The self styled “Islamic State” that an American woman hostage it was holding in Syria was killed when Jordanian fighter jets bombed a building where she was being held. However Jordanian officials were sceptical about the terror outfit’s account of her death.
In Washington, US officials said they could not confirm that the woman, 26-year-old humanitarian worker Kayla Mueller of Prescott, Arizona, had been killed.
Her family said in a statement on Friday they are hopeful she is alive and asked the IS(IL) to contact them.
Mueller was the last-known American hostage held by the sadistic terror group, IS which controls wide swathes of Syria and Iraq.
The group has beheaded three other Americans, two Britons and two Japanese hostages – most of them aid workers or journalists – in recent months. Mueller was taken hostage while leaving a hospital in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo in August 2013.
The group’s latest claim, detailed by the SITE monitoring group, came just days after it released a video on Tuesday showing a captured Jordanian pilot, Mouath al-Kasaesbeh, being burned alive in a cage.
Jordan’s King Abdullah, who was in Washington discussing how to deal with IS militants when the video was made public, vowed to avenge the pilot’s death and ordered a stepped-up military role against the terror group.
Jordan said it had carried out a second straight day of air strikes yesterday on IS positions.
“We are looking into it but our first reaction is that we think it is illogical and we are highly skeptical about it. … It’s part of their criminal propaganda,” government spokesman Mohammad Momani said in response to Islamic State’s account of what happened to Mueller.
“How could they identify Jordanian war planes from a huge distance in the sky? What would an American woman be doing in a weapons warehouse?” Momani said.
Hours after the release of the video showing the pilot burning to death, Jordanian authorities executed two al Qaeda militants who had been imprisoned on death row, including a woman who had tried to blow herself up in a suicide bombing and whose release had been demanded by Islamic State.
In a statement released by a family representative, Mueller’s parents, Carl and Marsha Mueller of Arizona, asked the Islamic State group to contact the family privately.
“You told us that you treated Kayla as your guest, as your guest her safety and well-being remains your responsibility,” they said in a message directed to “those in positions of responsibility for holding Kayla.”
White House National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said the United States was “deeply concerned” over the report but had not seen “any evidence that corroborates” the group’s account.
Mueller, a 2009 Northern Arizona University graduate, had a long record of volunteering abroad and was moved by the plight of civilians in Syria’s civil war.
“For as long as I live, I will not let this suffering be normal – something we just accept,” Mueller’s local newspaper The Daily Courier quoted her in 2013 as saying.
“When Syrians hear I’m an American, they ask, ‘Where is the world?’ All I can do is cry with them, because I don’t know,” Mueller said.
“The common thread of Kayla’s life has been her quiet leadership and strong desire to serve others,” according to a statement from her family’s representative.
Jordan has vowed to take the war to the IS terrorists, and if it has to, it will do so even on its own.
