White House confirms beheading of American aid worker by ISIS
Associated Press
BEIRUT
The Islamic State group released a video today of a masked, black-clad militant standing over a severed head it claimed is American aid worker Peter Kassig, a former Army Ranger, as well as the mass beheadings of a dozen Syrian soldiers.
The White House confirmed the authenticity of the video. In a statement issued as he flew back to Washington after a trip to the Asia Pacific region, President Barack Obama said the group “revels in the slaughter of innocents, including Muslims, and is bent only on sowing death and destruction.”
With Kassig’s death, the Islamic State group has killed five Westerners it was holding. Britons David Haines, a former Air Force engineer, and Alan Henning, a taxi driver from northwest England, were beheaded, as was U.S. reporter James Foley and American-Israeli journalist Steven Sotloff.
Unlike previous videos of slain Western hostages, the footage released Sunday did not show the purported decapitation of the American or the moments leading up to his death.
“This is Peter Edward Kassig, a U.S. citizen ... who fought against the Muslims in Iraq,” said the militant, who spoke with a British accent distorted in the video, appeared on websites used in the past by the Islamic State group, which now controls a third of Syria and Iraq.
After his capture in eastern Syria on Oct. 1, 2013, while delivering relief supplies for the aid group he founded, Kassig had converted to Islam and took the name Abdul-Rahman Kassig.
Obama said Kassig “was a humanitarian who worked to save the lives of Syrians injured and dispossessed” by war.
The president said the 26-year-old Indianapolis man “was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group that the world rightly associates with inhumanity.”
Obama offered prayers and condolences to Kassig’s family. “We cannot begin to imagine their anguish at this painful time,” he said.
Kassig’s family said in a statement that it preferred “our son is written about and remembered for his important work and the love he shared with friends and family, not in the manner the hostage takers would use to manipulate Americans and further their cause.”
The footage released Sunday identifies the militants’ location as Dabiq, a town in northern Syria that the Islamic State group uses as the title of its English-language propaganda magazine and where they believe an apocalyptic battle between Muslims and their enemies will occur.
The high-definition video also showed the beheadings of about a dozen men identified as Syrian military officers and pilots, all dressed in blue jumpsuits. The black-clad militant warns that U.S. soldiers will meet a similar fate.
“We say to you, Obama: ... You claim to have withdrawn from Iraq four years ago,” the militant said. “Here you are: You have not withdrawn. Rather, you hid some