Steven Sotloff, the American journalist whose beheading is reportedly shown in a video released by the militant group Islamic State (Isis) on Tuesday, made it his business to report from some of the world’s most unstable and dangerous locations in the three years before he was captured in Syria in 2013.
As a freelance contributor to a range of current affairs outlets, Sotloff, 31, travelled around the Middle East from hotspot to hotspot, covering the initial optimism of the Arab Spring and its less happy aftermath. A month before he disappeared, he tweeted from the relatively tranquil location of Antakya in south-west Turkey: “Got pepper sprayed by riot police in Antakya today”.
“Steven embodies what it takes to report from combat zones,” said Bill Roggio, managing editor of the Long War Journal, a news website that covers jihadist groups for which Sotloff wrote in 2011 from Cairo. “He has that courage and little bit of craziness that you need to take risks to observe and understand a story in dangerous places.”
His work took him from Egypt and Turkey to Bahrain, where he wrote for the Christian Science Monitor, and Libya, where he reported extensively for Time magazine on the attack on the US compound in Benghazi in which ambassador Chris Stevens was killed. In 2013 he turned to Syria and the millions of refugees fleeing the civil war there.
Benjamin Pauker, executive editor of Foreign Policy, for which Sotloff wrote from Syria, told Al Jazeera that Sotloff took “a serious look at the plight of Syrian refugees. The reporting these people do is extremely valuable, extremely risky and extremely dangerous.”
A self-described “standup philosopher”, Sotloff came from Miami and was a passionate supporter of the NBA’s Miami Heat. His last post on Twitter saw him speculating about the chances of his beloved Heat in the coming season.
That post was entered on 3 August of last year. Some time soon after that he was captured by militants – it is thought outside Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. For almost a year, all knowledge of his kidnapping was kept secret at the request of his family due to threats from Isis that it would kill Sotloff if the news became public.
The public disclosure of his capture was made by Isis itself at the end of the video the organization released last month of the beheading of another American journalist, James Foley. Sotloff, his head shaved, was brought in front of the ISIS camera dressed in the same Guantanamo-style orange jumpsuit as Foley and made to kneel.
“The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision,” an ISIS militant said in that video.
Shirley Sotloff, Steven’s mother, then responded with her own video message to his captors. “As a mother, I ask your justice to be merciful and not punish my son for matters he has no control over,” she said. “Steven has no control over the actions of the U.S. government. He is an innocent journalist.”
