WATCH: The video showing that ISIS beheaded 26-year-old aid worker Peter Kassig was not only the extremist group’s most gruesome, it was also the most revealing. Mike Drolet explains.
The parents of slain U.S. aid worker Abdul-Rahman Kassig said the “love and support that has poured into their lives” has helped them through the recent weeks as they held out hope the 26-year-old would be released.
Addressing media in Kassig’s hometown of Indianapolis on Monday, Paula Kassig asked for people to continue praying for her son, and “all people held against their will in Syria and Iraq, and around the world.”
Kassig, who was born Peter Kassig but adopted the name Abdul-Rahman after converting to Islam while being held captive, was kidnapped in Syria in October 2013. His death was confirmed Sunday after ISIS posted a video online showing he had been beheaded.
WATCH: The parents of American aid worker Peter Kassig offered this statement to the press and public Tuesday after learning the news that their son was the latest aid worker to be publicly beheaded by ISIS.
Paula Kassig described her son’s work helping Syrian’s injured and affected by the country’s civil war by citing a letter written by one of his former teachers.
“In 26 years, he has witnessed and experienced first hand more of the harsh realities of life than most of us can imagine,” she quoted the letter from Shelley Boeglin, sent on Nov. 16. ” But, rather than letting the darkness overwhelm him, he has chosen to believe in the good – in himself and in others…. Peter’s life is evidence that he’s been right all along; one person can make a difference.”
“Greater love hath no man than this: than to lay down his live for another,” Ed Kassig said quoting the Bible passage John 15:13.
“Please pray for Abdul-Rahman, or Pete if that is how you knew him, at sunset this evening,” his father Ed Kassig said at the press conference held at the Epworth United Methodist Church.
He went on to ask for privacy so the family could “mourn, cry —and yes, forgive —and to begin to heal.”
France: At least 1 Frenchman in ISIS video
A 22-year-old French convert to radical Islam appears in a propaganda video showing a beheaded American aid worker and the deaths of Syrian soldiers, a Paris prosecutor said Monday.
Prosecutor Francois Molins identified the man as Maxime Hauchard, one of at least three young Europeans believed among the cold-eyed fighters on the video as the extremist Islamic State group tries to portray itself as an international movement.
Molins said Hauchard has been on the radar of French authorities since he left for Syria in 2013 and another Frenchman could also be among the fighters in the video but it was too early to tell.
President Barack Obama confirmed the slaying of Kassig after a U.S. review of the video, which also showed the mass beheadings of more than a dozen Syrian soldiers.
READ MORE: ISIS captive Peter Kassig — from U.S. Army Ranger to aid worker
WATCH: ISIS terrorists beheaded an American this weekend bringing the total to five westerners the militants have murdered. As Susan McGinnis reports from Washington, the U.S. is accelerating its effort to destroy the group.
The overwhelming majority of Islamic State fighters are from the Mideast, but the extremist group is trying to cement its claim on an Islamic empire straddling Iraq and Syria. Europe appears to be a fertile ground to find Islamic State supporters, with officials saying thousands of young Europeans have headed off to jihad.
The latest video lingered on the faces of Frenchman Maxime Hauchard and other knife-wielding extremists lined up behind their kneeling victims. Some had distinctly Asian features, while another whose face was hooded had the familiar London accent of the jihadi who also appeared in beheading videos with American hostages James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and with British hostages David Haines and Alan Henning. There were also indications that a Welsh medical student may be the man standing next to Hauchard.
“It’s quite transparent that IS is trying to exaggerate its base of support,” said Charlie Winter, a researcher at the Quilliam Foundation in London. “They are trying to show that Muslims from all over the world are protecting their Syrian brethren and their Iraqi brethren.”
European officials are trying just as furiously to counter that message.
“I call solemnly and seriously on all our citizens, and notably our young people who are the primary target of the terrorist propaganda, to open your eyes to the terrible reality of the actions of Daesh,” said French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group. “These are criminals that are building a system of barbarity.”
Hauchard, who is around 22 and from west of Paris, gave an interview to France’s BFM television in July, telling the network he had helped capture Mosul, the Iraqi city whose fall eventually prompted the United States to resume military operations in Iraq.
One father from Wales, Ahmed Muthana, said he thinks he saw his son, 20-year-old Nasser Muthana, in the latest video, and a British researcher confirmed the likeness of the jihadi with the Cardiff medical student.
“It resembles him. I was shown a picture of the video. I cannot confirm it is him, but I think it might be,” Ahmed Muthana told Britain’s Press Association.
Obama denounced the extremist group, which he said “revels in the slaughter of innocents, including Muslims, and is bent only on sowing death and destruction.”
Kassig, who founded an aid group to help Syrians caught up in their country’s brutal civil war, “was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group that the world rightly associates with inhumanity,” Obama said in a statement.
“(Our son) lost his life as a result of his love for the Syrian people and his desire to ease their suffering,” the slain hostage’s parents, Ed and Paula Kassig, said in an earlier statement.
READ MORE: Friends of American held by IS call for his release, saying he is a now Muslim
With Kassig’s death, the Islamic State group has killed five Westerners it was holding. Unlike previous videos of slain Western hostages, the footage released Sunday did not show the decapitation of Kassig, the moments leading up to his death or threaten to kill any other Western hostages.
The footage released Sunday identified the militants’ location as Dabiq, a town in northern Syria that the Islamic State group uses as the title of its English-language propaganda magazine and where they believe an apocalyptic battle between Muslims and their enemies will occur.
WATCH: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry condemns the brutal killings of Western citizens by ISIS, including the most recent American victim, Peter Kassig.
The high-definition video also showed the beheadings of about a dozen men identified as Syrian military officers and pilots, all dressed in blue jumpsuits. The black-clad militant warns that U.S. soldiers will meet a similar fate.
“We say to you, Obama: You claim to have withdrawn from Iraq four years ago,” the militant said. “Here you are: You have not withdrawn. Rather, you hid some of your forces behind your proxies.”
A U.S.-led coalition is targeting the Islamic State group in airstrikes in northern Syria, supporting Western-backed Syrian rebels, Kurdish fighters and the Iraqi military. The U.S. announced that 31 airstrikes had been carried out from Nov. 14-17 against Islamic State group targets.
Kassig, who served in the U.S. Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, a special operations unit, deployed to Iraq in 2007. After being medically discharged, he returned to the Middle East in 2012 and formed a relief group, Special Emergency Response and Assistance, to aid Syrian refugees.
READ MORE: ISIS leader threatens Canada, says it will fight to the last man in audio recording
The terror group still holds other captives, including British photojournalist John Cantlie, who has appeared in several videos delivering statements for the IS, likely under duress, and a 26-year-old American woman captured last year in Syria while working for aid groups. U.S. officials have asked that the woman not be identified out of fears for her safety.
The group’s militants have beheaded and shot dead hundreds of captives, mostly Syrian and Iraqi soldiers, during its sweep across the two countries, and has celebrated its mass killings in extremely graphic videos.
The Islamic State group has declared a self-styled Islamic caliphate in areas under its control, which it governs according to its violent interpretation of Shariah law, including massacring rebellious tribes and selling women and children of religious minorities into slavery.
With files from Global News and Diaa Hadid of The Associated Press
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