William Maclean / Reuters & ITV.com – 2014-09-03 00:47:04
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/03/us-iraq-crisis-islamicstate-video-idUSKBN0GX20R20140903
Islamic State Issues Video
Of Beheading of US hostage
William Maclean / Reuters
DUBAI (September 3, 2014) — The Islamic State militant group released a video on Tuesday purporting to show the beheading of a second American hostage, journalist Steven Sotloff, raising the stakes in its confrontation with Washington over US air strikes in Iraq. A masked figure in the video seen by Reuters also issued a threat against a British hostage, a man the group named as David Haines, and warned governments to back off “this evil alliance of America against the Islamic State”.
A statement released by Sotloff’s family through a spokesman indicated the family considered the video to be authentic. “The family knows of this horrific tragedy and is grieving privately. There will be no public comment from the family during this difficult time,” said the spokesman, Barak Barfi.
The purported executioner appeared to be the same British-accented man who appeared in an Aug. 19 video of the killing of American journalist James Foley, and it showed a similar desert setting. In both videos, the captives wore orange jumpsuits.
In Washington, the White House said it could not immediately confirm the authenticity of the Sotloff video. But several US government sources said it appeared to be authentic. Sotloff, a 31-year-old freelance journalist from Florida, was kidnapped in Syria in August 2013.
“I’m back, Obama, and I’m back because of your arrogant foreign policy towards the Islamic State, because of your insistence on continuing your bombings and in Amerli, Zumar and the Mosul Dam, despite our serious warnings,” the masked man said in the video, addressing US President Barack Obama. “So just as your missiles continue to strike our people, our knife will continue to strike the necks of your people.”
In the video, Sotloff describes himself as “paying the price” with his life for the US intervention in Iraq.
The White House said late on Tuesday that Obama was sending three top officials — Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco — to the Middle East “in the near-term to build a stronger regional partnership” against the Islamic State militants. US officials also said Obama ordered 350 more US military personnel to protect the large American embassy in Baghdad, bringing up to about 820 the number of US forces working to bolster diplomatic security in Iraq.
Sotloff’s mother, Shirley, appealed last Wednesday for her son’s release in a videotaped message to Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
In the video it released last month, Islamic State said Foley’s death was in retaliation for US air strikes on its insurgents who have overrun wide areas of northern Iraq.
The United States resumed air strikes in Iraq in August for the first time since the pullout of US troops in 2011. The raids followed major gains by Islamic State, which has declared an Islamic Caliphate in areas it controls in Syria and Iraq.
“We have seen a video that purports to be the murder of US citizen Steven Sotloff by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” White House National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said in a statement. “The intelligence community is working as quickly as possible to determine its authenticity. If genuine, we are appalled by the brutal murder of an innocent American journalist and we express our deepest condolences to his family and friends. We will provide more information when it is available.”
Iraq’s outgoing foreign minister, Hoshiyar Zebari, condemned what he called “this savage killing . . . an example of savagery and evil,” and said it was evidence of the need for Iraq and the West to defeat Islamic State. “We have a common enemy and the whole world is moving in the right direction to stop this savagery and brutality,” Zebari said. “The whole world is standing united against IS. They must be defeated so these horrid scenes will not be repeated.”
Iraqi Shi’ite Muslim politician Sami Askari, who is close to outgoing Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, said: “They are trying to scare the Americans not to intervene. I don’t think Washington will be scared and stop. . . . This is evil. Every human being has to fight this phenomenon. Like cancer, there is no cure. You have to fight it.”
British Prime Minister David Cameron condemned Sotloff’s apparent decapitation as “an absolutely disgusting and despicable act (by) barbaric terrorists”. He said he would hold a meeting of his security crisis team on Wednesday. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius called the killing a “further illustration of the barbarity without limit of this caliphate of terror that must be fought with the utmost determination”.
Obama did not answer questions from reporters as he boarded his helicopter on the White House South Lawn en route to a military base outside Washington, before flying on Air Force One bound for Estonia.
The video triggered new calls from Obama’s critics in the US Congress for more decisive action against Islamic State forces. Critics accused the president of dithering after he said last Thursday: “We don’t have a strategy yet,” to confront the operations of the militant group in Syria.
“Whenever American air power has been employed, in coordination with reliable partners on the ground, ISIL has been devastated. It’s a tactic that should be aggressively pursued both in Syria and Iraq,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a leading Republican voice on foreign policy, using an acronym for the Sunni militant group.
The US military announced its latest air strike on Islamic State forces, saying US aircraft on Monday destroyed or damaged 16 of the group’s armed vehicles near the Mosul Dam in northern Iraq.
Sotloff’s colleagues described him as a dedicated journalist and gifted writer who had filed in-depth reports from across the Middle East. He covered unrest in Libya for Time magazine in 2012 before his kidnapping in Syria. Time Editor Nancy Gibbs said that Sotloff “gave his life so readers would have access to information from some of the most dangerous places in the world.”
Filmmaker Matthew VanDyke, a friend of both Steven Sotloff and James Foley, said the two were aware of the dangers in Syria, but their passion to tell the story drove them to accept the peril. “They believed that the story needed to be told and they weren’t going to let the risks stop them,” VanDyke said. “They took precautions and unfortunately even if you do everything right, sometimes in Syria, things go wrong.”
On Aug. 24, al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front militants in Syria freed an American writer, Peter Theo Curtis, who had been missing since 2012, following what officials said were efforts by the Gulf Arab state of Qatar to secure his release. A US government source told Reuters that a criminal probe by the Justice Department into Foley’s killing was certain to be extended to include Sotloff.
(Additional reporting by Noah Browning, Mark Hosenball, Ned Parker, Andrew Osborn, Victoria Cavaliere, John Irish and Jennifer Atkinson; Writing by William Maclean and Will Dunham; Editing by Mark Heinrich, Peter Cooney, Eric Beech and Clarence Fernandez)
Transcript of Video: The Final Words
Of US Hostage and Journalist Steven Sotloff
ITV.com
(September 3, 2014) — A video has been released by Islamic State extremists claiming to show the murder of US hostage and freelance journalist Steven Sotloff. The White House has said it is working to verify the contents of the video.
What follows is a transcript of what is claimed to be the last words of Steven Sotloff, taken from the footage reportedly released by Islamic State.
I am Steven Joel Sotloff.
I’m sure you know exactly who I am by now, and why I am appearing before you.
And now it is time for my message.
Obama, your foreign policy of intervention in Iraq was supposed to be for the preservation of American lives and interests, so why is it that I’m having to pay the price of your interference with my life.
Am I not an American citizen?
You’ve spent billions of US taxpayers dollars and we’ve lost thousands of our troops in our previous fighting against the Islamic State.
So where is the American people’s interests in reigniting this war?
From what little I know about foreign policy I remember a time when you could not win an election without promising to bring our troops back home from Iraq, from Afghanistan, and to close down Guantanamo.
Here you are now Obama, nearing the end of your term, having achieved none of the above, and seemingly marching us, the American people, into a blazing fire.
The man who appears to wield the knife seems to have a British accent that has been disguised. His statement suggests he is the same fighter who killed James Foley last month. Below is a transcript of what he says:
I’m back Obama,
and I’m back because of your arrogant foreign policy towards Islamic State, because of your insistence in continuing your bombings in Amerli, Samarra and Mosul dam despite our serious warnings.
You, Obama, have yet again through your actions, killed yet another American citizen.
So just as your missiles continue to strike our people, our knife will continue to strike the necks of your people.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
