I got an unexpected message from a longtime friend and colleague from my days reporting on the ISIS war in Syria and Iraq. My friend, Alan Duncan, is a Scottish documentary filmmaker and a former infantry soldier. I met him when he was a volunteer fighter with the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga and I was a front-line correspondent. This July, he invited me to meet him in a quiet cafe in Tel Aviv, where he told me an astounding story.
A young Yazidi woman who had been kidnapped by Islamic State—better known as ISIS during its rampage across northern Iraq’s Nineveh Plains in 2014—was now a captive in Gaza. Her family was trying to free her, and Alan wanted me to spread the word to the right people in Israel.
The young woman’s harrowing story illustrates the grim realities of life for many in the Middle East over the past decade. It also demonstrates the extent to which the burgeoning of Islamist and jihadist centers of government in the region has devastated innocent people.
In 2014 Fawzia Sido, then 11, was among the thousands of Yazidis captured in northern Iraq’s Sinjar region. She was separated from her family and enslaved. During the period in which ISIS maintained its caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria, the organization forced Ms. Sido to marry a jihadist from Gaza. Repeatedly raped by this man, who was in his 20s, she bore two children, a boy and a girl.
Read the full article at the Wall Street Journal.
