This screenshot, taken from a social media video released on October 3, shows Yazidi woman Fawzia Sido, who was kidnapped by Islamic State in Iraq and released from Gaza this week, meeting her relatives in an unknown location .

The Israeli army said Thursday it had rescued a 21-year-old Yazidi woman held captive by Hamas in Gaza for more than a decade after being trafficked by ISIS, in a “complex operation” coordinated with the United States and Israel. other international actors.

The woman, Fawzia Amin Sido, told CNN that she was kidnapped by ISIS as a child in August 2014, when the group captured the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq. ISIS executed Yazidi men and boys and committed acts of sexual violence and rape against women and girls, among other things, as CNN has reported.

Sido said she was trafficked to different locations in different countries over the next few years.

She told CNN that she spent a year in Rafah in southern Gaza, where life was “unbearable,” and had been moving regularly since the war between Israel and Hamas broke out in October 2023 until Tuesday, when she said an NGO had saved her.

“Hamas continuously harassed me because of my Yazidi background and contact with my family, even going so far as to format my phone during their investigations,” she said.

“Upon entering Israel, she continued to Jordan via the Allenby Bridge Crossing and from there returned to her family in Iraq.”

The IDF said her captor was killed, “presumably during IDF attacks” in Gaza, allowing her to flee to a shelter.

Fawzia made no mention of a strike when she spoke to CNN, saying only that she had been rescued in Rafah by an NGO, the name of which she could not remember. “From there, American officials took me and helped bring me back to Baghdad,” she said.

The United States and Iraq confirmed they had worked together to help evacuate Sido from Gaza.

“We were contacted by the Iraqi government, who were informed that she escaped, that she was alive and that she wanted to come home to her family,” state spokesman Matthew Miller said Thursday.

The Iraqi Foreign Ministry said Sido was released after more than four months of efforts by Iraqi government agencies working with U.S. and Jordanian authorities.

An Israeli diplomat, David Saranga, released a video of Sido reuniting with her family members. Saranga said her captor was “a Palestinian Hamas-ISIS member.”