The United States indicated Thursday that it had helped, at the request of Iraq and with the help of Israel, to bring out Gaza gangs a young woman from the Yazidi minority, who was in captivity but was able to escape.
“I can tell you that she is now safe with her family in Iraq,” said State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller when asked about this during his daily press briefing. He confirmed that the United States had “contributed to the safe evacuation of a young Yazidi woman from Gaza so that she could be reunited with her family in Iraq.”
He explained that “the circumstances of this case are really, really difficult to describe”, speaking of a “young woman who, 10 years ago, when she was 11 years old, was kidnapped by the group Islamic State in Iraq, sold and forced to marry a Hamas fighter in Gaza, and moved to Gaza against her will.
“The recent death of his captor in Gaza allowed him to escape,” the spokesperson continued, saying that the United States was then contacted by the Iraqi government to try to help him escape from the Strip. from Gaza, where the Israeli army is in conflict against Hamas since the latter’s attack on Israel on October 7. He declined to go into detail about the operation, saying only that Washington had cooperated with the “government of Israel and other countries in the region.” But, he said, over the past 12 months, “we have been able to repeatedly get people out” in specific cases.
The Yazidis form a Kurdo-speaking minority following a pre-Islamic religion and have been persecuted by jihadists for several years.
