A decade after the so-called Islamic State (Isis) kidnapped her as a nine-year-old, Fawzia Amin Sido is finally free.
She was abducted during the terror group’s 2014 attack on Kurdish-majority Sinjar in northern Iraq and spent the next 10 years being trafficked between militants, beaten and repeatedly raped, before she was rescued from Gaza in an international operation in 2024.
But despite escaping brutality beyond words, the 21-year-old Yazidi survivor says her harrowing journey is not over.
Hundreds of Yazidis – members of an ancient religious minority – are still missing more than a decade after Isis’s campaign, recognised internationally as a genocide. Ms Sido, who is living under humanitarian protection in Germany, is working to find them and bring them home.
Before Isis stormed her home village of Gir Zarek, Ms Sido told The i Paper in an exclusive interview, her childhood had been “filled with innocence and peace”.
“My little dream was to grow up and become a doctor so I could heal people from their pain,” she said. “All that occupied my mind in the morning was for the sun to rise so I could run to my friends and school, and then return home to hug my dolls. It was a simple, safe life, and I never knew those small dreams would be stolen from me so suddenly.”
Ms Sido grew up peacefully with her family in northern Iraq, where she harboured dreams of becoming a doctor“When Isis attacked Shingal [as it is known in Kurdish] on 3 August, we were sleeping on the roof of our house,” she said. “My family immediately ran down to the first floor. I stayed upstairs alone on the roof for about two hours, while bullets passed all around me. I felt immense fear, as if those hours would never end.”
As Isis fighters advanced, she fled with her family towards the slopes of Mount Sinjar in the Yazidi heartland, holding tightly on to her five-year-old brother’s hand. “In the midst of the fear, chaos, and escape, he was the most important thing to me. But when [Isis] came, they tore me away from his hand. This is the memory that stays with me to this day.”
Ms Sido was taken into captivity. Many thousands were massacred and abducted. Many Yazidi died of thirst and hunger while trapped on Mount Sinjar.
For Ms Sido, what followed was a decade of unimaginable abuse.
“These men were from different countries. To them, I was not a human being with feelings, dreams, or a family. They sold me, gave me orders, and controlled me,” she said. “They tied me up, beat me, and raped me. They electrocuted me and treated me with severe cruelty. It was a life without freedom, without protection, and without dignity.”
Clothes and destroyed cars of the Yazidi population left behind while they were escaping Isis in Sinjar, Iraq, in January 2016 (Photo: Alessandro Rota/Getty)In 2020, Ms Sido was taken to Gaza, where she was sold to a jihadist, forced into marriage under the threat of violence and made to bear two children while still under the age of 15. “You have to imagine that the worst thing that could happen to a woman in this world happened to me,” she said.
“I was a lost girl. I was forced to do everything, absolutely everything. It is disgusting. I did not feel like a human being. Rather, I felt like a piece of property.”
For three months she was imprisoned in a windowless room, where the abuse became so relentless she attempted to take her own life several times. “My greatest support was thinking about my family. I wanted to return to them one day,” she said. “I tried to [kill myself] several times; sometimes I thought that perhaps I could reach my family that way.
“But the memory of my family and my mother tongue gave me strength. It reminded me of who I am and where I came from.”
Eventually, another woman secretly handed her a mobile phone. Hiding her face beneath a niqab, she recorded a video in Kurdish and uploaded it to TikTok. “The first attempt failed because many people did not believe that a Yazidi girl could be in Gaza. But on the second attempt, I was believed,” she said.
The video triggered a complex rescue operation involving authorities in the United States, Iraq, Jordan and Israel, and in October 2024, as the Israel-Hamas war raged around her, she was freed. “When I realised I was free, the feeling was indescribable. Freedom after years of captivity feels like something unrealistic,” she said.
A funeral ceremony for victims from the Yazidi minority executed by Isis in 2014, in front of a memorial monument in Sinjar in January 2024 (Photo: Zaid al-Obeidi/AFP)Yet her rescue has not erased the trauma. “Freedom after captivity is not an easy step; rather, it is the beginning of another painful journey. The hardest challenge I faced was the shock of returning to an entirely new reality, trying to live with a heart weighed down by brutal memories.
“But today, with all the strength and remnants of hope I possess, I am trying to mend my soul and rebuild my life, step by step.”
Throughout her captivity, she dreamed of seeing her father again, but he died in 2024 before they could be reunited. “The moment that tears my heart apart the most, and which I can never forget, is our final phone call while my father was on his deathbed,” she said.
Now she fears she is running out of time to see her gravely ill mother, who remains in Iraq with her brother.
Standing before diplomats and human rights advocates at a UN event in Geneva last month, Ms Sido said she was speaking not as a statistic, but as “a human being who has endured what no one on Earth should ever have to endure”. Addressing the German government, she urged ministers to allow her family to join her through humanitarian family reunification.
“I have come to appeal to your conscience,” she said, describing reunification as “the only cure” for the trauma she continues to carry.
Her plea extends beyond her own family. “I want to tell the world that these women and children – many of whom have become adults today – have never lost hope of returning to their families. Please do not stop searching for them.”
She hopes people remember, especially today, on the 12th anniversary of the genocide, that the Yazidis are “not just victims or passing numbers in the pages of history. Instead, we are a living symbol of resilience and the power of survival”.
“They tried to erase us, but we endured – and my story is proof that life always triumphs in the end.”
For confidential support, Samaritans are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Call for free on 116 123 or visit samaritans.org.
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