“We are heartbroken to share that we’ve received confirmation that Kayla Jean Mueller, has lost her life,” a statement from the family reads.
“Kayla was a compassionate and devoted humanitarian. She dedicated the whole of her young life to helping those in need of freedom, justice, and peace,” the family said.
On Friday, ISIS claimed that Mueller — captured in northern Syria in 2013 — had been killed in a building that was hit during a Jordanian airstrike on Raqqa, the militants’ de facto capital in Syria. At the time, ISIS offered no proof to back up its claim, other than an image of a building in rubble.
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After working for a year as an au pair in France, she traveled to the Turkish/Syrian border to work with the Danish Refugee Council and the humanitarian organization Support to Life, which assisted families who had been forced to flee their homes due to the civil war in Syria, the spokeswoman said.
In a YouTube video produced in October 2011, before the rise of ISIS, Mueller said she supported a sit-in that protested the Syrian regime.
“I am in solidarity with the Syrian people,” she said. “I reject the brutality and killing that the Syrian authorities are committing against the Syrian people.”
