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Yazidi woman kidnapped by ISIS in Iraq escapes from Gaza a decade later, officials say
A Yazidi woman kidnapped from her home by ISIS terrorists in Iraq when she was just 11 years old has been reunited with her family after years stranded in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, Iraqi and Israeli officials said Thursday.
The woman, identified by Iraq’s Foreign Ministry as Fawzia Amin Sido, now 21, was abducted along with thousands of other Yazidi women from northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region in August 2014. According to a report in the Jerusalem Post, she survived years of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of a Palestinian ISIS militant she was forced to marry, and that she was moved to Gaza several years ago.
Sido returned to Iraq and was reunited with her mother and the rest of her surviving family in Sinjar, northwest Iraq, on Wednesday.
Steve Maman, a Jewish Canadian businessman sometimes referred to as “the Jewish Schindler” for his efforts to help Yazidis escape ISIS captivity, posted a video on social media Thursday showing the moment the family was reunited after 10 years.
“I made a promise to Fawzia the Yazidi who was hostage of Hamas in Gaza that I would bring her back home to her mother in Sinjar,” Maman wrote in his post on X. “To her it seemed surreal and impossible but not to me, my only enemy was time.”
David Saranga, the director of the Digital Diplomacy Bureau at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a separate post that Sido had “finally been rescued by the Israeli security forces,” without providing any details of the operation.
The Israel Defense Forces said on Thursday that the operation was led by the defense ministry’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories in collaboration with the US Embassy in Israel.
The Iraqi Foreign Ministry did not mention Israeli involvement in its statement, but said Sido had been freed “through joint efforts between the [Iraqi] Foreign Ministry and the National Intelligence Service” in coordination with the U.S. embassies in Baghdad and Amman and with Jordanian authorities. The ministry said the process had taken four months.
Maman told the Jerusalem Post that Sido escaped from her Palestinian captor’s family in late 2023 after he was killed in an Israeli airstrike. She then sought refuge in a safe house within “walking distance” of IDF forces, but spent a month waiting for permission to leave Gaza, he told the newspaper.
The IDF said Sido “was recently rescued in a secret mission from the Gaza Strip through the Kerem Shalom Crossing” and crossed through Israel into Jordan before traveling home to Iraq.
The Free Yezidi Foundation estimates that more than 2,600 Yazidis remain missing a decade after ISIS’ documented genocide against the religious minority group.
ISIS militants are believed to have kidnapped more than 6,000 Yazidi women and girls as they overran the Sinjar mountains in northern Iraq in 2014. Many were sold as sex slaves and then sold or traded between the terrorists during their years in control of large swathes of Iraq and Syria.
Yazidi women are still rescued with some regularity from the sprawling al-Hol displacement camp in northern Syria, where they have continued to live trapped among ISIS fighters.
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Wisconsin school shooter was in contact with California man plotting his own attack, court documents say
The shooter who killed a student and teacher at a religious school in Wisconsin brought two guns to the school and was in contact with a man in California whom authorities say was planning to attack a government building, according to authorities and court documents that became public Wednesday.
Police were still investigating why the 15-year-old student at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison shot and killed a fellow student and teacher on Monday before shooting herself, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes told the Associated Press Wednesday. Two other students who were shot remained in critical condition on Wednesday.
A Southern California judge issued a restraining order Tuesday under California’s gun red flag law against a 20-year-old Carlsbad man. The order requires the man to turn his guns and ammunition into police within 48 hours unless an officer asks for them sooner because he poses an immediate danger to himself and others.
Carlsbad is located just north of San Diego.
According to the order, the man told FBI agents that he had been messaging Natalie Rupnow, the Wisconsin shooter, about attacking a government building with a gun and explosives. The order doesn’t say what building he had targeted or when he planned to launch his attack. It also doesn’t detail his interactions with Rupnow except to state that the man was plotting a mass shooting with her.
CBS’ San Diego affiliate KFMB-TV reported that law enforcement searched the man’s home Tuesday night after the order was signed by the judge.
Police, with the assistance of the FBI, were scouring online records and other resources and speaking with the shooter’s parents and classmates in an attempt to determine a motive for the shooting, Barnes told the AP.
Police don’t know if anyone was targeted in the attack or if the attack had been planned in advance, the chief said. Police said the shooting occurred in a classroom where a study hall was taking place involving students from several grades.
“I do not know if if she planned it that day or if she planned it a week prior,” Barnes said. “To me, bringing a gun to school to hurt people is planning. And so we don’t know what the premeditation is.”
On a Madison city website providing details about the shooting, police disclosed Wednesday that two guns were found at the school, but only one was used in the shooting. A law enforcement source previously told CBS News the weapon used appears to have been a 9 mm pistol.
Barnes told the AP that he did not know how the suspected shooter obtained the guns and he declined to say who purchased them, citing the ongoing investigation.
No decisions have been made about whether Rupnow’s parents might be charged in relation to the shooting, but they have been cooperating, Barnes told the AP.
Abundant Life is a nondenominational Christian school that offers prekindergarten classes through high school. About 420 students attend the institution.
The Dan County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the two people killed Wednesday as 42-year-old Erin West and 14-year-old Rubi Vergara.
An online obituary on a local funeral site stated Vergara was a freshman who leaves behind her parents, one brother, and a large extended family. It described her as “an avid reader” who “loved art, singing and playing keyboard in the family worship band.”
West’s exact position with the school was unclear.
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