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Remembering James Foley

Jamie Dettmer

   James Foley was the first of the Western hostages to be beheaded.

   Earmarked for especially harsh treatment by Islamic State militants in
   Syria -- possibly because he had a brother who had served with U.S.
   forces in Afghanistan -- he was 40 when he was executed on the 636th
   day of his captivity.

   Now two of his alleged killers are in the U.S., awaiting trial.

   Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, from west London, were arraigned
   in a Virginia court at midweek. They have denied being involved in
   Foley's death. And they also have denied participating in the horrific
   killings of other Western hostages, including aid workers Kayla Mueller
   and Peter Kassig and journalist Steve Sotloff, all Americans.

   That is not how European hostages who were freed by IS in exchange for
   ransoms see it.

   They say Kotey and Elsheikh were members of a quartet of British
   militants who put their Western captives, especially the British and
   Americans, through rounds of excruciating suffering, routinely beating
   and waterboarding them and staging mock executions and crucifixions.
   The four tormentors were nicknamed "the Beatles" because of their
   British accents.

   Visible scars

   "You could see the scars on his [Foley's] ankles," Jejoen Bontinck, a
   19-year-old Belgian and convert to Islam, said in interviews later.
   Bontinck, a jihadist recruit who fell afoul of IS, shared a prison cell
   with Foley in 2013. "He told me how they had chained his feet to a bar
   and then hung the bar so that he was upside down from the ceiling. Then
   they left him there," he said.

   Foley's abduction in November 2012 came as a lightning bolt for war
   reporters covering Syria. He was experienced, having covered the
   uprising previously in Libya that led to the ouster of Moammar Gadhafi.
   There, too, he had been captured and held for several weeks. "It was a
   kind of siren song that called me out to the front lines," he told
   students later at Marquette University in Milwaukee, where he, too, had
   studied.

   "It's not enough to see it from the distance," he added.

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