Al-Baghdadi operation named after Kayla Mueller. Who was she?

"Well, it's a roller coaster of emotions whenever this ugly situation raises its head, but it's become part of our life over the last five and a half years," Kayla's father, Carl Mueller, told CNN.

By RACHEL WOLF, EZRA TAYLOR
Eric Mueller reads a poem about his late sister aid worker Kayla Mueller at the Prescott's Courthouse Square in Prescott, Arizona, February 18, 2015. Friends and colleagues of Mueller, the aid worker who died while a captive of militants of the Islamic State group in Syria, remembered her on Saturda (photo credit: REUTERS/DEANNA DENT)
Eric Mueller reads a poem about his late sister aid worker Kayla Mueller at the Prescott's Courthouse Square in Prescott, Arizona, February 18, 2015. Friends and colleagues of Mueller, the aid worker who died while a captive of militants of the Islamic State group in Syria, remembered her on Saturda
(photo credit: REUTERS/DEANNA DENT)
When President Donald Trump announced that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a US operation, the world wondered if this could be the end of the terror organization and what it meant for the Middle East as a whole. For the Mueller family, the news was a little more personal, because the US named its operation for their daughter, Kayla Mueller.
"Well, it's a roller coaster of emotions whenever this ugly situation raises its head, but it's become part of our life over the last five and a half years," Kayla's father, Carl Mueller, told CNN.
"We were deeply touched by what [Trump] said. We were grateful that they didn't mess around and went right in," Kayla's mother, Marsha Mueller, said in a phone interview with the news network.
Kayla was an aid worker and activist who, according to US officials, had been repeatedly raped by al-Baghdadi himself before she died in Islamic State custody in 2015.
In 2012, driven by the plight of Syrian civilians, Kayla went to work with the Danish Refugee Council and the organization Support to Life on the Turkish-Syrian border. She worked in Turkey and provided humanitarian aid to Syrian refugees.
A year later, in 2013, ISIS took her hostage while she was visiting a hospital in Aleppo, Syria.
Al-Baghdadi reportedly personally brought Meuller to Abu Sayyaf's home where she was held hostage, according to Reuters. Abu Sayyaf was a Tunisian ISIS member who was killed in a US raid in May 2015.
Prior to her work in Turkey and Syria, Kayla also volunteered in the West Bank with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a pro-Palestinian organization, according to Haaretz. The 2003 death of American activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed when an Israeli bulldozer hit her while she was protesting with ISM against the demolition of a Palestinian home, made the organization famous.
ISM told Haaretz that Kayla worked and lived with a family in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in east Jerusalem, “to try and prevent the takeover of their home by Israeli settlers.” She also accompanied Palestinian children on their way to school in Hebron's Tel Rumeida neighborhood, Haaretz reported. Kayla, like Corrie, also protested the demolition of Palestinian homes.
“Oppression wails from the soldiers radio and floats through tear gas clouds in the air, but resistance is nestled in the cracks in the wall, resistance flows from the minaret 5 times a day and resistance sits quietly in jail knowing its time will come again," Kayla wrote in an online blog. "Resistance lives in the grieving mother’s wails and resistance lives in the anger at the lies broadcasted across the globe. Though it is sometimes hard to see and even harder sometimes to harbor, resistance lives. Do not be fooled, resistance lives.”

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"The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff named the operation that took down al-Baghdadi after Kayla Mueller, after what she had suffered," White House national security adviser Robert O'Brien told CNN.
"Kayla always had a heart to help people. All people," her mother told the network. "It didn't matter if they didn't think exactly like you or if they thought differently. She had a gift of meeting people where they were and trying to learn from them, so she could better understand their side."
Reuters contributed to this report.


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Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi