Doctors Without Borders: The Mueller Information

Doctors Without Borders withheld a key email address and refused to negotiate for the release of Kayla Mueller even when they had the opportunity to do so.Kayla Mueller, the American woman kidnapped by ISIS in August of 2013, was eventually raped, tortured and killed by the group.Mueller was kidnapped while riding in a Doctors Without Borders/Medicins Sans Frontieres vehicle and taken prisoner by armed men.Although she did not work for MSF, she was kidnapped along with MSF employees, including her boyfriend, who was a Syrian national contracted to install satellite communications for the group in Aleppo, Syria.Mueller was killed in ISIS captivity in February of 2015, 18 months after she was taken.The group maintains that because Mueller was not an employee of MSF, they had no responsibility to negotiate for her.“I don’t think there was a moral responsibility,” Jason Cone, MSF’s United States executive director, said in an interview with ABC News. “We can’t be in the position of negotiating for people who don’t work for us.”In a statement released on their website, MSF claimed that, had they known Kayla would be traveling with the Syrian national communications technician, she “was not expected” and if anyone had known about her arrival, they would have told her not to come.

MSF Withheld Crucial Email Address For Kayla Mueller's Parents

When her vehicle was stopped by gunmen, Kayla, her boyfriend and two other Syrian nationals in the car were taken hostage. The other Syrians were released three weeks later, while Mueller was held.Several months later, five MSF staffers were kidnapped in a different part of Syria. Three of them, all women, were released in April of 2014, while two more staffers, both men, were kept by ISIS.During their debrief, MSF learned that the women had been held in the same location as Kayla Mueller.The women were given a specific ISIS email address to which the parents of Kayla Mueller could send communications and negotiate for her release.MSF leadership withheld the email address for nearly two months, out of concern that “doing anything that surprised them could destabilize an extremely delicate and dangerous situation.”Even after the two men were released on May 14^th, MSF did not give the email address to Kayla Mueller’s parents. It took them until the 23^rd of May to do so, and they did not offer it up: Marsha Mueller had to contact MSF in order to obtain the information.After news of Kayla’s death reached the mainstream, with media outlets claiming she worked for MSF, the group released a terse statement disavowing Mueller as an employee, which it later took down.