Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
4th beheading steels resolve of U.K. leader
Cameron calls execution horror for horror’s sake
CAIRO — The Islamic State extremists who have beheaded another Western hostage are deaf to reason and must be destroyed, British Prime Minister David Cameron said Saturday as Muslims worldwide were urged to pray for the victim on one of Islam’s holiest days.
Cameron, speaking after a security briefing at his rural retreat Chequers, said Friday’s slaying of 47-yearold English aid worker Alan Henning demonstrated that Islamic State militants were committed to inflicting horror for horror’s sake.
Asked whether he believed Islamic State fighters would kill more hostages, Cameron said they would have to be hunted down to be stopped. He declined to say whether Britain would extend its involvement in U.S.-led airstrikes on the Islamic State group to Syria, where the hostage killings are believed to have happened.
“The fact that this was a kind, gentle, compassionate and caring man who had simply gone to help others, the fact they could murder him in the way they did, shows what we are dealing with,” Cameron said. “This is going to be our struggle now. … We must do everything we can to defeat this organization.”
Henning, a taxi driver from the town of Eccles in northwest England, was abducted minutes after his aid convoy entered Syria on Dec. 26. He was the fourth Western hostage to be killed by the Islamic State since mid-August, after two American journalists and another British aid worker. In their latest video, Henning’s killers linked their action to a vote Sept. 26 in British Parliament to deploy the Royal Air Force against Islamic State positions in Iraq, but not Syria.
Henning’s widow, Barbara, said the family was devastated at the loss of a “decent, caring human being” and that they were proud of the work he did in helping others.
“There are few words to describe how we feel at this moment. … All of Alan’s family and friends are numb with grief,” she said in a statement through Britain’s foreign office.
Muslim leaders across
Britain urged worshippers worldwide to pray for Henning and for peace in the Middle East as they gathered at mosques to celebrate Eid al-Adha, or “Feast of Sacrifice,” a major holiday in Islam.
“Millions should be praying today for Alan Henning, a good and honorable man,” said Muslim peace activist Shaukat Warraich, speaking outside a mosque in the central English city of Birmingham.
Egypt’s Foreign Ministry denounced what it called a “barbaric and savage act that fully contradicts Islamic religion tenets and the simplest human and ethical rules.”
Britain’s former army chief of staff, Gen. Richard Dannatt, called for British air power to be deployed in Syria as well as Iraq, but not for Western ground forces. “This is a fight for the soul of Islam. This is their fight,” Dannatt said, pointing to Jordan and Turkey as countries that need “to get stuck into this fight.”
Farooq Siddique, former leader of a British government initiative to combat extremism, said Western involvement plays into the extremists’ hands. “Saudi Arabia has 700 jets. They are using only 10 of them. Why do they need the West to go and help them?” Siddique said.
The video was similar to other beheading videos shot by the Islamic State and ended with a militant threatening American hostage Peter Kassig, 26, as its next victim.
“Obama, you have started your aerial bombardment of Sham [Syria], which keeps on striking our people, so it is only right that we continue to strike the necks of your people,” the masked militant in the video said.
National Security Council spokesman Caitlin Hayden confirmed that Islamic State militants had Kassig.
“We will continue to use every tool at our disposal — military, diplomatic, law enforcement and intelligence — to try to bring Peter home to his family,” Hayden said.
In Indianapolis, Kassig’s parents released a video message Saturday, pleading with their son’s captors to free him.
In the family’s video, Ed Kassig says his son, who now goes by the first name Abdul-Rahman after converting to Islam during his captivity, was captured Oct. 1, 2013, in Syria, where he was providing aid for refugees fleeing that country’s civil war through the relief organization he founded, Special Emergency Response and Assistance.
His family said Kassig began delivering food and medical supplies to Syrian refugee camps in 2012, and is a trained medical assistant who provided trauma care to injured Syrian civilians and helped train 150 civilians in providing medical aid.
After his capture, the group suspended its aid efforts.
“We implore those who are holding you to show mercy and use their power to let you go,” Paula Kassig says in the video, holding a photo of her son.
According to his military record, Kassig served in the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, a special operations unit, was deployed to Iraq from April to July 2007 and was medically discharged later that year at the rank of private first class.
The militant video Friday was the fourth such video released by the Islamic State group. Previous victims were American reporter James Foley, American-Israeli journalist Steven Sotloff and British aid worker David Haines.
FBI Director James Comey said American officials believe they know the identity of the masked militant, who speaks with a London accent. Comey has declined to name the man or reveal his nationality
The Islamic State group has its roots in al-Qaida’s Iraqi affiliate but was expelled from the global terror network over its brutal tactics and refusal to obey orders to confine its activities to Iraq. It grew more extreme and powerful during the three-year civil war in Syria, launching a lightning offensive this summer that captured territory in both countries.
Islamic State militants may hold many more hostages. On Friday, the father of John Cantlie, a British photojournalist held by the group, appealed for his son’s release in a video, describing his son as a friend of Syria.
AIRSTRIKES IN SYRIA
On Saturday, the U.S.-led coalition carried out new airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Syria.
The airstrikes targeted the militants’ positions Friday night in the eastern town of Shaddadeh, a stronghold of the Islamic State group in the northeastern Syrian province of Hassakeh, according to activists.
The airstrikes caused fatalities, the activists said, with Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights saying as many as 30 Islamic State fighters were killed. The activist group said all the dead were foreign fighters.
It was the first time Shaddadeh was struck since the U.S.-led campaign began nearly two weeks ago. There was no immediate confirmation from Washington.
Meanwhile, intense fighting continued on the outskirts of Kobani on the Syrian-Turkish border, where Islamic State fighters have been trying to capture the town to open a direct link between their positions in the Syrian province of Aleppo and their stronghold of Raqqa, to the east.
Kobani and its surrounding areas have been under attack since mid-September, with militants capturing dozens of nearby Kurdish villages. The assault, which has forced some 160,000 Syrians to flee, has left the Kurdish militiamen scrambling to repel the militants’ advance into the outskirts of the town, also known in Arabic as Ayn Arab.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said fighting was focused Saturday on the southwestern edge of the town, adding that members of the Islamic State group were shelling Kobani.
Islamic State is “still shelling Kobani with mortars as people there are struggling to defend themselves,” Ibrahim Ayhan, a pro-Kurdish lawmaker in the Turkish parliament, said by phone from the country’s border town of Suruc on Saturday. Airstrikes the previous night by U.S.-led coalition warplanes didn’t “change the tide of the war,” he said.
In Turkey, a senior special forces police officer was wounded in the head by stray shrapnel from the fighting in Kobani, reported the private Dogan news agency. There was no immediate official confirmation. The news agency said the officer was being treated in a hospital.
Also on the Turkish side, a group of about 200 activists marched toward the border with Syria on Saturday, chanting slogans in support of the Kurdish fighters in Kobani. Turkish troops stopped the group about 50 yards from the border, then fired tear gas to push them away from the frontier.
While Turkey’s government has vowed to prevent an Islamic State takeover of Kobani, Kurds aren’t convinced, accusing authorities in Ankara of using the crisis to suppress a largely autonomous Kurdish region that has evolved during Syria’s civil war.
A diplomatic rift between Turkey and the United States was patched over late Saturday after Vice President Joe Biden officially apologized to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for remarks suggesting that Turkey helped facilitate the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group.
In remarks at Harvard University on Thursday, Biden said Erdogan had admitted erring in allowing foreign fighters to cross Turkey’s border into Syria, eventually leading to the formation of the group.
Biden’s spokesman, Kendra Barkoff, said in an emailed statement that the two leaders spoke by phone Saturday. “The vice president apologized for any implication that Turkey or other allies and partners in the region had intentionally supplied or facilitated the growth of ISIL or other violent extremists in Syria,” Barkoff said.
Earlier Saturday, Erdogan had demanded an apology, saying he had never made any such remark to Biden.
In Iraq, officials said two attacks targeting the country’s military killed nine people.
The deadliest attack struck Diyala province, west of the capital. A police official said militants with the Islamic State targeted an Iraqi army checkpoint in the town of Mansouriya, killing four people and wounding 14.
A second attack hit Tarmiyah, a town 30 miles north of Baghdad. Another police official said a roadside bomb targeting an Iraqi military convoy there killed at least five people. The official said three of those killed were civilians and two were soldiers, while eight people were wounded.
Hospital officials confirmed the casualties. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with journalists.
The Pakistani Taliban offered to help Islamic State and other militant fighters in Syria and Iraq, and called on them to stay united as they besiege the northern Kurdish strong- hold Kobani.
“We are with you in this hard time and will help you as much as possible,” Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan chief Mullah Fazlullah said in a statement from an undisclosed location. “We advise you to be patient and determined at such a hard time and stay united, as your enemies stand united against you.”
Another militant group leader who recently split from the Pakistani Taliban, Omar Khorasani, also offered his help in a 10-minute video message to mediate between Islamic State, al-Qaida and the Nusra Front.
“Pakistani militants see the land captured by Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as a base for this holy war, and this being the time to join them,” Asad Munir, a former brigadier general who served as security chief of Pakistan’s tribal area, a Taliban haven, said by phone from Islamabad. “They believe in capturing the world and setting up a caliphate.” Information for this article was contributed by Jon Gambrell, Shawn Pogatchnik, Jill Lawless, Maamoun Youssef, Rick Callahan, Bassem Mroue, Mehmet Guzel, Albert Aji, and Qassim Abdul-Zahra of The Associated Press; by Sebnem Arsu of The
New York Times; and by Selcan Hacaoglu, Benjamin Harvey, Carter Dougherty, Faseeh Mangi and Kamran Haider of Bloomberg News.