How a TikTok video led to the rescue of Isis’s sex slave kidnapped at age 11 | World news

A TikTok video of an Isis sex slave kidnapped as a child has led to a secret rescue operation to free her from captivity.

Fawzia Amin Seydou, 21, has almost given up all hope of being rescued after a decade in brutal Islamic State 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 hangs 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 published last September, she asked someone to contact Yazidi activist Nadia Murad, begging viewers to “help me”.

She said: ‘I’m very tired, it’s not just your men, your women and children also harass me… They can attack me, KILL me… it’s really overwhelming.’

Fawzia’s mother assumed her son had long been killed until she came across his interview on a Kurdish TV channel following the TikTok appeal, reports the Sunday Times.

Miraculously, Fawzia survived years in captivity and was transported across borders by her attackers.

How the 11-year-old girl ended up becoming Isis’s wife

Fawzia’s childhood came to a cruel end when the Islamic State terrorized her home area of ​​Sinjar in northern Iraq.

In August 2014, IS fighters killed men and kidnapped 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 marrying a 24-year-old Palestinian from Gaza. who was allegedly a member of Hamas, she was taken to the IS stronghold of Raqqa.

The young woman was forced to “sleep with him” and he was given anesthetic medication, she told Kurdish TV channel Rudaw.

A year after the kidnapping, she gave birth to a boy and later a daughter.

When her Islamic State husband was killed in late 2018 during fighting between Islamic State and Kurdish forces, Fawzia was taken to the infamous Al-Hawl camp for Islamic State wives, the outlet reports.

Fawzia and her children ended up in Gaza after the Islamic State fighter’s family organized passage through Egypt’s secret tunnels into the illegally blockaded Gaza Strip.

She was desperate to leave the camp to save her children’s lives, so Fawzia agreed.

However, in the Gaza city of Rafah, she faced more abuse from her husband’s family, which led to her taking an overdose.

‘The most complex of any rescue’

Fawzia posted her video on TikTok just weeks before Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack, which was followed by Israeli airstrikes that devastated Gaza and killed tens of thousands of civilians.

It was then that Steve Maman set everything in motion to try and get Fawzia out of Gaza after her family contacted him.

Maman – a Moroccan-Canadian vintage car dealer and entrepreneur – is nicknamed the “Jewish Schindler” after rescuing 140 Yazidi women and girls from IS.

But getting Fawzia to safety was “the most difficult and 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 has really complicated things.”

To make the situation even more complicated, Israel and Iraq do not have diplomatic relations.

He said: ‘You would think countries could put aside their differences to help a young girl who was kidnapped at 11 and is suffering. But the most beautiful thing is that, in the end, they succeeded.

Maman obtained 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 conversations, and lobbied the Israeli parliament for her release.

He got Fawzia a phone and some money when the family moved to northern Gaza.

That’s 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 to go on her own to the Kerem Shalom crossing, send an IDF soldier to escort her or send “a trusted person we know from Gaza to secretly pick her up”, he told The Sunday Times .

The team opted for the latter option.

And in the early hours of October 1, Fawzia was told to be ready in six hours for a collection that would take her on a stressful journey.

Goren, who monitored the trip from a control room, said: “We sent drones to escort the car in the air and guided its route to ensure it skirted the roads where Hamas and criminals operated.”

He said he was “happy she is safe,” adding that “if there are other similar cases in Gaza, I encourage you to contact us.”

The official said “there is a difference between Palestinians and foreigners and between locals and someone sold to Hamas” when asked about the thousands of Palestinian women and children killed and injured in Israeli airstrikes, including an attack on a school.

“We have evacuated more than 4,000 Palestinians who need medical treatment,” he told the channel.

For Fawzia, her return is marked by the death of her father 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 kids.

‘Now she’s free, she’s thinking about them and feeling why she couldn’t have brought them too.

“But they are children of Hamas. There was no way they would have let her take them… Nor would the Yazidis have accepted her with them.’

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