ISIS Attempts to Prove Legitimacy

Journalist Steven Sotloff

cnn.com

Journalist Steven Sotloff

Davis Goode, Editor-in-Chief

Two weeks, two executions. American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff were both beheaded by an ISIS executioner over the past two weeks.

President Obama and his staff have responded with the expected, outraged rhetoric against Isis. Obama claims that our “reach is long” and that “justice will be served” (NBC). ISIS claims that the executions are a direct result of Obama’s decision to launch air strikes in Iraq. The president is also considering air strikes in Syria, a move which many Republicans and some democrats are strongly lobbying (CNN).

The air strikes helped loosen ISIS’s grip on certain areas of Iraq, including the strategically vital Mosul dam, the city of Amerli, and the regional Kurdish capital of Irbil. The Sotloff execution comes just days after the president’s widely criticized statement in which he said the US has no strategy for combating ISIS in Syria. Obama is currently in Estonia ahead of a NATO summit in Wales to address the future of NATO as well as recent Russian aggression.

The president has directed his intelligence community to identify the landscape and other details in the video, using technology similar to the technology used by the British to identify the executioner himself.

Sotloff was a 31 year old freelance reporter from Florida. ISIS claims to hold captive several other Americans, although major news outlets like CNN cannot independently confirm their claim’s authenticity.