Screengrab from a video showing Fawzia Sido (R) after she was rescued by the IDF from Gaza, October 3, 2024.
Credit: X/@WahhabHassoo
A Yazidi woman who was recently freed from Gaza after 10 years of captivity under the Islamic State has claimed that ISIS fed her and other abductees the 'meat of babies'.
Fawzia Sido was just nine years old when she, along with two of her brothers, were captured by the Islamic State in 2014.
Given no food and forced to march from Sinjar to Tal Afar in Iraq — a journey of three-four days — Sido and other captors found themselves starving when they reached their destination, which at the time, was controlled by ISIS.
"They told us that they would give us food. They made rice and they gave us meat to eat with it," the recently-rescued woman recalled in an interview published by Jerusalem Post.
What followed was sheer horror.
"The meat had a weird taste, and some of us had stomach aches afterwards," Sido said, recalling that horrific moment from 2014.
Before long, she realised what the issue was.
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"When we were done, they told us that this was the meat of Yazidi babies," the woman said, adding, "...it wasn't our fault. They forced us."
"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," Sido was further quoted as saying by the publication.
Notably, this is not the first time that such a claim has been made — the accusation that ISIS fed human meat to Yazidi hostages was first made in 2017 by Vian Dakhil, a member of the Iraqi parliament, based on a first-person testimony.
Much of what Sido said afterwards conformed to most accounts of the treatment of Yazidi women by ISIS.
Kept as a captive and later sold as a sex slave, Sido was first raped when she was 10 years, before being sold off to other men several times.
By the time she was 15 or 16, a Gazan militant "married" her, following which she bore him two children, born of rape.
However, after years of captivity, Sido was rescued from Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in a joint operation with the US Embassy that become particularly complex owing to the security situation in the region following Israel's military offensive in Gaza launched last year.
While Sido is now finally free, her children still remain in Gaza with the family of militant she was forced to 'marry'.