2/7/2015

ISIS Declares Airstrike Killed a U.S. Hostage - NYTimes.com

http://nyti.ms/1C58BUk

MIDDLE EAST

ISIS Declare Airtrike Killed a U.S. Hotage

RUKMINI CALLIMACHI and RICK GLADSTON

F. 6, 2015

She had always been the unidentified, lone female American hostage of the
Islamic State. For nearly 17 months, while her fellow American captives were
beheaded one after another in serial executions posted on YouTube, Kayla
Muellers name remained a closely guarded secret, whispered among
reporters, government officials and hostage negotiators all fearing that any
public mention might imperil her life.
On Friday, the Islamic State confirmed her identity, announcing that Ms.
Mueller, a 26-year-old aid worker from Prescott, Ariz., had been killed in the
falling rubble of a building in northern Syria that it said had been struck by
bombs from a Jordanian warplane. Both the Jordanian and American
governments said there was no proof, even as they rushed to deplore her
possible death. Top Jordanian officials said the announcement was cynical
propaganda.
But the groups use of Ms. Muellers name for the first time prompted her
family and its advisers to confirm her prolonged captivity in a statement and
changed the calculus about what could be reported about her life. It threw a
spotlight on a hostage ordeal that befell an eager and deeply idealistic young
woman, who had ventured into one of the most dangerous parts of Syria
apparently without the backing of an aid organization, according to interviews
with advisers to the family and employees of Doctors Without Borders, the
international medical charity that hosted Ms. Mueller during her brief stay in
one of Syrias ravaged cities.
Initially based in southern Turkey, where she had worked for at least two

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ISIS Declares Airstrike Killed a U.S. Hostage - NYTimes.com

aid organizations assisting Syrian refugees, Ms. Mueller appears to have

driven into the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Aug. 3, 2013, alongside a
man who has been alternatively described as her Syrian friend or colleague,
and by others as either her boyfriend or her fianc. He had been invited to
travel to the city to help fix the Internet connection for a compound run by the
Spanish chapter of Doctors Without Borders, known in Spanish as Mdicos
Sin Fronteras, or M.S.F. Employees of the charity said they were surprised
when the young Syrian man arrived with Ms. Mueller.
On Aug. 3, 2013, a technician sent by a company contracted by M.S.F.
arrived at one of the organizations structures in Aleppo, Syria, to perform
repairs. Unbeknown to the M.S.F. team, Kayla, a friend of the technicians, was
accompanying him, said the groups spokesman, Tim Shenk, in a statement.
It took longer than expected to finish the repair work, and as night
approached, M.S.F. agreed to let the two stay overnight, out of concern for
their safety, said Mr. Shenk. The next day the charity arranged to transport
them to an Aleppo bus stop, where they planned to catch a bus back to Turkey.
They never made it. They were abducted on the road, the statement said.
Although Ms. Mueller had moved to Turkey in December 2012 to work
with two organizations helping refugees including the Danish Refugee
Council she was not employed by either of those groups when she entered
Syria at a time when numerous foreigners already had been kidnapped inside
the country, said the Mueller family advisers. What she was doing in Aleppo
beyond accompanying her Syrian companion remains unclear.
Her companion, who was released after several months, declined to be
interviewed.
There is a lot of murkiness about what she was doing there. Thats been
the problem no one really knows, said one adviser of the Muellers.
In the statement released Friday, the family said that it had received the
first message from Ms. Muellers captors in May 2014 nine months after her
disappearance. The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, provided initial
proof that she was alive, the family said.
Then on July 12, 2014, the Islamic State announced that it would kill her

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ISIS Declares Airstrike Killed a U.S. Hostage - NYTimes.com

within 30 days unless the family provided a ransom of 5 million euros ($5.6
million), or exchanged her for Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani scientist
educated in America who was convicted of trying to kill American soldiers and
F.B.I. agents in Afghanistan in 2008. She is serving a sentence in a Texas jail,
according to an email explaining the demands forwarded to The New York
Times by an acquaintance of the Muellers. When the deadline passed, nothing
happened, prompting the family to hope that Ms. Mueller might be spared.
During those 30 days, her parents shared their ordeal only with the tightknit group of advisers and with parents of other American hostages held by the
Islamic State. Together the anxious parents traveled to Washington to meet
Obama administration officials to push for the release of their children. That
was shortly before the United States began airstrikes against the Islamic State
in concert with European and Arab allies. Soon after, in August, the Islamic
State posted the first of its decapitation videos, starting with the beheading of
the American James Foley, and then in quick succession the fellow Americans
Steven J. Sotloff and Peter Kassig.
A group of concerned advisers helping the Muellers dispatched
negotiators to Turkey, Qatar, Lebanon and Iraq in an effort to find a way to
contact the Islamic State to negotiate Ms. Muellers release. They spent many
hours parsing messages by the Islamic State, trying to answer the crucial
question: Would the group, which had shown no qualms about killing
American male hostages, go so far as to behead a 26-year-old woman?
They feared the worst after the Islamic State released a video on Tuesday
showing the immolation of a captured Jordanian pilot, a killing that shocked
the world and particularly infuriated Jordan. In retaliation, the Jordanians
then executed two prisoners convicted of terrorism, including a Qaeda-linked
woman who had tried to blow up a hotel in Amman.
The Jordanians then began their own extensive bombings of Islamic State
targets in Syria.
It was one of those attacks, the Islamic State said in its message Friday,
that killed Ms. Mueller.
Experts on the Middle East said they believed Ms. Mueller was dead, since

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ISIS Declares Airstrike Killed a U.S. Hostage - NYTimes.com

the Islamic State had no motivation to make such an assertion about a hostage
if it were not true. Some also speculated that the Islamic State might have
killed her beforehand and taken the opportunity to blame the Jordanian
bombs in her death.
Andrew J. Tabler, senior fellow at the Program on Arab Politics at the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said it was possible the militants
simply wanted to drive a wedge between regional and Western members of
the coalition.
Ms. Mueller, who was born in 1988, had a deep desire to help those less
fortunate. After graduating from Northern Arizona University, she worked for
aid organizations in India and Israel and in the occupied Palestinian
territories, according to statement from her family. In 2012, she was drawn to
what would soon become the worlds top humanitarian crisis, the Syrian civil
war. She moved to Turkey, where many Syrians were seeking refuge, and she
settled in a border town assisting Syrian families for the Danish Refugee
Council and an aid group called Support to Life. The common thread of
Kaylas life has been her quiet leadership and strong desire to serve others,
her family said in the statement.
The family advisers said there was not any indication that she had been
working with an aid group when she went to Aleppo. She had no professional
connection to the M.S.F. compound, said Carlos Francisco Cabello, the current
head of the Spanish division of Doctors Without Borders Syria mission.
She appeared there with the external technician in a war zone. We didnt
know that she was coming, or otherwise we would not allow her to visit, Mr.
Cabello said, speaking by telephone from Turkey. U.S. and U.K. citizens at
that moment, and even now, were not considered for the Syrian mission for
M.S.F. for obvious security reasons, he said.
She was never employed by M.S.F.-Spain in Syria. This must be clear, he
said, adding, Aleppo at that time and now is a war zone.
In an interview with The Daily Courier in Arizona, Ms. Mueller described
how fulfilled she felt by her work with refugees, which included leading art
classes for displaced Syrian children.

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ISIS Declares Airstrike Killed a U.S. Hostage - NYTimes.com

For as long as I live, I will not let this suffering be normal, she said.
Correction:February6,2015
Anearlierversionofthisarticlemisstatedtheyearwhenthewomanwas
takenhostage.ItwasAugustof2013,notlastyear.
Correction:February7,2015
AnearlierversionofthisarticlemisstatedtheroleofCarlosFranciscoCabelloin
DoctorsWithoutBorders.HeisthecurrentheadofitsSpanishdivisionsSyria
mission.HeisnottheheadofitsSpanishdivision.
Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt and Julie Hirschfeld Davis from
Washington; Rana F. Sweis and Ranya Kadri from Amman, Jordan; Anne
Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon; and Sheri Fink from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on February 7, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with
the headline: ISIS Declares Airstrike Killed A U.S. Woman.

2015 The New York Times Company

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