WASHINGTON -- The Islamic State extremist group released a video Tuesday showing the beheading of a man identified as American journalist Steven Sotloff and warning President Barack Obama that as long as U.S. airstrikes against the militant group continue, "our knife will continue to strike the necks of your people."
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The Islamic State, a militant Sunni group that controls a swath of eastern Syria and northern Iraq, beheaded another U.S. journalist, James Foley, in a video released last month.
"I'm back, Obama," a masked fighter says in the latest video, which was obtained by the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks jihadist activity. "I'm back because of your arrogant foreign policy toward the Islamic State, because of your insistence on continuing your bombings."
Since early August the U.S. has carried out 124 airstrikes against the militants in Iraq, the latest taking place Monday near the Mosul Dam. That airstrike damaged or destroyed 16 armored vehicles, U.S. Central Command said in a statement late Tuesday.
Sotloff, a 31-year-old Miami-area native who freelanced for Time and Foreign Policy magazines, vanished in Syria in August 2013 and was not seen again until he appeared in the video showing Foley's death. Sotloff was threatened in that video with death unless the U.S. stopped its airstrikes on the Islamic State.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Jen Psaki said U.S. intelligence analysts will work as quickly as possible to determine if the video is authentic.
"If the video is genuine, we are sickened by this brutal act, taking the life of another innocent American citizen," Psaki said. "Our hearts go out to the Sotloff family."
Barak Barfi, a spokesman for the family, said the Sotloffs had seen the video.
"The family knows of this horrific tragedy and is grieving privately. There will be no public comment from the family during this difficult time," Barfi said.
Sotloff's mother, Shirley, had released an emotional video appeal to his captors last week, asking the leader of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to grant amnesty to her son.
The killer in the new video mentions recent U.S. airstrikes around the Mosul dam and the beleaguered Iraqi town of Amirli, making it unlikely Sotloff was killed at the same time as Foley, as some analysts have speculated.
Over the weekend, Iraqi government forces with help from U.S. airstrikes broke the Islamic State's two-month siege of Amirli, a town where some 15,000 Shiite Turkmens had been stranded.
After citing the recent U.S. airstrikes against the group in Iraq, the fighter in the video says, "just as your missiles continue to strike our people, our knife will continue to strike the necks of your people."
The militant speaks with a British accent, raising the possibility that he is the same person who killed Foley, 40.
The latest recording ends with another prisoner kneeling in an orange jumpsuit, just as Sotloff was shown at the end of the recording of Foley's killing. The man in the new video is identified as David Cawthorne Haines, a British citizen.
In an apparent reference to Britain, Sotloff's killer warns "governments that enter this evil alliance of America ... to back off and leave our people alone." Haines is shown in the same kneeling position and wearing the same type of orange jumpsuit as Sotloff and Foley before him.
U.S. and British authorities are still seeking to determine the identity of Foley's killer. His British accent has intensified concerns in Europe about the large number of fighters that have flocked to Syria's civil war over the past four years.
Britain, France and other countries have seen hundreds of citizens depart for Syria, almost all of them carrying passports that would allow them to return to their home countries or travel to other Western nations.
British officials raised the country's threat level to "severe" last week as the nation's home secretary warned that terrorist plots were seen as "highly likely" because of the fallout from the conflicts in Iraq and Syria.
More U.S. action urged
U.S. lawmakers responded to the new video by urging Obama to step up efforts to forge a broad coalition of nations that would take on Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria, where the group has declared self-rule on lands it has captured.
Obama said last week that he will send Secretary of State John Kerry to the Mideast to seek support from nations in the region.
"There is a growing awareness internationally that we have to form an unprecedented international program of cooperation," Rep. Ed Royce of California, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said on a conference call with reporters Tuesday.
While Obama has authorized limited airstrikes against Islamic State in Iraq for humanitarian purposes and to protect U.S. personnel, he said last week that "we don't have a strategy yet" to extend the fight into Syria. The U.S. backs what it calls moderate rebels seeking to overthrow Syria's President Bashar Assad, even as Islamic State has made greater headway against Assad's forces.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in an emailed statement Tuesday that American air power, employed "in coordination with reliable partners on the ground," should be "aggressively pursued both in Syria and Iraq."
Some Democrats have joined Republicans in urging more forceful action by Obama.
"I've learned one thing about this president, and that is he's very cautious -- maybe in this instance too cautious," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who heads the Senate intelligence committee, said Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press.
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., said in a statement Tuesday that America must go after Islamic State "right away because the U.S. is the only one that can put together a coalition to stop this group that's intent on barbaric cruelty."
Royce, the head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he will call Kerry before the panel this month to testify on efforts at "rolling back" Islamic State's gains.
Royce and Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, the committee's top Democrat, said they expect Congress to vote on airstrikes in Iraq and possibly Syria.
"We anticipate that there would be a vote for authorization," Royce said.
But some Obama administration officials said they and the president are wary of expanding the overt U.S. military role. Doing so risks unwittingly assisting the extremists' efforts to define the conflict as part of a centuries-old Christian crusader and Jewish war against Islam, according to six officials who asked for anonymity to discuss internal policy deliberations.
In a statement calling Sotloff's murder "despicable and barbaric" if confirmed, British Prime Minister David Cameron said Tuesday that Islamic State terrorists "speak for no religion. They threaten Syrians, Iraqis, American and British people alike and make no distinction between Muslims, Christians or any other faith."
'Ethnic cleansing"
In addition to the killings of Foley and Sotloff, the Islamic State has been accused of committing war crimes against civilians in Iraq and Syria, particularly against religious minority groups.
An international rights group accused the extremist Islamic State group on Tuesday of systematic "ethnic cleansing" in northern Iraq targeting indigenous religious minorities, as well as conducting mass killings of men and abducting women.
In a new report, Amnesty International said militants abducted "hundreds, if not thousands" of women and girls of the Yazidi faith. The extremists also killed "hundreds" of Yazidi men and boys, Amnesty said. In at least one episode, the report said militants rounded up the boys and men on trucks, took them to the edge of their village and shot them.
The 26-page report adds to a growing body of evidence outlining the scope and extent of the Islamic State group's atrocities since it began its sweep from Syria across neighboring Iraq in June. The militants since have seized much of northern and western Iraq, and have stretched to the outskirts of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.
Obama on Tuesday approved sending 350 more troops to help protect the American Embassy in Baghdad and its support facilities in the Iraqi capital, raising the number of U.S. forces there to more than 1,000, the White House said in a statement. The additional troops will not serve in a combat role, the White House said.
On Monday, the United Nations' top human-rights body approved a request by Iraq to open an investigation into suspected crimes committed by the Islamic State group against civilians. Its aim would be to provide the Human Rights Council with evidence on atrocities committed in Iraq, which could be used as part of any international war crimes prosecution.
In its report, Amnesty detailed how the advance of Islamic State group fighters expelled an estimated 830,000 people -- mostly Shiites and those belonging to small religious minority groups including Aramaic-speaking Christians; Yazidis, a faith that traces to ancient Mesopotamia; the Shabak, an offshoot of Islam; and Mandeans, a gnostic faith.
Most fled as extremists neared their communities, fearing they'd be killed or forcibly converted to the group's hard-line version of Islam.
Thousands of Christians now live in schools and churches in northern Iraq. Yazidis crowd into a displaced persons camp and half-finished buildings. Shiites have mostly drifted to southern Iraq.
The sudden displacement of the minority groups appears to be the final blow to the continuity of those tiny communities in Iraq. Their numbers had been shrinking since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which triggered extremist violence against them.
"Minorities in Iraq have been targeted at different points in the past, but the Islamic State has managed, in the space of a few weeks, to completely wipe off of the map of Iraq, the religious and ethnic minorities from the area under their control," said Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International.
Information for this article was contributed by David Lerman, Roxana Tiron, John Walcott and Robert Hutton; by Greg Miller, Adam Goldman, Anne Gearan, Julie Tate, Karen DeYoung and Liz Sly of The Washington Post; by Zeina Karam, Ken Dilanian, Josh Lederman, Lara Jakes, Nariman El-Mofty, Sylvia Hu, Christine Armario, Sinan Salaheddin, Diaa Hadid, Marco Drobnjakovic and staff members of The Associated Press; by Rick Gladstone, Eric Schmitt, Michael R. Gordon, Brian Knowlton and by Rukmini Callimachi of The New York Times.
A Section on 09/03/2014