Yazidi rescued from Gaza by Israel thought she was ‘going to be stuck there forever’

An Iraqi Yazidi woman who was kidnapped to Gaza and rescued by Israel during the war in the Strip has spoken to Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth.

“I told myself I was going to be stuck there forever,” Fawzi Amin Sido tells the paper (the comments are translated to English here from the Hebrew in which they were published). “I was sad because I started to realize that’s it, I would never see my family again. I didn’t even know if they were alive or dead.”

Sido was kidnapped by ISIS in 2014 at the age of 11 and trafficked to the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces extracted her in coordination with other nations and transferred her home to her family in Iraq.

Sido says she underwent rape, sexual assault and other forms of abuse by multiple men throughout her years in captivity. She has left behind two children born in the Gaza enclave.

“Life in the Gaza Strip was very difficult, and every step was accompanied by immense hardship,” she says. “There is no freedom, people constantly tell you what to do. This led me to very difficult mental places and also to suicide attempts. I felt like I was going crazy.”

“I look at everything that happened to me there in Gaza as a nightmare or a bad dream, as if it didn’t even happen to me. Now that I’m in Germany, I’m in an emotional storm. I was happy to return home, but I mourn the fact that I had to leave my children behind in Gaza. One of the things that kept me sane was that I wrote every day. I would like to continue that, but now I need a blank, clean page.”