Kayla Mueller was forced to marry ISIS leader: report
The Iraqi teenager met American aid worker Kayla Mueller in the sweltering confines of the darkened cell in which they were being held captive by the Islamic State.
They shared stories of their experiences, which included being tortured and raped, forced to serve as sex slaves and wives to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The 16-year-old offered a plan for their escape, but Mueller, who was 26, said she was too scared she’d be caught and put to death.
"She told me about the American journalist who was beheaded, and she said, 'If I escape, they will behead me,'" the young Iraqi woman, identified as "Zeinat," told CNN. "The first time I told her I would escape, she said, 'Don't run away; if they catch you, they will surely kill you."
Zeinat’s account of her ordeal, which began when she was captured by ISIS soldiers near Mount Sinjar, in Iraq, and held captive until her daring escape about 10 weeks later, offers a look at the depraved conditions to which Mueller and scores of other young women have been subjected.
Mueller was working with Syrian refugees when she was captured in August 2013. She was forced to dress in a niqab, a veil that covered her face, and her captor forbade other men from looking at her. He also gave her an expensive watch as a sign of ownership, Zeinat said.
Kayla Mueller, 26, was working as a humanitarian aid worker in Syria in 2013 and was killed in February. ISIS claims her death was from a coalition led air strike.
ISIS has claimed that Mueller was killed by a coalition air strike in Syria, on Feb. 10. The U.S. hasn’t said how Mueller was killed.
Her death was confirmed after the terror group sent her family pictures of her corpse. Her parents said they were told Mueller was tortured, that she was the property of al-Baghdadi.
“She was a friend, she was like a sister to me,” Zeinat said of Mueller, whom she met in a “jail” in Raqqa, Syria, after the home to which she and several others had tried to flee turned them in. “After that, we stayed together and became like sisters.”
Zeinat described the squalid circumstances they were forced to endure during the first weeks of their relationship.
“There was so little room (in the cell), and it was dark, with no power,” she said. “It was summer, and it was so hot.”
The women had to live on the small rations of bread and cheese they were given in the morning along with rice or macaroni at night.
“Just a little bit, and we were starving,” she said.
Eventually they moved to a house owned by an ISIS official, Abu Sayyaf, where Mueller told Zeinat she was taken by al-Baghdadi to be his wife.
“We asked her, ‘Why are you crying?’ and Kayla told us al-Baghdadi said: ‘I am going to marry you by force and you are going to be my wife. If you refuse, I will kill you,’” she said.
Mueller told her that al-Baghdadi raped her four times.
ISIS Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi took Mueller for a wife and forced girls he held capitive to convert or he would kill them, Zeinat said.
But when she told Mueller they should try to escape, the American rejected the idea.
The young women had been forced to watch a video of the beheading of an American journalist, Zeinat told CNN, adding that they were threatened with the same fate.
“If you don’t convert to Islam, this will happen to you — we will behead all of you,’” she said they were told. “‘You have two choices: Convert to Islam, or die like this.’”
The ISIS leader would periodically talk to the women in the home, but he also would leave for several days at a time, she said. He would get up at 10 a.m. and go to bed at midnight, she said, and he spent several hours a day alone in his room.
“He treated us so badly,” she said. “He would always tell us, ‘Forget your father and your brothers; we have killed them, and we have married off your mothers and sisters. Forget them.’”
A 16-year-old girl from iraq who was given the alias ‘Zeinat’ told CNN she was held captive in a Syrian home by ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi along with American hostage Mueller.
Zeinat finally managed to escape one night when she and a friend broke out of a small window in their room and trekked to a nearby village. Two men on motorbikes took them home to her mother in Iraq.
She reunited with some of her siblings, but learned that three other sisters had also been captured by ISIS and her father was missing and presumed dead.
She said she is speaking out so others will know the true depravity of al-Baghdadi.
“I hope they kill him,” she said. “Soon.”
“He murdered people. He forced people to convert. He raped girls. He killed families, separating mothers from their children,” she added. “I want the world to know how evil he is.”
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