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Two weeks after her rescue by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from Gaza, Yazidi survivor Fawzia Amin Sido has recounted the harrowing atrocities she endured during her time in captivity under ISIS. Ms Sido recounted how, at the age of nine, she was captured along with her brothers and forced to march from Sinjar to Tal Afar. The group was starved for three days before being fed rice and meat, which they later discovered was the flesh of Yazidi babies.
“They made rice and gave us meat to eat with it. The meat had a weird taste, and some of us had stomach aches afterwards,” Ms Sido recalled, as per the Jerusalem Post.
“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,” Ms Sido said, adding that one mother even recognised her own child because of the baby’s hands. “They forced us. But it’s very hard to know that it happened. But it was not in our hands,” she said.
Fawzia Sido was one of many Yazidi women enslaved by ISIS in 2014 during the group’s reign of terror. The Yazidis, a religious minority in northern Iraq, were subjected to unimaginable horrors.
Ms Sido’s revelation follows previous accusations that ISIS fed human meat to their captives. Yazidi parliamentarian Vian Dakhil first brought this practice to light in 2017, but Ms Sido’s firsthand account is one of the clearest confirmations of this depravity.
Fawzia Sido’s ordeal did not end with the forced consumption of human flesh. She was held captive for nine months in an underground prison alongside 200 other Yazidi women and children. Some of the children died due to contaminated water. Ms Sido was also sold to multiple jihadi fighters, including Abu Amar al-Makdisi, with whom she had two children.
After years of captivity, she was rescued by the IDF in a joint operation with the US Embassy and returned to her family in Iraq. However, her children remain in Gaza with her captor’s family, where they are being raised as Arab Muslims.
She said, “Until I got back to Iraq, I was all the time a ‘sabaya,’ also in Gaza,” using the Arabic term for a young woman held captive and exploited sexually.
