Fawzia Amin Sido, a Yazidi woman, who was rescued from captivity in Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and the US embassy, told a British documentary filmmaker that after Islamic State terrorists kidnapped her along with many other Yazidis, they fed them meat of Yazidi babies.
Speaking to Alan Duncan, the documentary filmmaker, who also served in the British forces and volunteered with Iraqi Kurds, Fawzia said she was taken hostage by ISIS along with her young brothers, at the age of nine.
From 2014, ISIS systematically targeted the Yazidi community in Iraq, committing, through mass killings, sexual slavery, forced conversions and displacement. Thousands of Yazidis were killed and many women and children were abducted.
Fawzia is a member of this ancient religious minority mostly found in Iraq and Syria which saw more than 5,000 members killed and thousands more kidnapped in an ISIS campaign in 2014 that the UN has said constituted genocide.
“They told us that they would give us food. They made rice and they gave us meat to eat with it. The meat had a weird taste, and some of us had stomach aches afterwards,” Fawzia told the filmmaker, according to the Sun and the Jerusalem Post.
“When we were done, they told us that this was the meat of Yazidi babies. They showed us pictures of beheaded babies, and said ‘these are the kids that you ate now.’ One woman suffered heart failure and died shortly after. The mothers of these babies were there also. One mother recognized her own baby because of its hands,” she said.
Fawzia has been returned to her family in the Sinjar area of northern Iraq. Sinjar and many areas of northern Iraq were under ISIS control until coalition forces defeated them in protracted battles, wresting away territory from their control. However, ISIS, despite becoming weak, still remains active in West Asia and parts of Africa.
More than 6,000 Yazidis were captured by Islamic State militants from Sinjar region in Iraq in 2014, with many sold into sexual slavery or trained as child soldiers and taken across borders, including to Turkey and Syria.
Over the years, more than 3,500 have been rescued or freed, according to Iraqi authorities, with some 2,600 still missing.
Many are feared dead but Yazidi activists say they believe hundreds are still alive.
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