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Islamist militants claim to have beheaded a man identified as James Foley, an American journalist kidnapped in Syria in late 2012, in a graphic video posted on the internet.
A spokeswoman for the White House said the intelligence community was trying to determine the video’s authenticity. “If genuine, we are appalled by the brutal murder of an innocent American journalist,” she said.
At the end of the video, the same person holds up a second person, who is identified with a caption on the screen as Steven Sotloff, a journalist kidnapped in 2013, and says: “The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision.”The video entitled “Message to #America (from the #IslamicState)” purporting to show “James Wright Foley” on his knees ahead of his execution by a man whose identity is disguised and who speaks with a distinct British accent.
Last week, social media accounts controlled by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or Isis, uploaded videos showing dozens of beheadings of individuals they accused of being sympathisers of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, in the northern Syrian town of Deir Ezzor.
The posting of the latest video by Isis comes days after President Barack Obama ordered an intensifying series of air strikes on the militants in northern Iraq.
The immediate aim of the strikes was to back Kurdish and Iraqi forces in their efforts to retake Mosul Dam, a strategic asset which the militants had gained control of in their recent military surge.
Mr Obama has said that Washington will not send troops to Iraq to engage Isis in combat but administration officials have expanded the US military mission there over the last week to halt and push back the militant’s advance.
“We believe that Isis needs to be taken out,” Marie Harf, a State Department spokeswoman, said this week.
An estimated 500 Britons have travelled to fight with extremist groups in Syria – most from London – and almost all have joined Isis, according to UK security officials.
British intelligence believes that several have travelled into Iraq and that some have almost certainly been involved in the worst of Isis’ atrocities.
The apparent murder of Mr Foley is a violent reminder of some of the most graphic crimes committed by Isis’s predecessor organisation, al-Qaeda in Iraq, which gruesomely beheaded dozens of Iraqis and foreigners, uploading videos of the acts to the internet, under the command of the militant group’s then leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, nearly a decade ago.
The beheading of American citizen Nicholas Berg in 2004 by Mr Zarqawi himself propelled AQI to the forefront of the war on terror and marked the beginning of a new particularly bloody phase in the Iraqi extremist insurgency in the wake of the US-led invasion.
AQI’s other high profile victims included Americans Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong, Briton Kenneth Bigley and South Korean Kim Sun Il.
Mr Zarqawi was killed in northern Iraq in 2006 in a US air strike, and AQI was subsequently driven underground by a surge in American troops in Iraq and a groundswell of Sunni support – financed by the West – in fighting the jihadi group.
The core of AQI’s ideological and operational beliefs and practices has survived in Isis however. The group has inherited many of the hallmarks of AQI, and has been posting videos of beheadings of Assad-regime soldiers and Iraqi Shia and Kurds online for months.
Early assessments by many in the Western intelligence community concluded that Isis was primarily a group focused on a violent regional and sectarian struggle.
With Isis’ declaration of a “caliphate” in June, however, and with it a direct challenge to what remains of al-Qaeda, many European and American security officials have grown more worried about its international ambitions.
Since air strikes against the group by the US began, intelligence officials have grown more worried over Isis’ attack planning against the West.
Of the estimated 3,000 Europeans who travelled to Syria to fight against Mr Assad’s regime, the majority have become Isis members and represent a potential terrorist risk to Western states.
-Culled from FT
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