ISIS Reportedly Beheads Another American Journalist, Posts Video Of Execution

Details from The New York Times:

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has beheaded Steven J. Sotloff, the second American executed by the Islamic militant group, and posted a video of it on the Internet, the SITE Intelligence Group, a research organization that tracks jihadist web postings, said Tuesday.

The execution of Mr. Sotloff, 31, came despite pleas from his mother aimed directly at ISIS’s top leader seeking mercy for her son, a freelance journalist who was captured in northern Syria a year ago.

Word of Mr. Sotloff’s beheading came two weeks after James Foley, 45, another American journalist, was beheaded by ISIS, which warned that Mr. Sotloff would be the next to die.

The videotaped beheadings and threats by ISIS have helped rocket the group’s ascendance into a top crisis for the Obama administration and its Western allies.

Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, said he could not immediately confirm the authenticity of the video showing Mr. Sotloff’s killing. “It is something that will be analyzed very carefully by the U.S. government and our intelligence officials to determine its authenticity,” he told reporters in Washington.

The second American journalist whose life is being threatened by ISIS militants is Steven Joel Sotloff, who has written for Time magazine and other outlets and disappeared a year ago in Syria. A video obtained by NBC News shows an ISIS militant beheading another American journalist, James Wright Foley. An ISIS fighter then stands next to a man identified as Sotloff and threatens his life unless the United States calls off airstrikes against the group.

Sotloff, 31, grew up in Miami and attended the University of Central Florida in the early 2000s. He has a Twitter account, and last posted Aug. 3, 2013, just before he disappeared. He has posted about turmoil in the Middle East and about his love of the NBA’s Miami Heat.

Sotloff has also done freelance work for the publications National Interest and MediaLine. For Time, he wrote about the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, about the Syrian civil war and about post-Gadhafi Libya.

Syria is the most dangerous country for journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least 69 journalists have been killed covering the civil war there, and at least 80 have been kidnapped, the organization says.

“Everyone is scared right now,” a college friend of Sotloff’s, Emerson Lotzia, told NBC Miami. “No one really knows what to think of this situation, because we never really thought that we would ever have one of our friends in this situation.”

ISIS reportedly beheads another American journalist, posts video of execution