The Israeli army on Thursday said that its troops had freed a Yazidi woman it said had been held in Gaza after being captured by the Islamic State group a decade ago, then trafficked to the Palestinian territory.
The army said the 21-year-old woman of Yazidi origin was rescued in a coordinated and complex operation this week that involved cooperation with the US, Jordan and other international partners.
“She was recently rescued in a secret mission from the Gaza Strip through the Kerem Shalom crossing,” the military said in a statement. “Upon her entry into Israel, she continued to Jordan through the Allenby Bridge crossing and from there returned to her family in Iraq.”
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The Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed the woman’s return, praising the cooperation between the US and Jordan following more than four months of “efforts and follow-ups.”
“The girl was handed over to her family this [Thursday] evening after returning to Iraq,” the ministry said, without making any mention of Gaza or Israel.
In Washington, US Department of State spokesman Matthew Miller said the young woman was only 11 years old when she was “kidnapped by ISIS [Islamic State] in Iraq, sold and forced to marry a Hamas fighter in Gaza, moved to Gaza against her will.”
“The recent death of her captor in Gaza allowed her to escape, and we were contacted by the Iraqi government, who was made aware of the fact that she escaped, that she was alive and that she wanted to come home to her family,” he said.
The US “worked with a number of our partners in the region to get her out of Gaza, to get her safely home,” he added.
Brigadier General Elad Goren of COGAT, the Israeli military body responsible for civil affairs in the Palestinian territories, did not provide specific details about how the woman was moved from Iraq to Gaza, but said it was most likely through the Rafah border crossing from Egypt.
“ISIS sold her to one person from Hamas, but she’s been held by a group from Hamas,” Goren said at a news conference. “[It’s] further proof of the ideological links between Hamas and ISIS.”
Israeli officials have repeatedly tried to equate the Palestinian militant group which has ruled Gaza since 2007 with the Islamic State group, whose extreme interpretation of Sunni Islam saw them target not only non-Muslim communities such as Iraq’s Yazidis, but also Shiite Muslims.
Goren said the woman was physically healthy, “but not in a good mental situation,” following the rescue operation.
“She wasn’t hurt physically, but we understand that the experience she had was terrible,” he told reporters.
The Islamic State group carried out horrific violence against the Yazidi minority as they rampaged across Iraq in 2014, killing men en masse and abducting thousands of girls and women. The women were repeatedly raped and shared out among fighters as sex slaves in a reign of terror qualified as genocide by UN investigators.
After the massacres, about 100,000 Yazidis fled to Europe, the US, Australia and Canada, according to the UN.
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