BEIRUT -- Islamic State extremists released a video Saturday showing the beheading of British aid worker David Haines, who was abducted in Syria last year, and British Prime Minister David Cameron is condemning his slaying as "an act of pure evil."
Cameron confirmed Haines' death in a statement posted late Saturday on his official Twitter account after the British Foreign Office said earlier that it was "working urgently to verify the video."
Cameron is expected to head a meeting of the government's emergency response team today.
He vowed to do "everything in our power to hunt down these murderers and ensure they face justice, however long it takes."
The video was posted Saturday on Twitter by the Site Intel Group, a provider of news and information about jihadists. It's similar to the ones that showed the executions of U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Joel Sotloff, and the killer appears to be the same man, the SITE group said.
The new video starts with a clip of Cameron saying that he wants to use diplomatic and military pressure on the Islamic State, which he calls an "appalling organization."
Cameron's interview is cut, and a black screen appears with the words: "A message to the allies of America."
The video then shows Haines, kneeling against a desert backdrop wearing an orange jumpsuit similar to the ones worn by Foley and Sotloff before their killings.
"I would like to declare that I hold you, David Cameron, entirely responsible for my execution," Haines says, speaking to the camera. "You entered voluntarily into a coalition with the United States against the Islamic State, just as your predecessor Tony Blair did."
In the video, a man in a black hood, speaking in English, jabs a knife into the air. "Your evil alliance with America which continues to strike the Muslims of Iraq and most recently bombed the Haditha Dam will only accelerate your destruction," the unidentified man said.
The video ends with the black-clad executioner identifying the next possible victim as Alan Henning, another British citizen.
The group is currently holding another Briton, as well as two American aid workers. Their families have asked the news media not to disclose their names, after the Islamic State warned that the hostages would be killed if relatives made their identities public.
Haines, who has a military background, was kidnapped 19 months ago in northern Syria and was held alongside an Italian co-worker, Federico Motka. Both men worked for ACTED, a French aid group, and had traveled to Syria to help during the country's civil war. Their fates diverged based on their country's individual policies: Motka was released in May, one of 15 Europeans liberated from the same Islamic State-run jail for a ransom, according to a person who was held alongside them and who could not be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.
The British government had managed to keep Haines' kidnapping secret out of concern for his safety until the video of Sotloff's execution was released Sept. 2, in which he is named as the next to be killed. Late Friday, the family of Haines had issued a public plea urging his captors to contact them.
Mike Haines said in a statement issued by the Foreign Office that his brother was devoted to humanitarian work.
"David was most alive and enthusiastic in his humanitarian roles," Mike Haines said. "His joy and anticipation for the work he went to do in Syria is for myself and family the most important element of this whole sad affair. He was and is loved by all his family and will be missed terribly."
The killing was a clear message to Britain, a key ally of the United States as it tries to build an international coalition to target the militant group, which has made major advances across Syria and northern Iraq in recent months. It also put pressure on the government of Cameron.
NATO leaders met in Wales this month and sought to devise a strategy to address the growing threat from the Islamic State, including plans to strengthen allies on the ground in Iraq and Syria, and conduct airstrikes against the militants.
Cameron's government earlier Saturday said it will be supplying "heavy machine guns and nearly half a million rounds of ammunition" at the request of the Iraqi government.
The move will give the Kurdish peshmerga forces in northern Iraq "additional firepower in order to help them defend the front line, protect civilians and push back" advances by the Islamic State, the U.K. government said in a statement on its website.
In a statement issued Saturday night, President Barack Obama said the hearts of Americans go out to David Haines' family and the people of the United Kingdom.
"We will work with the United Kingdom and a broad coalition of nations from the region and around the world to bring the perpetrators of this outrageous act to justice, and to degrade and destroy this threat to the people of our countries, the region and the world," he said.
As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry sought Egyptian support Saturday for the international coalition to combat jihadi groups, Egypt pressed for broader international efforts to fight militants in its troubled neighbor, Libya.
Military officials said that in exchange for Egypt's support for the coalition to combat the Islamic State, it seeks assurances that sorting out Libya will be at the top of the U.S. agenda. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
In meetings with Kerry, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi used language that for the Egyptians clearly referred to Libya, according to a statement by the presidential spokesman.
"[He] stressed that any international coalition against terrorism must be a comprehensive alliance that is not limited to confront a certain organization or to curb a single terrorist hotbed but must expand to include all the terrorist hotbeds across the Middle East and Africa."
Nearly 40 nations have agreed to contribute to what Kerry said would be a worldwide fight to defeat the Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria. On Thursday, representatives from 10 Arab countries, including Egypt, met with the top American diplomat in the Saudi city of Jiddah promising to "do their share" in the fight.
"Almost every country has an ability to play some kind of role in this fight against ISIL, and to join this coalition one way or the other," Kerry said, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
Kerry formally announced Saturday that retired Marine Gen. John Allen will join the State Department as a special presidential envoy to coordinate the international coalition. Allen worked with international allies as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan from 2011-13.
Storage tank fire
In Iraq, Islamic State militants fired mortar rounds Saturday at the Baiji refinery, 130 miles north of Baghdad, causing a crude storage tank to catch fire and emit smoke that was visible from miles away, the police said in a statement read over the phone by an officer.
"The fire could go on for two or three days, as there is no civil defense to put it out," police said in the statement, without indicating how much oil the tank contained. "The situation in the refinery's perimeter is quiet now."
Islamic State militants have attacked the refinery several times since June as they seek to secure fuel and funding for a so-called caliphate that they proclaimed in areas stretching over the Iraqi-Syrian border. They already control oil-producing regions in eastern Syria.
The Obama administration is struggling to cut off the millions of dollars in oil revenue that has made the Islamic State one of the wealthiest terror groups in history, but so far has been unable to persuade Turkey, the NATO ally where much of the oil is traded on the black market, to crack down on an extensive sales network.
Western intelligence officials say they can track the Islamic State oil shipments as they move across Iraq and into Turkey's southern border regions. Despite extensive discussions at the Pentagon, U.S. forces have so far not attacked the tanker trucks, though a senior administration official said Friday "that remains an option."
In public, the administration has been unwilling to criticize Turkey, which insists that it has little control over the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq and Syria across its borders, or the flow of oil back out. One senior official, calling Obama's recent conversations with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan "sensitive," said the decisions about what the country will do to counter the Islamic State "will be theirs to make."
Turkey declined to sign a communique Thursday in Saudi Arabia that committed Persian Gulf states in the region to counter the Islamic State, even limited to the extent each nation considered "appropriate." Turkish officials told their U.S. counterparts that with 49 Turkish diplomats being held as hostages in Iraq, they could not risk taking a public stance against the terror group.
Still, administration officials say they believe Turkey could substantially disrupt the cash flow to the Islamic State if it tried.
"Like any sort of black market smuggling operation, if you devote the resources and the effort to attack it, you are unlikely to eradicate it, but you are likely to put a very significant dent in it," a senior administration official said Saturday.
Curbing shelling
Iraq's prime minister said Saturday that he has ordered the army to stop shelling populated areas held by militants in order to spare the lives of "innocent victims" as the armed forces struggle to retake cities and towns seized by the Islamic State extremist group this summer.
"I issued this order two days ago because we do not want to see more innocent victims falling in the places and provinces controlled by Daesh," Haider al-Abadi said at a news conference in Baghdad, referring to the Islamic State by its Arabic acronym.
He accused the militants of using civilians as human shields to stop the advance of Iraqi security forces. But he vowed to continue military operations against the al-Qaida breakaway group, which seized large territories in the north and west in an unprecedented June offensive.
Also Saturday, the U.S. military said it had conducted two airstrikes Friday against Islamic State militants near the Mosul dam.
Back in Syria, government warplanes and helicopter gunships struck targets in a central village Saturday in what appears to be preparations for a ground offensive on the rebel stronghold, activists said.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Syrian warplanes conducted at least eight airstrikes on Kfar Zeita. It had no word on casualties. An activist who goes by the name of Yazan Shahdawi said that by the afternoon there had been about 20 strikes, as well as artillery shelling.
The air raids on Kfar Zeita, which has been under rebel control for nearly two years, came amid a major government offensive in the religiously mixed central province of Hama.
Saturday's air raids came two days after troops captured the strategic town of Halfaya, better positioning government forces to defend nearby Christian and Alawite communities that support President Bashar Assad. Central Syria is a communal patchwork home to large groups of Christians, Ismailis and Alawites, who mainly back Assad, himself an Alawite. Many from these groups fear attacks on them by extremists among the mostly-Sunni rebels
Information for this article was contributed by Annie Linskey, Kadhim Ajrash, Khalid Al-Ansary, Maher Chmaytelli and Thomas Penny of Bloomberg News; by Zeina Karam, Lara Jakes, Mariam Rizk, Sameer N. Yacoub, Sylvia Hui and staff members of The Associated Press; and by Rukmini Callimachi, David E. Sanger, Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura of The New York Times.
A Section on 09/14/2014