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| James Foley, in a photo from the website FreeJamesFoley.org, in Aleppo, Syria, in November 2012, the month he disappeared. Credit Nicole Tung, via Associated Press |
President Obama declared on Wednesday that the entire world was “appalled” by the videotaped beheading of an American journalist by Islamic militants, speaking as American warplanes conducted 14 airstrikes in Iraq and the State Department asked the Pentagon to send as many as 300 more American troops to Iraq for security.
“The United States of America will continue to do what we must do to protect our people,” the president said from Martha’s Vineyard, where he was vacationing. “We will be vigilant, and we will be relentless.”
Mr. Obama’s remarks came hours before administration officials said that the president had authorized a secret mission in July to rescue the American, James Foley, and other American hostages in a remote area of Syria. But when commandos arrived, the hostages were not there, American officials said.
N.Y. TIMES
A secret nighttime military mission authorized by President Obama to rescue Americans held captive in Syria failed early this summer when a team of two dozen Delta Force commandos raided an oil refinery in the northern part of the country but found after a firefight with Islamic militants that there were no hostages to be saved, administration officials said Wednesday.
The officials — speaking a day after the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria posted a video showing the American journalist James Foley being beheaded — described what they called a “complicated operation” in which the commandos were dropped by helicopter into Syrian territory in an attempt to rescue Mr. Foley and others being held by the Sunni militant group.
N.Y TIMES
Kneeling in the dirt in a desert somewhere in the Middle East, James Foley lost his life this week at the hands of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Before pulling out the knife used to decapitate him, his masked executioner explained that he was killing the 40-year-old American journalist in retaliation for the recent United States’ airstrikes against the terror group in Iraq.
In fact, until recently, ISIS had a very different list of demands for Mr. Foley: The group pressed the United States to provide a multimillion-dollar ransom for his release, according to a representative of his family and a former hostage held alongside him. The United States — unlike several European countries that have funneled millions to the terror group to spare the lives of their citizens — refused to pay.
The issue of how to deal with ISIS, which like many terror groups now routinely trades captives for large cash payments, is acute for the Obama administration because Mr. Foley was not the lone American in its custody. ISIS is threatening to kill at least three others it holds if its demands remain unmet, The New York Times has confirmed through interviews with recently released prisoners, family members of the victims and mediators attempting to win their freedom.
ISIS also appears determined to increase the pressure on Washington. It has now threatened to kill a second of its hostages, Steven J. Sotloff, a freelance journalist for Time magazine who was being held alongside Mr. Foley.
In the video uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday, the screen goes dark after Mr. Foley is decapitated. Then the ISIS fighter is seen holding Mr. Sotloff in the same landscape of barren dunes, wearing an orange jumpsuit and his hands cuffed behind his back. “The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision.”
Along with the three Americans, ISIS is holding citizens of Britain, which like the United States has declined to pay ransoms, former hostages confirmed. The terror group has sent a laundry list of demands for the release of the foreigners, starting with money but also prisoner swaps, including the liberation of Aafia Siddiqui, an M.I.T.-trained Pakistani neuroscientist with ties to Al Qaeda currently incarcerated in a prison in Texas. The policy of not making concessions to terrorists and not paying ransoms has put the United States and Britain at odds with other European allies, who have routinely paid significant sums to win the release of their nationals — including four French and three Spanish hostages who were released this year after money was delivered through an intermediary, according to two of the victims and their colleagues.
Kidnapping Europeans has become the main source of revenue for Al Qaeda and its affiliates, which have earned at least $125 million in ransom payments in the past five years alone, according to an investigation by The Times. Although ISIS was recently expelled from Al Qaeda and abides by different rules, recently freed prisoners said that their captors were well aware of what ransoms had been paid on behalf of European nationals held by Qaeda affiliates as far afield as Africa, indicating that they were hoping to abide by the same business plan.
While government and counterterrorism officials insist that paying ransoms only perpetuates the problem, the policy has meant that captured Americans have little chance of being released. A handful succeeded in running away, and even fewer were rescued in special operations. The rest are either held indefinitely — or else killed.
In an opinion article for Reuters, David Rohde, a columnist for the news service and a former foreign correspondent for The Times who was kidnapped by the Taliban, said that the uneven approach to ransoms may have cost Mr. Foley his life.
“The payment of ransoms and abduction of foreigners must emerge from the shadows. It must be publicly debated,” wrote Mr. Rohde, who escaped his yearlong custody of the Taliban only when he climbed out a window and freed himself. “American and European policy makers should be forced to answer for their actions.”
Mr. Foley, a freelance videographer and reporter for GlobalPost and Agence France-Presse, went missing 21 months ago in a town 25 miles south of the Turkish border.