The leader of the Islamic State personally kept a 26-year-old American woman as a hostage and raped her repeatedly, according to U.S. officials and her family.
The family of Kayla Mueller said in an interview Friday that FBI had informed them that the emir of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had sexually abused their daughter, a humanitarian worker.
Mueller’s parents said the FBI first spoke to the family about the sexual assault in June and provided more details approximately two weeks ago. The bureau pieced together what happened to the American from interviews with other hostages and the captured wife of a senior Islamic State figure.
The FBI also told the Muellers their daughter had been tortured.
“June was hard for me,” said Marsha Mueller, Kayla’s mother. “I was really upset with what I heard.”
News of Baghdadi’s involvement with Mueller, who is from Prescott, Ariz., was first reported Friday by The Independent, a London newspaper.
“As a painful as this is for our family, we just feel like the world needs to know the truth,” said Carl Mueller, Kayla’s father. The Muellers noted that today would have been their daughter’s 27th birthday.
The Islamic State claimed that Mueller was killed earlier this year after a Jordanian fighter plane dropped a bomb on the house where she was being kept. The U.S. government confirmed the death, but not the cause.
Mueller was abducted in August 2013 after leaving a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo.
The disclosure that Mueller was raped by Baghdadi represents the clearest indication yet that the exploitation and abuse of captive women has been not only sanctioned but practiced from the terror group’s highest ranks.
A report released in April by Human Rights Watch accused the Islamic State of war crimes in its brutal treatment of female members of the Yazidi religious sect — many of them teenagers — who were captured in Iraq last August, taken to Syria and forced into sexual slavery by the Islamic State.
After surging into the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar last year, Islamic State fighters captured as many as 1,000 Yazidi women, many of whom were given a bleak choice of “marriage” to a fighter or imprisonment and potential death.
U.S. officials’ understanding of Mueller’s abuse by Baghdadi is based to a large extent on accounts from two Yazidi women who were held captive with the American.
The Human Rights Watch report focused on the accounts of 20 women who escaped the group and provided detailed accounts of their treatment.
One described attempting to kill herself by going into a bathroom, turning on water and grasping a wire “to electrocute myself but there was no electricity.”
After being discovered, she said she was badly beaten, handcuffed to a sink, stripped of her clothes and washed. “They took me out of the bathroom, brought in [a friend] and raped her in the room in front of me,” said the woman, whose full name was not included in the report. Later she too was raped.
Another victim, who was only 12 years old, said that after being abducted in Sinjar the women in her family were separated from the men and sent to a house in Mosul. Islamic State fighters “would come and select us,” she said. One of the captors beat her, she said, and then “spent three days having sex with me.”
A recent version of the English-language magazine issued by the Islamic State described the taking of sexual slaves as religiously justified in an article that appeared to present the exploitation of women as an explicit policy of the so-called Caliphate.
The article, titled “Slave girls or prostitutes?” appeared in the ninth issue of Dabiq, the glossy Islamic State online magazine. It endorses the taking of sexual slaves, saying that they are “lawful for the one who ends up possessing them even without pronouncement of divorce by their (non-Muslim) husbands.”
The article goes on to cite accounts that the Prophet Mohammed “took four slave-girls as concubines,” and purports to serve as a religious basis for a practice that has become a recruitment tool for the terror group.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...hpModule_9d3add6c-8a79-11e2-98d9-3012c1cd8d1e
The family of Kayla Mueller said in an interview Friday that FBI had informed them that the emir of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had sexually abused their daughter, a humanitarian worker.
Mueller’s parents said the FBI first spoke to the family about the sexual assault in June and provided more details approximately two weeks ago. The bureau pieced together what happened to the American from interviews with other hostages and the captured wife of a senior Islamic State figure.
The FBI also told the Muellers their daughter had been tortured.
“June was hard for me,” said Marsha Mueller, Kayla’s mother. “I was really upset with what I heard.”
News of Baghdadi’s involvement with Mueller, who is from Prescott, Ariz., was first reported Friday by The Independent, a London newspaper.
“As a painful as this is for our family, we just feel like the world needs to know the truth,” said Carl Mueller, Kayla’s father. The Muellers noted that today would have been their daughter’s 27th birthday.
The Islamic State claimed that Mueller was killed earlier this year after a Jordanian fighter plane dropped a bomb on the house where she was being kept. The U.S. government confirmed the death, but not the cause.
Mueller was abducted in August 2013 after leaving a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo.
The disclosure that Mueller was raped by Baghdadi represents the clearest indication yet that the exploitation and abuse of captive women has been not only sanctioned but practiced from the terror group’s highest ranks.
A report released in April by Human Rights Watch accused the Islamic State of war crimes in its brutal treatment of female members of the Yazidi religious sect — many of them teenagers — who were captured in Iraq last August, taken to Syria and forced into sexual slavery by the Islamic State.
After surging into the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar last year, Islamic State fighters captured as many as 1,000 Yazidi women, many of whom were given a bleak choice of “marriage” to a fighter or imprisonment and potential death.
U.S. officials’ understanding of Mueller’s abuse by Baghdadi is based to a large extent on accounts from two Yazidi women who were held captive with the American.
The Human Rights Watch report focused on the accounts of 20 women who escaped the group and provided detailed accounts of their treatment.
One described attempting to kill herself by going into a bathroom, turning on water and grasping a wire “to electrocute myself but there was no electricity.”
After being discovered, she said she was badly beaten, handcuffed to a sink, stripped of her clothes and washed. “They took me out of the bathroom, brought in [a friend] and raped her in the room in front of me,” said the woman, whose full name was not included in the report. Later she too was raped.
Another victim, who was only 12 years old, said that after being abducted in Sinjar the women in her family were separated from the men and sent to a house in Mosul. Islamic State fighters “would come and select us,” she said. One of the captors beat her, she said, and then “spent three days having sex with me.”
A recent version of the English-language magazine issued by the Islamic State described the taking of sexual slaves as religiously justified in an article that appeared to present the exploitation of women as an explicit policy of the so-called Caliphate.
The article, titled “Slave girls or prostitutes?” appeared in the ninth issue of Dabiq, the glossy Islamic State online magazine. It endorses the taking of sexual slaves, saying that they are “lawful for the one who ends up possessing them even without pronouncement of divorce by their (non-Muslim) husbands.”
The article goes on to cite accounts that the Prophet Mohammed “took four slave-girls as concubines,” and purports to serve as a religious basis for a practice that has become a recruitment tool for the terror group.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...hpModule_9d3add6c-8a79-11e2-98d9-3012c1cd8d1e
