WaPo | 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 the FBI had informed them that Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi, the emir of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, had sexually
abused their daughter, a humanitarian worker.
Mueller’s parents
said the FBI first spoke to the family about the sexual assault in late
June and provided more details 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 that their daughter had been tortured.
“June was hard for me,” said Marsha Mueller, Kayla’s mother. “I was really upset with what I heard.”
The
disclosure that Mueller was raped by Baghdadi adds to the grim evidence
that the exploitation and abuse of women has been sanctioned at the
highest levels of the Islamic State. The sexual enslavement of even
teenage girls is seen as religiously endorsed by the group and regarded
as a recruiting tool.
