FACE TO FACE WITH THE MAN WHO KILLED MY SON
In this extract from American Mother, Diane Foley explains how it felt to meet Alexanda Kotey, a British-born Islamic State fighter, who was found guilty of conspiracy to murder her son James, a freelance journalist, in a public beheading in Syria
In August 2014, the video of a man being beheaded shocked the world. The image, regarded as one of the most heinous that has been branded into our collective consciousness, is of James (Jim) Foley, in an orange jumpsuit, kneeling next to his soon-to-be murderer, Islamic State (IS) hostage taker “Jihadi John”. He was one of the notorious kidnap-and-murder cell known as the “Beatles” because of their British accents. “Jihadi John” was killed in a drone strike in 2015.
Alexanda Kotey, one of the other key members of the cell, was captured and, because of a mandated plea agreement, was to meet the mother of the man he murdered. Diane agreed, as she wanted to know if he felt any sorrow for her son’s death and to find out where Jim was buried. These encounters took place at the Virginia courthouse in 2021 in a windowless room. The meetings between grieving mother and staunch militant open the book, which is written by novelist Colum McCann, who agreed to help Diane tell her story. McCann had been interested in the kidnapping and murder of Jim since he saw a photo of him in a military bunker reading one of his novels.
He continues kneading his hands. “I didn’t feel guilty,” he says, “but I felt compassion.” Another silence then, in the room. Jim, the James Foley Story was directed by Jim’s boyhood friend Brian Oakes. She was initially against the project, thinking it intrusive, but she came to admire the film, its bravery, its construction, its honesty: it captured her son perfectly, even discovered things about him she had not known. But she is curious as to how — and deeply why — Kotey might have watched the film a second time. What sort of instinct could have led him to watch it again? Was it perversity? Or simple curiosity? Or gloating? Or a way to know his enemy? A way to transcend perception? Why did it cut so sharply under his skin?
“It was emotional to see your family’s emotion,” he says.
Especially James’s father and how it affected him. “It got to me.”
She recalls the scene: her husband John in the living room, heaving with tears.
Kotey pulls his feet in under the chair. He curls and makes himself smaller. A strange sound seems to come from a distance. Something guttural, something clamped. And she realises then that it is coming from him, not from her memory.
She looks along the length of the table. There are seven other people in the room. But there is only this one human sound. And then it happens again. She can see him fighting to hold it back. She is sure that it is not rehearsed. It happens again. His head so deeply bowed. The last thing she had expected from him.
Tissues had been placed at her side of the table for the past two days. Her family friend leans across. So too does another observer. Kotey opens the package.
Another long silence. Then he catches himself, wipes his eyes. He shakes his head to snap himself out. Hauls in a net of breath.
“Because I also felt a resentment, you understand?”
“I think so,” she says.
A resentment, she wonders. What resentment? “Can I tell you a story?” says Kotey.
“Yes.”
What he tells, then, is haphazard. It has no dates. No specific geography. It is related in a staccato manner. One detail to the next. Suggesting to her a truth. There is no rehearsal here. The story comes in fits and starts. He talks about a Canadian mother and her one-year-old child. He was out with a friend of his, he says. They were somewhere engaged in battle, a British fighter too. A friend of his from the UK. This fighter, this friend, lived on the outskirts of the city.
“We were coming back from battle. His wife and daughter, you see. What happened was a drone strike, you understand? An American drone strike. A specific attack. With no warning. They chose that building. Where they lived.” His eyes are closed as he speaks. “And one half of the building was still standing, and the other half was just gone, just blown away, demolished. We ran to it. My friend and I. His family were there, you see? And we started searching through the rubble, picking things up, things, bits and pieces. One woman was alive.”
A vacuum of silence in the room. “And then we found them. But they were dead, see? I pulled his little baby from the rubble. She had nothing to do with it. A year old. One year old. You understand? They weren’t at war. Collateral damage. That’s what your government said. We carried them through the streets. To bury them. I was beyond emotion. You could have hit me with a million drone strikes. I would not have cared, you understand?”
She does not want to dismiss his story. It confuses her but pierces her too: “The people need to hear these things, Alexanda, yes.”
“And I was resentful, see, when I saw the documentary. Because nobody got to tell her story. Also because I was affected by James’s story too. And his father. I was ashamed. I should have reserved my grief, you understand? But James gets his story told on
HBO. He’s white and he’s American. People listen to him. But nobody told her story, that child.” He breathes in another net of air. “Because she’s not white and she’s not American.”
His, briefly, is a one-hundred-yard stare.
“But you could have told her story, Alexanda.” He gathers himself. Puts his clasped hands to his forehead, dries his eyes with his fist: that fist. She knows, too, what he must be thinking: How could he have told that story? Who would have listened? By what means could he have told it?
It will, she knows, be almost impossible to tell others — her family, her friends — about this moment. Hard to believe that the man who tortured her son is sobbing no more than four feet in front of her. Hard to explain that it is, most likely, not an act. Hard to illustrate how she has contained her emotions. Hard to judge if he is exploiting the moment. Even harder to explain that it is not just the story of a one-year-old child taken from the rubble, or a father crying in a documentary, or an anonymous drone strike, or a tortured son, or a journey across mountains, or a screed of hatred, or a tower coming down, or a city filled suddenly with poison gas, or a scorched earth, or a peddling of fear, or three young children in front of a camera in a refugee camp, or a man who ventured out from New Hampshire, or a soldier who guided a remote drone, or a politician sitting in a suddenly small office, or a woman in east London edging her fingers along a photograph, or a six-year-old wondering about his uncle, or a chain hanging in the air of a basement in Abu Ghraib, or a blow of a steel pipe against the bottom of a pair of feet in Raffa, or the thud of a fist in the kidneys, or a murdered messenger, or the incanted prayers, or the way it is all knitted together, from Wisconsin to London to Damascus to New Hampshire to Tripoli to Virginia, all these wild and entwined things, somehow held together and not by language: there is no word for it that she knows of.
She beseeches the Holy Spirit to come down and help her find one. Give me mercy. Give me strength. Maybe it is not enough to say that it’s just sad, it’s all just sad, it’s terribly sad, but perhaps there is no other word, just simple sadness that Jim is dead, and sadness that Alexanda will spend the rest of his life in prison, and sadness that his daughter in England will never know him, and sadness that Jim’s nephews will not see him at Christmas, and sadness that so many people want to poison it with narrowness, and sadness that others want to turn away and forget it all, and sadness that nobody wants to know about the hostages, and sadness that the newspapers and television stations and websites are struck dumb by indifference, and sadness that nobody knows what innocence means any more, and sadness that we still go about taking the lives from one another, and sadness that it comes down to either justice or revenge — as if that is the only choice — and sadness, too, that the very sadness itself is not an answer.
She knows that she will be called naive if she tells the story, somehow, someday, on television somewhere, or in print, or on the internet — they will say that she was duped by him, that she fell for his act. That she allowed herself to open up to his deception, but it doesn’t matter, not a bit, not in this moment, no.
Diane Foley allows herself for the first time, the very first time, the only time — since August 19 2014, the day her son’s death was announced — to cry in public.
She does not make a spectacle of it. She does it quietly. Hardly anyone in the room knows. She is not even sure that Alexanda, four feet across the table, knows. She brings a knuckle to her cheek.
Seven years. No distance between then and now. “I hope that one day we can forgive one another,” she says to Kotey.
He is taken aback: “There is no reason for you to offer forgiveness.”