ARIZONA

Parents of ISIS hostage Kayla Mueller donate to Doctors Without Borders, a group they once denounced

Karina Bland
The Republic | azcentral.com
Kayla Mueller

The Arizona parents of slain aid worker Kayla Mueller are donating $120,000 to the nonprofit Doctors Without Borders, an organization the Muellers had earlier criticized for not doing enough to save their daughter after she was kidnapped by ISIS.

Plans for the donation and the dissolution of Kayla’s Hands, the charitable foundation the Muellers started in their daughter’s name, were announced in a statement Monday. It has been two years since the U.S. government confirmed that Kayla Mueller died in ISIS captivity.

“By donating to Doctors Without Borders, we can ensure Kayla’s legacy of healing is continued and that her spirit will remain out in the world. This gesture is a reflection of Kayla’s heart,” her parents wrote in the statement.

“Our hope is that this endowment in Kayla’s name will continue to grow with new support and from those who have generously supported it in the past,” they said.

Kayla Mueller was a well-traveled aid worker before she turned 25, having traveled from her home in Prescott to some of the most dangerous parts of the world, areas scarred by poverty and violence, to help people in need.

On Aug. 3, 2013, Mueller crossed the border into Syria to a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Aleppo. She accompanied Omar Alkhani, a photojournalist and activist who has said he was her boyfriend and who had been sent as a subcontractor to repair the medical facility’s internet service. Mueller was abducted the next day and held captive for 18 months before she was confirmed dead in February 2015 at age 26.

In an interview with ABC News last August, Carl and Marsha Mueller questioned the role of Doctors Without Borders, claiming the prestigious humanitarian group refused to help negotiate for their daughter’s freedom as it did for some of its own employees from another hospital. Those employees were later taken hostage and held along with Kayla Mueller.

“They're a fabulous organization, and they do wonderful work," Carl Mueller told ABC News, "but somewhere in a boardroom, they decided to leave our daughter there to be tortured and raped and ultimately murdered."

In response to the Mueller’s criticism, Doctors Without Borders — known overseas by its French acronym MSF, for Médecins Sans Frontières — released a statement reiterating that they were not expecting the American woman and would have discouraged her from visiting. They kept her and Alkhani at the facility overnight out of safety concerns.

The morning after Mueller and Alkhani arrived, someone at the hospital arranged for them to be taken to a bus station, along with a  Doctors Without Borders staff member, in a locally hired car marked with a Doctors Without Borders placard in the window, the agency said.

On the way to the station, armed gunmen took the three and the driver hostage. The driver was released hours later.

Doctors Without Borders officials were able to get all of their own people out.

'She believed in the work'

In the statement released Monday, the Muellers noted that in the office of their Prescott home is a Doctors Without Borders map that Kayla had kept at least since she was a student at Northern Arizona University.

“We look at it daily,” her parents wrote. “She believed in the work of Doctors Without Borders.”

Thus, the $120,000 they donated will be used to establish an endowment in Kayla Mueller’s name to support medical and humanitarian aid programs operating in nearly 70 countries.

"We know Kayla would want every penny to go toward any and every effort that seeks to meet the ever growing demands of this unsettled world, bringing the medical and humanitarian help needed with kindness and goodness, carrying Kayla into the world wherever they go,” the statement read.

The balance of the funds in the family’s foundation will be donated to other organizations that do the kind of work Kayla Mueller had supported, including Save the Children and the Syrian American Medical Society, and to the Kiwanis Club of Prescott, which built a playground in her name.

Reach Bland at karina.bland@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8614.

Kayla Mueller volunteered at Food for Life Vrindavan in 2010. According to the group's website, Food for Life Vrindavan is a humanitarian aid organization that for the last 10 years has worked in the poorest villages in the Vrindavan area south of New Delhi.