Uncredited/AP Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi repeatedly raped and tortured the 26-year-old Arizona woman while she was being held captive in Syria, counter-terrorism officials told ABC News.
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Umm “spilled everything” while under interrogation, including information about al-Baghdadi’s role in Kayla’s capture and details about ISIS leaders’ locations and patterns of life, a counter-terrorism official told ABC News.
Mueller Family-Reuters Kayla Mueller, 26, an American humanitarian worker from Prescott, Ariz.
On multiple occasions, al-Baghdadi returned to the home where Mueller was imprisoned to sexually assault her, the officials told ABC News. A few days later, though, her parents in Arizona confirmed her death. ISIS claimed in a public statement that she had been killed in an airstrike by Jordanian aircraft on a building in Syria. Al-Baghdadi took Mueller as a “wife”, repeatedly raping her when he visited, according to a Yazidi teenager who was held with Mueller and escaped in October 2014. She spent two and a half years as a prisoner of the Islamic State.
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”.
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”. Later she too was raped.
Although the White House said she was “complicit” in Mueller’s captivity, she was handed over to Kurdish authorities in Iraq.
“I saw him often, he came there often”, one Yazidi girl said.
Abu Sayyaf was killed in a Delta Force raid of his Syrian compound in June, which resulted in a treasure trove of intelligence about the Islamic State group.
The article, titled “Slave girls or prostitutes?” appeared in the ninth issue of Dabiq, the glossy Islamic State online magazine.
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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.
