Eighteen hostages were held in one cramped cell, but only one was doomed to die.With his last moments recorded on video and posted online by his ISIL captors, freelance journalist James Foley was beheaded by the Islamist militants last month.
As an American citizen, for Foley it was his nationality that effectively signed his death warrant. As is its policy, the US government does not pay ransom money to terrorist organisations to secure the release of its kidnapped citizens.
So while his former cellmates, holding passports from countries such as France and Denmark, were reunited with their families, only Foley faced execution.
Earlier this week another western hostage, David Haines, a humanitarian worker who had gone to Syria to deliver aid, was also beheaded by ISIL. Haines was a British citizen, and like the Americans, the United Kingdom does not meet the ransom demands of groups it considers terrorists.
Claims have been made that Foley’s former cellmates, among them the French journalist Nicolas Henin and Danish photojournalist Daniel Rye Ottosen, were released after their respective home countries paid ransoms to the extremists.
According to the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten, Ottosen, 25, was released following a payment of tens of millions of euros.
Since ISIL began kidnapping, parading and executing westerners, US president Barack Obama and British prime minister David Cameron have remained firm and repeated time and again that their countries do not pay ransoms.
But in recent years Al Qaeda and other extremist groups have earned hundreds of millions of dollars through such payments.
After the graphic video of Foley’s death was posted online, the US government was forced to defend its position on ransoms.
“The United States government, as a matter of long-standing policy, does not grant concessions to hostage takers,” said the White House press secretary Josh Earnest. “Doing so would put more Americans at risk of being captive and would be a funding stream for these terrorist organisations.”
Nearly a month later, Mr Cameron similarly defended Britain’s position after the execution of Haines, a 44-year-old who was kidnapped in Syria in March last year.
His abductors, effectively middlemen between ISIL and the UK, reportedly wanted a ransom payment in exchange for the release of the security expert.
A video of the execution of the father of two, from Perth, Scotland, was posted online on Saturday, making him the third western hostage to be executed by ISIL in less than a month.
Two weeks ago at a Nato meeting in Wales, Mr Cameron again reminded the member countries of the agreement made last year at the G8 Summit to “stamp out” payments to terrorist organisations.
“What matters is not your signature on a declaration, but not letting money be paid to terrorist kidnappers, because that money goes into arms, it goes into weapons, it goes into terror plots, it goes into more kidnaps,” he said.
The declaration Mr Cameron referred to was signed by G8 members, including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US, last summer.
Leaders of those countries agreed to “unequivocally reject the payment of ransoms to terrorists”.
But as the amount paid in ransoms to Al Qaeda-affiliated organisations and other extremist groups reached the tens of millions of dollars, the resolve of some countries seemed to be waning.
A New York Times investigation in July claimed that France had paid almost US$60 million (Dh220m) to Al Qaeda and its affiliates in ransoms since 2008.
Criminal groups, it said, were paid to seize hostages and received a cut of any ransoms paid for their release.
The newspaper accused Qatar and Oman, countries that act as intermediaries with terrorist groups in Yemen, of paying ransoms “on behalf of European governments”.
It also identified Switzerland, Spain and Austria as countries that had paid ransoms, and whose citizens accounted for 20 per cent of the 53 hostages taken captive over the last five years. Of this total, a third were French and only three were American, it said.
In late 2012, David S Cohen, the US undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, delivered a talk to the London-based think tank Chatham House. Speaking on kidnapping for ransom, he described it as “our most significant terrorist financing threat today”.
“Ransom payments lead to future kidnappings, and future kidnappings lead to additional ransom payments,” he said. “And it all builds the capacity of terrorist organisations to conduct attacks. We must find a way to break the cycle.”
Kidnappers looking for hostages, he claimed, specifically targeted those countries that have been known to have paid ransoms previously.
“And recent kidnapping for ransom trends appear to indicate that hostage takers prefer not to take US or UK hostages, almost certainly because they understand that they will not receive ransoms if they take American or British hostages, and because they fear a kinetic response if they do,” Mr Cohen said.
He noted that not paying a ransom did not mean the US government was abandoning its citizens who were taken hostage.
Mr Cohen referred to a 2011 kidnapping in which US special forces rescued a European citizen and an American aid worker taken hostage by Somali gunmen. All nine kidnappers were killed in the rescue.
“The kinetic response demonstrated US resolve, and put would-be hostage takers on notice that they should not expect the United States to abandon either its citizens or its commitment to make no concessions if they take American hostages.”
Last month, Qatar helped negotiate the release of an American writer after he spent two years in captivity.
Peter Theo Curtis had been held by Jabhat Al Nusra, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, after being kidnapped at the border between Turkey and Syria.
Questions were quickly raised as to whether the militants had been paid a ransom for Curtis’s release, which came just days after ISIL posted a video online of the Foley beheading.
Curtis’s family reportedly received ransom demands ranging from US$3 million to US$25 million and were connected with the Qatari government by the their own government.
After her son’s release, his mother Nancy Curtis said: “While the family is not privy to the exact terms that were negotiated, we were repeatedly told by representatives of the Qatari government that they were mediating for Theo’s release on a humanitarian basis without the payment of money.”
Mr Earnest said the US specifically had asked the Qataris not to pay a ransom for Curtis.
Kidnappings for ransom are not limited to extremist Islamist groups with a political point to prove.
Pirates off the coast of Somalia have spent many years capturing vessels in the country’s waters and demanding ransoms for their release.
In 2011, it reached a peak with 176 attacks before an international naval effort reduced the numbers. So far this year, there has only been two Somali pirate attacks.
In total, from 2005 through last year, Somali pirates collected between $339 million and $413 million in ransom money, according to a report released last year by The World Bank, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and Interpol.
The money they received was invested in arms trafficking, funding militias, human trafficking and other piracy activities.
As well as large commercial shipping vessels, the Somalians also targeted holidaymakers.
In one particularly high-profile case, retired British couple Paul and Rachel Chandler were kidnapped from their sailing boat off the Seychelles in 2009. Just over a year later a ransom of £600,000 (Dh3.57m) was paid to the Somali kidnappers. The money was thought to have been raised privately.
After the couple’s release, their relatives issued a statement: “The family believes it would be irresponsible to discuss any aspect of the release process as this could encourage others to capture private individuals and demand large ransom payments, something that we are sure none of us wants,” it said.
In September 2011, Judith Tebbutt, wife of the British publishing executive David Tebbutt, was kidnapped from Kenya and taken to Somalia. Her family were thought to have paid a ransom for her release six months later.
When ransoms are paid, Mr Cohen said, governments should locate, freeze and seize the ill-gotten gains and prosecute the hostage takers.
This “denial of benefits”, he said, was a third and final line of defence.
“But at the end of the day, the obligation to deprive terrorists of the financial means to plan, develop and execute their deadly attacks demands that we find a way to deny terrorists access to ransom payments. That includes, in our view, adopting and implementing a policy of refusing to pay ransoms.”
munderwood@thenational.ae
