ISIS: Second beheaded American journalist, Sotloff, was lover of Islamic world

After the brutal execution of an American journalist, James Foley, on August 19 by ISIS terrorists in Syria, another horrific video was released yesterday, September 2, showing the beheading of another American journalist, Steven Sotloff.

DailyMail UK now reports that Sotloff was the grandson of two Holocaust survivors who were fully aware of the risks of reporting from Middle East.

According to the report, Sotloff’s friends say he lived in Yemen for years, spoke fluent Arabic and had a deep love for the Islamic world before he was captured by ISIS militants in Syria in 2013. He has now been executed by them.

Sotloff, 31, grew up Miami with his mother Shirley - whose parents were both Holocaust survivors - and father Art before attending the Kimball Union Academy boarding school in New Hampshire from which he graduated in 2002.

He then studied at the University of Central Florida.

It is not fully known how he arrived in the middle east to report as a freelancer, but a friend of his, Emerson Lotzia said: “A million people could have told him what he was doing was foolish, it seemed like it to us outsiders looking in, but to him it was what he loved to do and you weren’t going to stop him.

“Steve said it was scary over there. It was dangerous. It wasn’t safe to be over there. He knew it. He kept going back”

During his time in the Middle East, Sotloff wrote reports from Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Turkey and Syria and was published in TIME, World Affairs, National Interest and the Christian Science Monitor.


Source: DailyMail UK