The word genocide has unfortunately lost much of its potency through misuse and unethical appropriation in the past decade. But in the case of the fragile Yazidi people, there can be no disputing the accuracy of the descriptor for the horrors inflicted on them in 2014 by the jihadist movement Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
The Yazidis, a small, ancient people, much diminished in influence and prosperity from previous eras, are indigenous to the Mount Sinjar highland in Kurdistan. Monotheists who do not proselytize, their religion includes elements of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The 2014 genocide was by their reckoning the latest in a string of more than 50 attempts to wipe them out over the centuries. (During World War I, Turkey killed 350,000 Yazidis along with the Armenians, a loss as psychologically devastating as the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.) Perceiving the Yazidis as pagans and infidels, ISIL massacred about 5,000 males, sent throngs of Yazidi boys to terrorist training camps for compelled combat with ISIL forces, and sex-enslaved 7,000 girls and women.
I was sorry, in August, to have missed the genocide’s 10th anniversary as an opportunity for a column on the 1,400 Yazidi refugees who came to Canada. But another opportunity has presented itself in the form of a dramatic human-interest story that broke recently — the saga of a 10-year-long sojourn from ISIL sex slavery to bondage in Gaza to freedom for a young Yazidi woman, a tension-filled cliff-hanger fit for a Netflix film.
The young woman’s rescue from Gaza took place in the shadow of Israel’s ongoing anguish over its own many unredeemed hostages, reason enough in itself to justify a column. But I was doubly motivated. For Fawzia Amin Saydo would likely still be languishing in Gaza if not for the sustained efforts of a Canadian hero, Steve Maman (pronounced Ma-man), who overcame innumerable obstacles in freeing her as the point man in a unique, strange-bedfellow coalition of Iraqi, Jordanian, Israeli and U.S. enablers.
Now 21, Fawzia was captured by ISIL at the age of 11. In 2015 she was forced into marriage with a 24-year-old Palestinian ISIL supporter. In Raqqa, she bore him two children, a boy and a girl. In 2019, the husband was killed during ISIL’s last stand in the Euphrates River Valley. Fawzia and her children joined other families in a march to a detention camp in northern Syria. From there, with ISIL network help, she and her children were smuggled into Turkey, thence to the “protection” of her husband’s family, who oversaw their passage through Egypt to Gaza in 2020. At no time did she have any access to U.S. or Canadian conduits to freedom.
For years, Fawzia was resigned to her fate as a permanent hostage to fortune.
Then, in August 2023, she managed to get hold of a cellphone and, veiled, posted her plight on TikTok. By then, she had made the decision to leave her children with their Gazan family, knowing she’d never get free if she didn’t, but also realistically aware that as the product of rape, they would never be accepted in her Yazidi community. Surviving family members in Sinjar got wind of the TikTok post, then took advice to contact Steve Maman in Montreal as their best bet for effecting her liberation and return.
Maman is an observant Sephardic Jew of Moroccan provenance, father of six, and a successful entrepreneur in the vintage car business, which takes him to many parts of the world. Deeply troubled by ISIL’s genocidal ravages, which reminded him all too vividly of the Holocaust, he parlayed his managerial skills and good connections in the Middle East into such an extraordinary record of rescue and humanitarian aid that he has earned the informal title of “the Jewish Schindler.”
In a 2017 documentary, Maman explained to Global News that he “decided not to remain a spectator” when he saw the horrific scenes of killings and slave markets, proudly broadcast by ISIL themselves (a sick impulse later echoed in Hamas’s GoPro videos detailing their October 7 atrocities in Israel). By serendipity, acquaintance with Canon Andrew White, the “vicar of Baghdad,” a peacemaker and negotiator specializing in hostage negotiations, turned into a fruitful collaboration, with Maman “inheriting” his security team on White’s return to England, an inestimable advantage in his mission.
Maman formed CYCI, a foundation for the liberation of Christians and Yazidis in Iraq, and began raising money to cover expenses and aid. His goal is to rescue 613 Yazidi and Christian hostages, a symbolic number referencing the 613 commandments in the Torah. So far, his team has provided humanitarian aid to about 25,000 Yazidis and Christians in Iraq and Europe, and has rescued 140 hostages, every one of them meticulously documented, including Fawzia, whose case he described to the Jerusalem Post as his “most difficult rescue,” requiring an enormous feat of co-ordination between national players who don’t normally “speak to” each other, and unflagging promotion of her cause, including a speech in the Israeli Knesset.
It was a great moment for Maman when, on Oct. 1, Fawzia was delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem before crossing into Jordan, thence to Baghdad and an emotional reunion with her family. Fawzia’s file is closed. Thousands more cases remain open.
National Post
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