Wife of ISIS leader charged with role in Kayla Mueller’s death

Nisreen Assad Ibrahim Bahar, an Iraqi citizen and wife of senior Islamic State leader Abu Sayyaf until his death past year, is accused along with her husband of holding Kayla Mueller and other women captive.

After Sayyaf’s capture, she was taken to a US air base near the Iraqi Kurdish city of Irbil, where the FBI-led High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group questioned her for intelligence purposes.

Sayyaf was charged on Monday with providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization that resulted in a person’s death, and faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted. USA officials say the circumstances of her death remain unclear.

The Justice Department alleged Umm Sayyaf helped keep Kayla Mueller hostage in Syria before she died under mysterious circumstances. Umm Sayyaf is now being held in Iraqi custody following the charges.

Justice Department officials say they support that prosecution, but they’ll continue to “pursue justice forKayla”.

“For as long as I live, I will not let this suffering be normal”, she said.

Mueller had travelled to Syria as an aid worker when she was kidnapped in 2013.

Mueller’s father briefly had a glimmer of hope that his daughter might be rescued but was mostly overwhelmed by “devastation and hopelessness” during the year and a half that his daughter was held captive by ISIS, a family friend told CBSN in February 2015.

A Mueller family spokesperson told The Daily Beast that officials had told them they were filing charges against Umm Sayyaf before the charges were publicly announced.

According to accounts by another hostage who was held at the same time al-Bagdahdi took her as a “wife”, repeatedly raping her whenever he visited.

US forces captured Umm Sayyaf in May during a raid in which her husband was killed. On those occasions, she acknowledged hosting Islamic State members and al-Baghdadi at her home.

She and the other captives were at times handcuffed or kept in locked rooms, chastised by Sayyaf as “kafir” or “infidels”, according to the affidavit. Then FBI agents from the Washington Field Office, known as a clean team, interviewed her repeatedly, working to build a criminal case against her for a future prosecution in federal court.

There also were concerns, officials said, that the Kurds could eventually release Sayyaf in a prisoner exchange. In the undated letter, Mueller said she was, “in a safe location, completely unharmed”.