Foley case lays bare debate over paying ransom

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

The beheading of freelance journalist James Foley has forced a new debate between the longtime U.S. and British refusal to negotiate with terrorists, and Europe and the Persian Gulf’s increasing willingness to pay ransoms in a desperate attempt to free citizens. The dilemma: how to save the lives of captives without financing terror groups and encouraging more kidnappings.

By paying ransoms, governments in the Mideast and Europe have become some of the biggest financiers of terror groups. By refusing to do likewise, the U.S. and Great Britain are in the thankless position of putting their own citizens at a disadvantage.

Foley’s captors, the Islamic State militants, had for months demanded $132.5 million from his parents and political concessions from Washington. They got neither, and the 40-year-old freelance journalist from New Hampshire was savagely beheaded within the past week inside Syria, where he had been held since his disappearance in November 2012.

Extremists called his death a revenge killing for the 90 U.S. airstrikes, as of Thursday, that have been launched against Islamic State militants in northern Iraq since Aug. 8. But the ransom demands began late last year, even before the Islamic State — one of the world’s most financially thriving extremist groups — had begun its brutal march across much of western and northern Iraq.

“They don’t need to do this for money,” said Matthew Levitt, a counterterror expert at the Washington Institute think-tank. “When you ask for $132 million, for the release of one person, that suggests that you’re either trying to make a point ... or you don’t really need the money.”

A senior Obama administration official said Thursday the Islamic State had made a “range of requests” from the U.S. for Foley’s release, including changes in American policy and posture in the Mideast.

At the State Department, deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said the militancy — which controls a swath of land across northern Syria and Iraq — has collected millions of dollars in ransoms so far this year alone.

“We do not make concessions to terrorists,” Harf told reporters. “We do not pay ransoms.”

The issue of payments by American families or U.S. corporations is now under debate within the Obama administration, according to a U.S. official familiar with the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss them by name.