Kayla Mueller’s parents chided former President Barack Obama in their praise of President Trump after a special operations raid killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria.
The humanitarian worker, 26, died in 2015 after being taken hostage two years earlier when she crossed into northern Syria to visit a hospital. Mueller’s family said their daughter was held in solitary confinement, tortured, and raped by Baghdadi. Her body has never been recovered.
“I still say Kayla should be here, and if Obama had been as decisive as President Trump, maybe she would have been,” her mother Marsha Mueller told the Arizona Republic over the weekend.
Carl and Marsha Mueller stayed silent about their daughter’s captivity at the request of U.S. authorities, they said. After her death, they spoke critically of the Obama administration’s handling of foreign hostages.
Carl Mueller, who has spoken at Trump’s rallies, said he was grateful the president mentioned their daughter in his news conference announcing Baghdadi’s death on Sunday.
“He knows her story. He’s been briefed on it, and he knows, and that’s important to me,” Carl Mueller said. “I don’t think anything would have stopped him from getting this guy.”
The operation that killed Baghdadi has been named after Mueller.
“We’ll be calling Kayla’s family. What — what he did to her was incredible. It’s a well-known story, and I’m not going to say it, but you know that,” Trump said Sunday from the White House. “He kept her in captivity for a long period of time. He kept her in his captivity, his personal captivity. She was a beautiful woman, beautiful young woman. Helped people. She was there to help people. And he saw her, and he thought she was beautiful, and he brought her into captivity for a long period of time, and then he killed her. He was an animal, and he was a gutless animal.”
