White House: At least one more American held hostage in Syria

The White House on Tuesday night confirmed that at least one more US citizen was held captive in Syria, hours after 26-year-old Islamic State hostage Kayla Mueller was confirmed dead.

“I’m not going to get into the specific discussions of the cases of individuals who are being held hostage, principally because we don’t believe that it’s in their best interests for me to discuss them publicly,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, according to Reuters.

“But there have been public reports of at least one other American hostage being held in Syria,” he said.

Earnest would not say whether the hostage was being detained by the Islamic State or other groups. He would not comment on the identity of the hostage.

Journalist Austin Tice disappeared in August 2012 while covering Syria’s civil war. It’s not clear what entity is holding him, but it is not believed to be the Islamic State group or the Syrian government, his family has said.

The statement about additional captives came hours after the White House confirmed Mueller’s death, citing a private message the family received from her captors.

According to a New York Times report on Wednesday, the Mueller family had contacted the jihadist group for proof of their daughter’s death, and received at least three photos of her corpse. In two of the photos, the aid worker is wearing a hijab and her face is partly covered. In the third, she is shown in a Muslim funeral shroud. Mueller’s face is covered in bruises in all three photos.

US security experts evaluating the photos remain skeptical that the aid worker was killed in a Jordanian airstrike, as claimed by the terror group on Friday. An unnamed source quoted by the paper said Mueller could have been killed in an adjacent building by debris.

The White House confirmed that the building mentioned by the jihadists, a weapons storage facility, was indeed targeted in an airstrike.

A US military official told the Wall Street Journal that the intelligence assessment had been that Mueller, as a woman, was not in any immediate danger. The aid worker was also believed to have been forced to convert to Islam and coerced into marrying an IS leader.

“She was not at the same risk,” the official said. “They have treated their female hostages differently.”

On Friday, the Islamic State had claimed that Mueller died in a Jordanian airstrike.

Jordan, which has launched a barrage of strikes in recent days in retaliation for the gruesome killing of one of its pilots at the hands of the militants, disputed that report and the White House said at the time that it had seen no evidence to corroborate the Islamic State claims.

Mueller is the fourth American to die while being held by Islamic State militants. Three other Americans — journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and aid worker Peter Kassig — were beheaded by the group.

Mueller was taken into captivity in August 2013 while leaving a hospital in Syria. Her identity was long kept secret out of fears for her safety. She also spent some time in Israel, volunteering for a pro-Palestinian movement and an aid organization for African migrants in Tel Aviv.

The pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement reported that Mueller attended weekly protests against Israel’s security fence in the Palestinian village of Bi’lin and stayed with a family in an eastern Jerusalem neighborhood to prevent the takeover of their home by Israeli forces. She also stayed with Palestinian families in a West Bank village to prevent the demolition of their homes and walked with Palestinian children to school in Hebron to protect them from attacks by Jewish settlers.

“Do not be fooled, resistance lives,” she wrote in a blog post on her stay in Israel and experiences with the Palestinians, according to Haaretz.

“Oppression wails from the soldiers radio and floats through tear gas clouds in the air … But resistance is nestled in the cracks in the wall, resistance flows from the minaret 5 times a day and resistance sits quietly in jail knowing its time will come again. Resistance lives in the grieving mother’s wails and resistance lives in the anger at the lies broadcasted across the globe. Though it is sometimes hard to see and even harder sometimes to harbor, resistance lives. Do not be fooled, resistance lives.”

AFP and JTA contributed to this report.