James Foley disappeared on November 22, 2012, in north-west Syria near the border with Turkey. Two years later, horrifying footage emerged of him reading a script preapred by ISIS terrorists
A journalist who was kidnapped and beheaded by twisted ISIS killer “Jihadi John” reportedly shared six final words before his execution.
James Foley disappeared on November 22, 2012, in north-west Syria near the border with Turkey after being forced into a vehicle by ISIS gunmen. At the time of his kidnap, James was working for the online US news outlet GlobalPost. ISIS released a video two years later of James kneeling next to a man dressed in black. He was forced to read a message scripted by the terrorists that the “real killer” is the US – before being beheaded. Moments before he was taken away to be executed, Foley was speaking to British photojournalist John Cantlie.
He supposedly told him: “Great, captured on Thanksgiving Day, killed on my mom’s birthday.” Cantlie’s words were featured in ISIS’ twisted propaganda magazine Dabiq, and were likely written under duress. In 2017, reports claimed that he had been killed by an airstrike in Mosul.
Then-US President Barack Obama said after James’ execution: “The entire world is appalled. “No just God would stand for what they did yesterday or every single day. “People like this ultimately fail. They fail because the future’s won by those who build and not destroy. The world is shaped by people like Jim Foley.”
American forces carried out 14 air strikes after the footage was released, targeting ISIS terrorists near the Mosul dam in northern Iraq. James’ killer Jihadi John – a Londoner whose real name was Mohammed Emwazi – joined the terror group with three other Britons dubbed the ISIS Beatles.
He was killed in a drone strike in 2015 in Raqqa after reportedly being tracked to a kebab takeaway. A defence source told The Sun: “We’d been monitoring Emwazi six weeks and identified a pattern in which he’d visit a building near his mosque. “The team asked MI6 about the building and it came back that it was a kebab shop. One day he walked out of the kebab shop there and the boy ran off to play football. It was our chance.”
In 2022, James’ mum Diane Foley sat opposite one of the men who helped murder her son. Alexanda Kotey – known as Jihadi George – is now serving a life sentence at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado, and was being held at a Virginia courthouse when they met. Diane has committed her life to freeing hostages since her son’s death and spent four hours with Kotey, the BBC reported.
She said: “I wanted Kotey to be confronted with the horror of what he did. For him to understand the goodness he destroyed and why people like James were in Syria. It’s because they cared and wanted to report the truth to the world.” Diane went on: “He said had been praying to his God for forgiveness. He shared a picture of his family, he has some young children whom he will probably never see again. It made me realise how much he’s lost by following hatred and propaganda. It made me pity him.”
