Mick Hartley

Jonathan Spyer in the Jerusalem Post on the almost unimaginable horrors experienced by rescued Yazidi captive Fawzia Sido:

It is now two weeks since the rescue of the Yazidi hostage Fawzia Amin Sido from captivity in Gaza by the IDF, in a joint operation also involving the US Embassy.

Fawzia has been returned to her family in the Sinjar area of northern Iraq. This week, she sat for her first filmed interview since her liberation….

Fawzia Sido, aged nine, was captured with two of her brothers by Islamic State in the summer of 2014. Following their capture, she and one of her brothers, Fawaz, were made to take part in a forced march from Sinjar to Tal Afar, at that time under the control of Islamic State. The journey took three or four days, during which time the Yazidis were given no food by their captors.

On arrival to Tal Afar, according to Fawzia, “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.

“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.”

And to the interviewer’s mute sounds of horror, she continues “It’s very hard, but it wasn’t our fault. They forced us. But it’s very hard to know that it happened. But it was not in our hands.”

The accusation that Islamic State fed human meat to Yazidi captives has been made before, though this has never become one of the widely known elements of the ISIS story in the West. Perhaps the human mind simply and instinctively recoils from such depravity, and as a result it goes unrecorded.

Vian Dakhil, a Yazidi member of the Iraqi parliament, was the first to reveal details of this practice by ISIS, in 2017. Dakhil related a testimony she had collected similar in its details to that given by Fawzia Sido. Dakhil revealed these details in an interview given to the Egyptian “Extra News” Channel, which was then translated by Memri.

Here's that MEMRI clip:

"One of the women whom we managed to retrieve from ISIS said that she was held in a cellar for three days, without food or anything. Afterwards, they brought her a plate of rice and meat. She ate the food because she was very hungry. When she finished, they said to her: We cooked your one-year-old son that we took from you, and this is what you just ate.

"One of the girls said that they took six of her sisters. Her youngest sister, a ten-year-old girl, was raped to death in front of her father and sisters. She was ten years old. The question that we keep asking is: 'Why?' Why did these savages do this to us?"