Kayla Mueller. Yahoo/AP
U.S. ISIS hostage Kayla Mueller has been confirmed to be dead. Yahoo/Reuters. Her family received an e-mail and photograph that U.S. intelligence officials have determined to be authentic. ISIS claims that Mueller was killed in a Jordanian airstrike. U.S. officials dispute the claim, saying that Mueller was killed in some kind of combat situation. Mueller was thought to be the last American held by ISIS but U.S. officials said that more were being held by the terrorist state. President Obama vowed to bring the people responsible for Mueller's captivity to justice.
My Comment:
Sad news, but not unexpected. There was almost no chance of the reports of Mueller being dead being false. This is just confirmation of what we already knew. There was little chance of her being released and a fairly good chance of her getting murdered anyways. My thoughts are with her and her family and friends.
There was some new information in this article that I wasn't aware of before. The first was what the United States thinks happened to Mueller. ISIS said she was killed in a Jordanian airstrike. That never made much sense because it was just too convenient for ISIS. After all Jordan had just stepped up their attacks on ISIS when this news broke. Obviously ISIS wanted to paint their air campaign as brutal and indiscriminate. It wouldn't have worked anyways because ISIS was still responsible for kidnapping Mueller and putting her in the position where she could be killed.
Either way that doesn't seem to be what happened. The U.S. claim is that she was killed in some kind of ground combat. That raises some pretty huge questions. Who killed her? Why were they fighting ISIS? Was it a rescue operation or an attempted kidnapping? Or was she just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Did ISIS kill her themselves because they thought they would lose her? Indeed, the revelation that she was killed in combat just raises more questions then it answers.
The second major revelation is that there are more hostages held by ISIS. Reuters floated the name Austin Tice, a journalist who disappeared in Damascus, but that is just speculation. Who are these hostages? Who knows. But whoever they are there seems to be very little chance of them being released. To date every American hostage held by ISIS has either been executed or killed. With official American policy being not to negotiate with terrorists there is little chance of these people of being released without a rescue operation..
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