Kayla Mueller, the Girl Left Behind

Kayla Mueller was a twenty-six-year-old American aid worker when she was taken hostage by ISIS in Syria in 2013. She had gone to the region to help civilians caught in the war. She was held for eighteen months and did not survive captivity.

Kayla Mueller, the Girl Left Behind investigates how she was failed by the institutions that could have saved her. Through interviews with hostages held alongside her, the reporting reconstructs her captivity from the inside, the conditions she endured and the resolve she showed. Through her parents, it follows a family's desperate effort to bring her home against a U.S. government that hesitated and made choices that closed the window for rescue. And it examines the role of Médecins Sans Frontières, the medical aid organization that had contact and opportunity to help secure her release, and did not.

The result is an account of a young woman who gave herself to helping others, and of the failures, official and institutional, that left her behind. It centers the people who knew her and were with her, and asks why the systems meant to protect an American abroad did not.