Kayla Mueller’s Islamic State captivity was different, in both life and death

Kayla Mueller’s captivity was different.

Islamic State jihadists are known for the bloody, fiery spectacles they make of their prisoners. They show no mercy, even toward women, as seen in the videos of fighters stoning to death an accused adulterer or joking about trading enslaved girls. They’ve beheaded journalists and aid workers, tossed suspected gays from tall buildings and tortured captive children with electric cables.

And yet, for whatever private horror the 26-year-old Mueller endured for 18 months, her life as a hostage and her death last week, possibly in a coalition airstrike, were kept largely out of the public eye, an odd departure for the Islamic State’s notorious propagandists.

That’s no comfort for the family in Arizona mourning a young humanitarian worker who spent her short life helping civilians in conflicts, but it adds one more wrinkle to Western understanding of a complex and unpredictable extremist group that typically shows zero lenience toward its American captives.

“We don’t know why Kayla was treated differently,” said a source close to the Mueller family, which on Friday fielded media queries through spokespeople.

Family members also declined to assign responsibility for the other looming mystery of Mueller’s ordeal: how she died.

The Islamic State announced on Friday that she had died in a Jordanian airstrike on the building in Syria where she was being held. On Tuesday, the Pentagon acknowledged that Jordanian aircraft and American air crews had struck the target on Friday. But they refused to connect Mueller’s death to the strike on what they said was a weapons depot that had been hit at least twice before. Defense officials said there was no evidence of civilian casualties and no investigation ongoing into the matter.

Still, U.S. officials didn’t dispute Mueller’s fate, confirming that she was dead after the Islamic State sent the family unspecified “additional information” over the weekend that was passed on to government intelligence analysts.

No matter how Mueller died, U.S. officials said, the Islamic State ultimately bore the guilt because she’d been a hostage of the group since she was seized August 2013 after leaving a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Aleppo, Syria.

“This, after all, is the organization that was holding her against her will,” said White House spokesman Josh Earnest. “That means they are responsible for her safety and her well being. And they are, therefore, responsible for her death.”

The confirmation of Mueller’s death also raised once again the question of whether the United States ought to reconsider its policy of refusing to negotiate ransom payments for citizens taken hostage by terrorist groups. Mueller was the fourth American to die in Islamic State custody in the past seven months – three of those were beheaded – even as a dozen or so Europeans were released after money exchanged hands.

This story was originally published February 10, 2015 at 7:15 PM with the headline "Kayla Mueller’s Islamic State captivity was different, in both life and death."