed.
However, in Rafah city in Gaza, she faced more abuse from her husband’s family, leading her to take an overdose.
‘The most complex of any rescue’
Fawzia posted her TikTok video just weeks before the deadly October 7 attack by Hamas which was followed by Israeli airstrikes that have devastated Gaza and killed tens of thousands of civilians.
This is when Steve Maman put wheels into motion to try to get Fawzia out of Gaza after her family had contacted him.
Maman – a Moroccan-Canadian vintage car dealer and businessman – is dubbed the ‘Jewish Schindler’ after rescuing 140 Yazidi women and girls from the hands of Isis.
But getting Fawzia to safety was ‘the hardest, most complex of any rescue,’ he admitted to The Sunday Times.
He compared the mission to a ‘Holocaust-era kind of thing,’ adding that the ‘geopolitical situation really complicated things.’
To make the situation even trickier, Israel and Iraq have no diplomatic relations.
He said: ‘You’d think countries might put aside their differences to help a young girl taken at 11 and who’s hurting. But the beautiful thing is that in the end, they did.’
Maman managed to sort out a temporary travel document in absentia for Fawzia through the Iraqi consulate in Jordan using a photo of her taken from one of their Skype chats, and he lobbied in the Israeli parliament for her release.
He was able to get Fawzia a phone and some money as the family moved to north Gaza.
This is when IDF officer Brigadier-General Elad Goren and his team made contact with her to find out how to get her out.
They had three options – Fawzia making her own way to the Kerem Shalom crossing, sending in an IDF soldier to escort her or sending ‘a trusted person we know from Gaza to secretly pick her up,’ he told The Sunday Times.
The team settled on the latter option.
And in the early hours of October 1, Fawzia was told to be ready in six hours for a pick-up to take her on a nerve-wracking journey.
Goren, who monitored the journey from a control room, said: ‘We sent drones overhead to escort the car from the air and directed its route to make sure they bypassed roads where Hamas and criminals were operating.’
He said he was ‘happy she’s safe,’ adding that ‘if there are other such cases in Gaza I encourage them to contact us.’
The officer said ‘there is a difference between Palestinians and foreigners and between locals and someone sold to Hamas’ when asked about the thousands of killed and injured Palestinian women and children in Israeli airstrikes, including an attack on a school.
‘We have evacuated more than 4,000 Palestinians who need medical treatment,’ he told the outlet.
For Fawzia, the return is marred by her father’s death just two months before her rescue, the destruction of her family home in Gerasik and the future of her children who were left behind.
Maman explained: ‘She loved those children.
‘Now she is free, she’s thinking about them and feeling why couldn’t she have brought them too.
‘But they are Hamas children. There’s no way they would have let her take them … Nor would the Yazidis have accepted her with them.’
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