Fawzia Amin Saydo was 10 years old when she and her two younger brothers were kidnapped and enslaved by the Islamic State in Iraq. They escaped, but she was sold as a sex slave five times. She was drugged and raped, forced to convert to Islam, and “married” to a 24-year-old Palestinian ISIS member. Before turning 15, she had two children by him.
He became even more abusive, especially after taking on another so-called wife. Fawzia ended up with his family in Gaza, where Hamas took her phone, cutting off her ability to contact anyone. Even once her captor was gone, apparently having been killed, his family was abusive.
“I started taking pills, like 50 at a time, but it didn’t kill me. I tried to end my life 21 times,” she says.
In 2024, 10 years after her abduction, she found a chance to escape. “I made contact with the Israelis, the Americans and some people from Canada,” she says. Israel, the United States and Jordan rescued her. She’s now free and attempting to bring her children away from her captor’s family.
Learn about it in the latest episode of They Stand Corrected.
It was a heroic operation — a story of survival, international cooperation, and victory against Islamist terrorism. Why haven’t you heard about it? Sure, there was coverage, including by the U.S. government-owned Voice of America, as well as Le Monde and the AFP. But as I explain in this episode, the mainstream media buried the story. It doesn’t fit their institutional, bigoted narrative.
The most shameful response came from the world’s biggest news broadcaster, the BBC. Reporting on the story in Arabic, the site devoted nearly 600 words to a Hamas statement calling her a liar, according to the Prescott Report. The BBC routinely presents Hamas lies as truth, and rarely even gives Israel a sentence to knock them down.
Learn more about the plight of the Yazidis in my Oct. 7 episode, and see Fawzia after her escape, here: