A tragedy beyond despair
She was a US aid worker jailed by IS with her lover and Jihadi John’s victims. After one cruel twist, he was freed – but she was left behind ... to be ‘bombed’ in a Jordanian air strike
‘If she’d said she was my wife, she would be free’
IT WAS the moment Omar Alkhani believed he was about to secure the release of his girlfriend, the last American hostage held by Islamic State. Kayla Mueller stood before him in her dimly lit cell, dressed in a traditional long black abaya cloak, her face covered.
At great personal risk, Omar had ventured into the heart of the terror group’s power base in Syria to try to bring her home.
Naïvely, perhaps, he was convinced that all Kayla had to do was confirm their cover story that they were man and wife to the IS ‘judge’ standing between them.
This, he says, is what they’d agreed for her protection in the event of something going wrong when they had crossed the border into Syria weeks earlier. ‘They won’t harm a Muslim man’s wife,’ he had assured her at the time.
Recalling what happened as he stood at the cell, Omar told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘The man said she’d denied being my wife and I asked her why she had said this. She was crying and could only say, “I don’t know”,’ said Omar.
The judge then promised Kayla – whose death was confirmed by Barack Obama last week – that Omar would not be hurt if she told the truth. She replied: ‘No, he is not my husband. He is my fiancé.’
With that, Kayla’s fate was effectively sealed. Omar was hustled out by masked gunmen and put in a cell of his own.
He spent two months there before being freed.
In the five months after his release, Western hostages including Britons David Haines, 44, and Alan Henning, 47, would become victims of the British executioner known as Jihadi John, whose voice Omar heard every morning interrogating prisoners.
Speaking for the first time about his four-year relationship with Kayla, 26, and the events that led to her capture and his own incarceration, Omar said: ‘To this day I don’t know why she didn’t go along with the story.
‘Because I am Syrian and not a spy, and she was my wife, they would have let her go. I came to get Kayla out but that was the last time I saw her.’ He added: ‘She once asked how much I loved her and I said that I would risk my life for her. And I did. I tried for her. She was the most beautiful thing that happened to my life. We were planning our future together.’ Fifteen months later, Kayla, from Prescott, Arizona, an activist and aid worker whose life was underpinned by a profound desire to help others, was dead.
According to IS, she was killed in the falling rubble of a building in northern Syria that it said had been struck by bombs from a warplane, despatched by Jordan after one of its pilots was burned to death in a cage. Yet there is no proof and the truth will probably never be known.
Focusing on their happy times together, Omar, 33, said: ‘It’s her laughter and her dancing that I remember the most. She loved dancing. She was such a happy person.
‘She cared for people so much. She would never buy make-up and extra clothes because she used that money to buy food for the poor children. That’s how I remember her.’
Played out against the backdrop of tumultuous events in the Middle East, Omar’s romance with Kayla began in 2010. They met in Cairo when Kayla, a politics graduate, answered his advert for a flatmate. He was an executive for an events marketing firm.
By the time she arrived in the Egyptian capital, yet to be shaken by the Arab Spring, she had spent months with the pro-Palestine International Solidarity Movement in the West Bank. She had also worked in India with orphaned children.
‘She was only meant to be with me for a week but ended up staying a month,’ Omar said. At the end of her stay, their easy rapport had grown into something deeper. ‘On that last day, we were both crying. I put her into the taxi outside my flat but we did not say goodbye because we knew we would meet again,’ he added.
They were reunited in Beirut and then moved on to Istanbul, where they rented a flat overlooking the Bosphorous. As their relationship deepened, they settled on the eastern edge of Turkey near the Syrian border. Kayla got a job with a Turkish charity helping Syrian refugees, while her boyfriend turned his hand to photography and began chronicling the horrors in his homeland.
In August 2013, Omar was asked if he could try to fix the internet connection at the Aleppo hospital where the charity Médicins Sans Frontières was based.
Kayla asked Omar if she could go too and wore him down after he first insisted it was too dangerous.
‘So many stories were coming out of Aleppo at the time: people without enough to eat, no clean water, disease and shelling by the regime,’ he said. ‘She needed to see it, to write about it in her blog, so that help would come.’
After agreeing to take her, they rehearsed their cover story – that she was his wife, Ayesha. They would say they married secretly in Beirut.
As they entered Syria by taxi, he told Kayla to remain silent to prevent the taxi driver realising she was a foreigner.
Omar said he told the MSF hospital in Aleppo that he was taking Kayla with him and no objections were raised. This contradicts what MSF said last week. It insisted Kayla arrived at the hospital unannounced and had staff been given prior warning, they would have protested.
In any event, the couple stayed at the hospital overnight and the following morning were taken by taxi on what should have been a 10-minute journey to the bus station. From there, they planned to return over the border to Turkey.
But as soon as their yellow Toyota left the hospital compound, Omar noticed a grey people-carrier tailing them. Moments later, it overtook them and forced their driver to stop.
Six masked men armed with Kalashnikovs and wearing body armour leapt out and surrounded them. They flung the taxi doors open and dragged everyone out. One of the gunmen told Omar in Arabic: ‘Don’t do anything or we will shoot you.’
Omar recalled: ‘We were forced into the back of the people-carrier. They pulled my T-shirt from my back and covered my face with it. They told Kayla to look down. Kayla was crying. I could feel her body shaking.’ Despite being told not to speak, Omar said he whispered a reminder to Kayla about their cover story – and was then hit on the head with the butt of a Kalashnikov.
After a 30-minute journey, Omar and Kayla were taken to a makeshift prison in the basement of a children’s hospital in Aleppo – Kayla was put in a cell with female prisoners and Omar was taken to a room and interrogated.
His captors beat him, suffocated him with plastic bags and stamped on his body when he fell to the ground.
ter, after checking his laptop and era, they accused him of being a – and when they found rock music his smartphone they called him a an worshipper’. s captors questioned him about la and every time he told them was his wife, they accused him of g. Omar said: ‘I knew she was in same prison as me, as every time uld be allowed to go to the toilet, ould cough loudly and she would gh back. Or I would say some- thing in Arabic like “Alhamdullillah [thanks be to God]”, and she would cough back.
‘I also used to peer through the underside of my prison door, just to see if she walked by. She wore a thread anklet on her left leg so I would look for that.’ He added: ‘Even without the coughing, she would have known I was in the prison because she would have heard my screams when they beat me.’
Suddenly, two months after the abduction, Omar was told he was free to go, his captors having apparently decided that as a Syrian he was of little worth to them. Kayla, however, was a prized hostage.
After Omar made it back to Turkey, he contacted her parents, who were by now aware she had been kidnapped. It has been suggested because of his early release that Omar might have been complicit in Kayla’s capture. It is a claim he denies. Moreover, Kayla’s parents do not believe this to be true. A family spokesman said: ‘The family knows that he cared for her deeply.’
Kayla’s parents told Omar they had received a 30-second video of their daughter begging for help. It was accompanied by a message which read: ‘If you want her alive, it will be $20m.’
It was only a matter of days after his release that Omar decided to head back to Syria for Kayla. He contacted rebel leaders and was given the details of an IS commander in the town of Idlib, who agreed to see him.
This meeting led to a promise that the IS sheikh – or judge – would hear his case in Aleppo.
After waiting weeks for an audience, Omar tried to persuade the judge that Kayla was his wife – but was accused of lying. He asked to see Kayla to put the question to her.
‘I hadn’t given up hope and I was still sure I would succeed.’
When the couple’s plan failed, Omar was locked up in a room next to a cell containing Western hostages. ‘I did not see them but I heard their names being called by the guards. I heard the names James Foley and Steven Sotloff.’
Nine months later both Foley and Sotloff were beheaded.
Omar also recalls hearing the voice of a masked prison guard, who came to the jail early in the morning. ‘He interrogated the Western hostages. He spoke classical Arabic, the language of the Koran, fluently, and also English with a British accent.’
Omar is convinced that the prison guard was Jihadi John.
Omar told how on Christmas Day 2013, Jihadi John and Abu Maryam AlIraqi – who Omar knew from overheard conversations was head of IS prisons – played a diabolical trick on the Western hostages.
‘They announced that they would be driven to the Turkish border and released. All were given new clothes for their journey,’ said Omar.
‘Al-Iraqi spoke in Arabic and Jihadi John translated.’
The Western prisoners were indeed driven away – not to freedom but to another jail. Omar believes the false hope was designed to discourage them from trying to escape during the transfer.
When he was eventually released, Omar contacted Kayla’s parents, who told him not to return to Syria.
Looking back, he blames himself for allowing Kayla to join him on the trip to Aleppo. ‘At the time I thought if I forced her not to come with me, she would find somebody else who would take her to Syria,’ he said.
‘If I hadn’t given in to her we would be planning our wedding. We said we would spend the rest of our lives together.’