A French official said there is a strong probability that a French citizen is among the Islamic State militants who participated in killing American aid worker Abdul-Rahman Kassig.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Monday that French intelligence analyzed a video the militants released Sunday and believe a 22-year-old Frenchman is pictured among images showing Kassig’s head and the beheadings of several Syrian soldiers.
Kassig, 26, was taken captive 13 months ago while doing humanitarian work in war-torn Syria. He was known as Peter before converting to Islam during his captivity.
The White House on Sunday confirmed the beheading of Kassig, who was the third American to be decapitated in Syria by Islamic State militants.
U.S. President Barack Obama offered prayers and condolences to the parents and family of Kassig and condemned his killing, calling it “an act of pure evil.”
‘Slaughter of innocents’
The White House said that while the Islamic State group “revels in the slaughter of innocents,” Kassig “was a humanitarian who worked to save the lives of Syrians injured and dispossessed by the Syrian conflict.”
The latest execution occurred as the top U.S. military official met with senior Iraqi and Kurdish officials and the U.S. began advising and training Iraqi security forces in restive western Anbar province.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who lauded Kassig for his service as an Army Ranger in Iraq, told reporters that Kassig had “extraordinary values and principles,” and that applying them by helping others wherever it was needed “cost him his life.”
Hagel said the United States is committed to defeat the Islamic State group.
“No one wants to live in a world of this kind of inhumanity and brutality, and all of us as human beings have a responsibility to see that that doesn’t happen. It’s difficult, but we will prevail,” Hagel said.
Hagel said in an earlier written statement that the killing shows the stark contrast between the “inhumanity” of the Islamic State fighters and the “bright and generous spirit” of Kassig.
Kassig, who witnessed the suffering of the Syrian people while visiting the region as a college student in 2012, was captured in eastern Syria in October 2013 while delivering relief supplies for Special Emergency Relief and Assistance, the aid group he founded.
He is the fifth Westerner to be beheaded by the Islamic State group. The militant Sunni group executed American journalists James Foley and Stephen Sotloff, and British aid workers David Haines, a taxi driver, and Alan Henning, a former Air Force engineer.
Family heartbroken
Kassig’s parents, Ed and Paula Kassig of Indianapolis, Indiana, who pleaded in a video last month to Islamic State militants to spare their son’s life, said they were heartbroken by the news.
In a statement Sunday, the Kassig family urged the media not to broadcast images released by the militants, saying this was “playing into the hostage-takers hands.”
British Prime Minister David Cameron said he was horrified by Kassig’s “cold-blooded murder.”
Appearing Sunday on U.S. television, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel stands with the U.S. in the battle against Islamic State militants.
“We support President Obama in leading this coalition [against Islamic State]. It has to be fought. ISIS has to be defeated and it can be defeated,” Netanyahu said, using another name for the group.
The Israeli leader said the Middle East is “awash in militant Islamists,” Sunni and Shi’ite, and, in a reference to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, added that they must not be allowed to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Training, advising mission
The U.S. is stepping up its training and advising mission of Iraqi forces battling Islamic State fighters with plans to train up to 12 brigades, including nine Iraqi units and three comprised of Kurdish peshmerga fighters.
The top U.S. military official, General Martin Dempsey, met with Iraqi Kurdish officials Sunday in Irbil after holding talks in Baghdad with members of Iraq’s central government, including Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
RAND Corporation senior political scientist Rick Brennan, a career Army officer, said he believes Dempsey is carrying two messages.
“One is that the United States is here [in Iraq] to provide the type of assistance the Iraqi security forces need in order to develop the capabilities that have atrophied over the last several years,” Brennan said.
“The other message I think he’s trying to emphasize [is] the great need for the Shi’ite-led government to reach out and mend bridges with the Sunni populace. If you go back to the 2005-2006 time period, one of the great successes the United States military had was driving a wedge between the Sunni populace and the predecessor [of] ISIS, al-Qaida in Iraq,” he said.
Brennan said U.S. forces now operating in Anbar province hope to re-establish that wedge lost during the tenure of former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. He said their presence at Ain al-Asad airbase is significant. He said it was envisioned as a training facility, had U.S. forces been allowed to stay past 2011.
Although U.S. troops were withdrawn, Brennan said he expects the base to allow the more rapid training of Iraqi security forces.
Following the announcement earlier this month that Obama authorized deployment of another 1,500 U.S. troops to Iraq, Brennan said the administration is finally taking actions that should have been implemented months ago.
He said the fight against the Islamic State group will take more U.S. forces than are on the ground now.
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