Now Bradley was directing his efforts toward freeing an American soldier turned humanitarian worker named Peter Kassig, who was still being held by the Islamic State. I spoke to Bradley and began looking for more information about Kassig and the circumstances of his captivity. Because he had been a soldier in the U.S. Army, I worried that he might be working for an intelligence agency and that he was only posing as an aid worker. But when I saw how easy it was to learn of his former military service online, I realized that was wrong. If he’d been undercover, there would have been more done to erase public information about his past.
Bradley told me that he had been in touch with some tribal chiefs in Iraq, but when I asked if he was in contact with anyone at ISIS, he said no. The tribal chiefs had access to parts of Iraq where ISIS was operating, but that was as close as they came to the terrorist group.
Peter Kassig had been raised in Indiana and had enlisted in the army as an infantryman in 2006. He served with the army’s Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment, deploying to Iraq from April to July 2007, and was medically discharged later that year.
In March 2012, while on spring break from Butler University, he traveled to Lebanon to work as a volunteer emergency medical technician. Several months later, he founded Special Emergency Response and Assistance (SERA), an NGO devoted to providing emergency medical supplies for Syrians living in the conflict zone. In 2013, he moved SERA’s base of operations to Gaziantep, Turkey. He was seized that October in eastern Syria, while traveling in an ambulance.
His family said that he’d developed a deep interest in Islam before his capture and had begun the conversion process to Islam the previous year. He had changed his name to Abdul-Rahman Kassig.
In addition to Foley and Sotloff, ISIS had also beheaded two British hostages, David Haines and Alan Henning. There was usually just a short period of time between the killings and when the videos appeared on the Internet, showing the victims dressed in orange jumpsuits that were supposed to look like those worn by prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
The same masked man always spoke first in the beheading videos, addressing President Obama directly and attacking him and his allies. He was known as Jihadi John, a name given to him by former hostages who reported that he and three other ISIS guards came from the United Kingdom. The hostages called them “the Beatles,” and Jihadi John was their most prominent member.
Bradley’s aim was to get Kassig out alive. I made a list of all the things I’d learned about Kassig. I Skyped with Bradley and asked if my information about his conversion was accurate. Bradley said it was, as far as he knew.
“This could be of huge help,” I told him. I noted down some names on a piece of paper, sources of mine who were members and sympathizers of ISIS, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and various go-betweens. I would contact them all to help free Kassig.
Even though ISIS had not recently had good relations with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, I knew that there were still links among them. Maybe Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, would think twice before killing a Muslim man whom other militants vouched for.
“Are you sure he is Muslim, and he was Muslim before he was taken?” one former bin Laden associate asked when I contacted him.
“Yes, Sheikh, he is Muslim and was before he was kidnapped,” I answered, even though I felt a hostage’s life shouldn’t depend on whether he was Muslim. But it was the only obvious argument we had, one chance to avoid another beheading.
For a brief period, I checked in with Bradley and my sources almost daily. I heard that lots of people, including tribal chiefs from Iraq’s Anbar Province, had been mobilized. Videos usually appeared a week to ten days apart. When no new one emerged, our hopes grew.
“Tell her the shura is discussing his case,” ISIS commander Abu Yusaf told a contact, who relayed the message to me. The shura was a council that advised al-Baghdadi. In the end, it would be his decision to make. (Abu Yusaf was the commander I’d interviewed near the Turkish-Syrian border earlier that year, soon after the German intelligence services assured me that it was again safe for me to travel there.)
Then suddenly things changed. Media reports now said that Kassig and several other hostages had converted to Islam only after they were taken, to get better treatment from their captors. A short time later I received a message asking me to call the man who was acting as a go-between in relaying messages to and from Abu Yusaf.
“You saw the articles?” my contact said when I reached him. “You know what this means, right?”
“Maybe the articles are not accurate. Have you thought about this?”
“Souad, the people from the shura read as well. There were already some who had this suspicion, and now they say even the media is confirming it.”
I felt helpless as I racked my brain for arguments to convince him otherwise.
“Please, what can we do? There must be something,” I said.
“There is nothing. It’s better for you to stop insisting; otherwise they will think you knew he was not Muslim and lied.”
I went home with the devastating feeling that this was it for Kassig. I reached out to Bradley and asked if he had seen the reports. He had, and he was surprised. He told me he appreciated all the help, but he understood that this might jeopardize my relationship with my sources and said he wouldn’t want to put me in that danger.
“I am very sorry,” I told him, “and I am sorry for the family.” In the days that followed, I scoured the Internet for any news or ISIS publications. I was hoping that Kassig might still have a chance.
On November 16, our hopes were dashed. A video appeared, showing ISIS executioners simultaneously beheading several Syrian pilots, followed by the man in black talking directly to Obama and the American people about Peter Kassig. It ended with a shot of Kassig’s severed head on the ground between Jihadi John’s legs.
It felt like a personal defeat. I stared at my laptop screen and asked the masked man, “Why are you doing this?” It was clear from the way he spoke English that he had either grown up in the United Kingdom or spent a lot of time there.
There he was, hiding behind his mask and taking someone else’s life. I fervently hoped that one day his mask would be torn off and the world would learn his true identity.
*
ABOUT A WEEK after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, while I was still in Paris, I got a call from Peter Finn. He wanted me to talk to another Post reporter, Adam Goldman, who was trying to identify the ISIS militants known to hostages as “the Beatles.”