A 21-year-old woman kidnapped by Islamic State fighters in Iraq in 2014 was freed from Gaza this week in a secret operation that involved Iraq, Israel, Jordan and the United States.
The Yazidis, whose faith is rooted in Zoroastrianism, mostly live in Iraq and Syria. They were targeted by ISIL in Iraq’s Sinjar district in a campaign that killed nearly 10,000 people in a matter of days and saw thousands of women kidnapped, raped or abused as sex slaves.
The woman was taken at the age of 11 and later trafficked into Gaza.
She was freed after more than four months of efforts that involved several attempts that failed due to the difficult security situation resulting from Israel’s war in Gaza, Silwan Sinjaree, chief of staff of Iraq’s foreign minister, told the Reuters news agency on Thursday.
The Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs praised the cooperation between the US and Jordan.
“The girl was handed over to her family this evening after returning to Iraq,” the ministry said in a statement on Thursday, without making any mention of Gaza or Israel.
Iraq and Israel do not have any diplomatic ties.
Iraqi officials had been in contact with the woman for months and passed on her information to US officials, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.
A State Department spokesperson said the US on Tuesday “helped to safely evacuate from Gaza a young Yazidi woman to be reunited with her family in Iraq”.
The spokesperson said her captor in Gaza had recently been killed, allowing her to escape and try to find a way home.
A US defence official said the US military did not have a role in the evacuation.
The United States “worked with a number of our partners in the region to get her out of Gaza, to get her safely home”, spokesman Matthew Miller said.
The Israeli military also announced the woman’s rescue.
“She was recently rescued in a secret mission from the Gaza Strip through the Kerem Shalom [Karem Abu Salem] crossing,” it 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.”
Sinjaree said the young woman was in good physical condition but was traumatised by her time in captivity and by the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza.
Some 100,000 Yazidis fled to Europe, the US, Australia and Canada after ISIL’s 2014 massacres, according to the United Nations. It has said ISIL’s actions amounted to genocide.
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