Before her death earlier this year, American hostage Kayla Mueller was repeatedly raped by the top leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, according to counter-terrorism officials.
Mueller's family confirmed to ABC News that government officials have
told them that their daughter, who would have turned 27 today, was the
victim of repeated sexual assaults by al-Baghdadi.
"We were told Kayla was tortured, that she was the property of
al-Baghdadi. We were told that in June by the government," Kayla's
parents, Carl and Marsha Mueller, told ABC News today.
Al-Baghdadi, an Iraqi who calls himself "Caliph" as ruler of the Islamic
State, personally brought the enslaved 26-year-old humanitarian aid
worker from Prescott, Arizona, to be imprisoned inside the home of Abu
Sayyaf, a Tunisian in charge of oil and gas revenue for the group,
counter-terrorism officials have told ABC News over the past several
months.
"Baghdadi was at the house of Sayyaf. He delivered Kayla Mueller, live
and in person," one of several counter-terrorism officials briefed on
the case told ABC News.
The top terror leader later regularly visited the compound to meet with
Sayyaf and to repeatedly sexually assault Mueller, officials said.
In early February ISIS claimed Mueller had been killed in a coalition
bombardment in Syria. Three months later, on May 16, the U.S. Army's
elite hostage-rescue and counter-terrorism unit known as Delta Force
conducted a ground raid to capture Abu Sayyaf but was forced to kill him
instead when he raised a weapon, officials said.
The new revelations about Mueller's long ordeal -- which involved
torture since the beginning of her one-and-a-half years of captivity,
her family has been told by the FBI -- shatter rumors spread by some
officials that she had cooperated or was a willing spouse, which has
deeply upset her family and many inside her case.
Some speculation was based on a smuggled letter released by her family
in which the captive Mueller wrote, about a year into her captivity,
that she was "completely unharmed + healthy (put on weight in fact); I
have been treated w/ the utmost respect + kindness."
The information about al-Baghdadi's extraordinary direct role in the
captivity and physical abuse of Kayla Mueller was drawn from, among many
sources, the U.S. debriefings of at least least two Yezedi teenage
girls, ages 16 and 18, held as sex slaves in the Sayyaf compound as well
as from the interrogation of Abu Sayyaf's wife Umm Sayyaf, who was
captured in the U.S. raid, the officials told ABC News.
Officials stressed that all of what transpired with many girls kept as
sex slaves inside the Sayyaf household hasn't been reconstructed
completely and is still is in the process of being verified, though
al-Baghdadi's role in abusing Mueller is certain.
At least two Yezedi teens had escaped last year and another girl was
rescued by the American ground assault force in Syria in May, which the
White House announced at the time.
Last fall, the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command in Irbil, Iraq,
located one girl, who had escaped Sayyaf’s clutches, and learned the
whereabouts of the last American known to be in ISIS hands, officials
said. American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff,
along with aid worker Peter "Abdul-Rahman" Kassig and two British aid
workers, had been brutally beheaded in ISIS execution videos by then.
By January, U.S. special operations senior commanders were aggressively
attempting to find and track Sayyaf, a "top tier leader" responsible for
funding the ISIS war machine, in order to plan a possible rescue of
Mueller and to bring her intelligence-rich captor to justice in a U.S.
courtroom, several officials said.
After enforcing a media blackout on names of hostages demanded by ISIS
in private emails to their families for months, White House Chief of
Staff Dennis McDonough inadvertently blurted out Mueller's first name on
ABC News’ "This Week" on January 25 as he explained efforts to find
her: "Kayla's family knows how strongly the president feels about this
and we will continue to work this,” he said then.
Asked about Mueller on NBC on Feb. 1, President Obama said, "Well, what
we can say is that, as has been true of all the hostages, that we are
deploying all the assets that we can working with all the coalition
allies that we can to identify her location. And we are in very close
contact with the family trying to keep them updated."
But days later, Mueller was dead. ISIS claimed in a public statement
that she had been killed in an airstrike by Jordanian aircraft on a
building in Syria. Though U.S. officials somehow quickly confirmed her
death, they have since disputed ISIS's claim of how she perished. How
Kayla Mueller actually died isn't known, officials told ABC News.
From that point forward, the military's Joint Special Operations Command
zeroed in on Abu Sayyaf. They tracked him to a location in Syria by
early March and awaited optimal conditions to launch a rare ground raid.
A Delta Force ground assault team on May 16 swiftly overwhelmed Sayyaf's guards
-- some of whom, realizing the compound was under attack, attempted
unsuccessfully to hide from the U.S. operators, an official said.
It was initially suspected by U.S. officials that Mueller had been
forced into a "marriage" to Sayyaf. But after Delta Force killed him,
newer intelligence pointed firmly to al-Baghdadi as Mueller's primary
victimizer.
The Yezedi teens -- and others -- provided the U.S. with a wealth of
information used to interrogate Umm Sayyaf, who "spilled everything,"
including details about various ISIS leaders' "locations and patterns of
life," a counter-terrorism official told ABC News.
Eventually the girls who had survived captivity with the Sayyafs were
allowed to leave the protection of the U.S. military in Irbil and return
to normal civilian lives, though occasionally shadowed by special
operators worried for their safety in public places.
Last week, the U.S. announced that Umm Sayyaf was handed over to Kurdish
authorities in Irbil, who are known for lightning-swift justice. Some
U.S. prosecutors had hoped to try her in federal court in Manhattan.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has been supportive of the Mueller
family, wrote to Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Thursday demanding to
know why Umm Sayyaf was given to Kurdish authorities rather than
brought to the U.S. for trial.
As her family marked Mueller’s 27th birthday, they pointed to a video made in tribute
in which their daughter said she had learned that, "Everything happens
for a reason, and that nothing should be a regret, and that you're
always learning about yourself through other people."
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