Daesh leader used American hostage as sexual slave

The leader of Daesh terrorist group personally kept a 26-year-old American woman as a hostage and raped her repeatedly, The Washington Post said Saturday quoting US 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 Daesh, 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 Daesh 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 Daesh. The sexual enslavement of even teenage girls is seen as religiously endorsed by the group and regarded as a recruiting tool.

News of Baghdadi’s abuse of Mueller, who was from Prescott, Ariz., was first reported Friday by the Independent, a London newspaper.

“As 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 Friday would have been their daughter’s 27th birthday.

Daesh claimed that Mueller was killed earlier this year after a Jordanian fighter plane dropped a bomb on the building where she was being held. The US government confirmed the death but not the cause.

US officials had previously said that Mueller was abused by her captors, but it was not known until now that she was kept as a sex slave of the leader of Daesh.