U.S. will not charge ISIS militant who held captive Kayla Mueller

The Pentagon announced Thursday that she is now being held by the Kurdistan Regional Government’s interior ministry in the semi-autonomous region within Iraq.

She had been there since May 15 when her husband, Abu Sayyaf, was killed by U.S. Special Operations Forces during a raid against the network in Syria.

Max Abrahms, professor of political science at Northeastern University and member at the Council on Foreign Relations, says that the decision not to bring Sayyaf back to the United States or even to the Baghdad government, who officially control Iraq’s sovereign territory, was questionable.

Documents seized at the site, and hours of conversations with Umm Sayyaf, have provided American officials with some of their best intelligence to date on the Islamic State, U.S. officials have said. U.S. officials have never confirmed that.

ISIS claimed that she was killed when a Jordanian airstrike hit the extremists’ stronghold of Raqqa, which U.S. and Jordanian officials deny.

U.S. prosecutors had been preparing charges against Umm Sayyaf in connection with Mueller’s kidnapping.

Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steve Warren had revealed in May that, whereas Washington was working to seek out “an final disposition for the detainee [Sayyaf]”, she would not find yourself in the controversial Guantanamo Bay jail facility.

As we reported after Umm Sayyaf was captured, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said in a statement that she is believed to have “played an important role in [ISIS’s] terrorist activities, and may have been complicit in what appears to have been the enslavement of a young Yezidi woman rescued last night”.