Did Israel Offer ISIS $10 Million to Free Steven Sotloff?

Franklin Lamb writing from Ein el Helwe Palestinian about the death of Steven Sotloff. It is also available on Al Manar.


Though details are not yet fully known to this observer, reliable sources who have contact with DAASH report that the Islamic State rejected frantic Mossad efforts to buy the release of American journalist Steven Joel Sotloff.


This much is credited with a fair amount of certainty. On 8/1/13 Steven Sotloff, born and raised in Florida, checked into Room 303 of the Hotel Istanbul in the small border town of Kilis in southern Turkey. Three days later on 8/4/13, shortly after checking out of the hotel and heading to the border to take the Kilis-Aleppos highway south into Syria, Mr. Sotloff and his “fixer” were abducted at a check point manned by unknown jihadists.

Ben Taub, an acquaintance who met Sotloff in Kilis and whose account of that meeting is reported in the Daily Beast, describes a conversation the two had over beer in the town’s only bar.

Sotloff told me he was sick of being beaten up, and shot at, and accused of being an Israeli spy. Just the day before, Turkish police had hit and pepper-sprayed him for taking pictures at a protest in a nearby city. He told me he wanted to quit reporting for a little while, at least on (the) conflict in the Middle East, and maybe apply to graduate school back home in Florida. But first he wanted one last Syria run. He said he was chasing a good story…


What is not reported by Taub, but which is mentioned by my own sources, is that the ‘fixer’ set the American journalist up and sold him for cash to rebels fighting the Assad regime. The ‘fixer’ is also accused of stealing, nearly nine months later, the Mossad ‘down payment’ entrusted to him for delivery to the jihadists holding Mr. Sotloff.

At the same time the US Zionist lobby has been intensively lobbying the Obama administration to bomb IS forces in Iraq and Syria, Israeli agents were reportedly talking with IS about obtaining Mr. Sotloff’s freedom and offering $10 million to DAASH as part of a release deal.

Over the last 48 hours Mr. Sotloff’s ‘fixer’ has reportedly disappeared from public view, and is no doubt himself being hunted and marked for death as Israeli and perhaps American agents track him.

This is not the first time, nor likely will it be the last, that Westerners or others seeking to report on events here—or who simply show up in exciting places to bear witness or do good—have gotten themselves into a fix. New arrivals around here often are unaware that the ‘war economy’ along the Turkish-Syria-Iraq border these days means that just about anything, or anyone, is up for sale at the right price. There is plenty of buyer’s cash available, and that attractively pushes profits up even higher. Even sworn enemies regularly do business—either through agents or sometimes even directly—with criminal gangs and others, and the commodities run the gamut from oil, arms, counterfeit US $ 100 bills, an array of drugs, women, children, would-be jihadists and just about every other tangible asset you can think of—this while simultaneously they fight each other nearby and pledge devotion to Allah and loyalty to “humanity.”

Mr. Sotloff, who was in Libya during June of 2011 and covered parts of the Libyan civil war from Benghazi and Misrata, was accused by the Gadhafi regime of being a Mossad agent. IS also reportedly had come to believe this is what he was as well, based apparently upon information derived from their prisoner during interrogations, which likely included torture. Mr. Sotloff had lived in Israel from 2005 to 2008, according to Israelis who knew him. He studied for a year at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, a private college north of Tel Aviv, and played on the local Raanana Roosters rugby team. He returned to Israel more recently for at least one visit. It was not clear when he obtained citizenship, but that is relatively easy under Israel’s Law of Return, which encourages Jews from around the world to immigrate.

Steven Sotloff, held both American and Israeli citizenships, according to the Zionist Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Times of Israel has reported that Sotloff moved to Israel in 2008 to finish college, and while there reporting throughout the Middle there he never shared the fact he was Jewish, opting instead to tell them he was a secular Muslim. 'He sometimes even chose to tell people that he was of Chechen origin, and that Sotloff –was a Chechen name.'

US security analyst Gordon Duff reports that Mr. Sotloff was an IDF veteran. Sotloff's nationality was kept secret until U.S. and United Kingdom officials verified the authenticity of the ISIS execution video. Governments involved said the secrecy surrounding Sotloff's Israeli citizenship was necessary to avoid further endangering the journalist's life while it was in the hands of IS extremists.

Yet, being accused of working for a foreign government these days in this region is not uncommon. This observer has been accused of being a CIA agent while at the same time also of being a supporter of the Lebanese National Resistance led by Hezbollah and Hamas. Many around these parts simply do not understand why someone from a ‘safe and prosperous country’ would be over here if he was not being paid by some government’s security services. Many don’t understand Americans or what patriotism means to most of us.

For a majority of Americans it’s not a question of “My country right or wrong!” as the bleats of the John McCain-Lindsay Graham’s insist. Rather it’s a question of, as Commodore Stephen Decatur put in back in April of 1816, having returned from the Barbary Wars in off Libya, as some historians argue, the first post–Revolutionary war hero: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; but if wrong, to be set right.”

Americans I cross paths with around the Middle East, love their country, recognize we have many problems of our own back home, but they want to change their governments policies toward this region and to support the Palestinian cause while seeking to end US government complicity in Zionist crimes against Palestine.

With respect to the claimed Mossad offer, ISIS reportedly balked at the proposal for several reasons, including the one stated publicly, i.e. the US bombings of ISIS fighters in Iraq. But an additional reason, reported to this observer, was the most recent Israeli aggression against Gaza:

Think of this execution as also a gesture to the Palestinian Gaza Resistance. As the Zionists do not put any value on other than Jewish lives, let them taste justice. No Jew, Christian or Muslim who works for Mossad or who works to confiscate one inch of Arab land will be treated with respect. They will taste Allah’s punishment.


Was the fact that Mr. Sotloff was Jewish and had written for the Jerusalem Post a factor in his savage murder? Possibly.

In today’s Middle East line-up, one’s religion unfortunately is sometimes of paramount importance in determining if one lives or dies.

By accounts from family and friends in Florida, Steven Sotloff was a decent enough man, and he may have been what he appeared to many to be—an individual caught up in a Middle East maelstrom for which few these days are prepared, and in which even fewer—scarcely anyone in fact—ought reasonably indulge themselves in feelings of confidence about their own personal security.

9 comments:

  1. I'd say there is more truth in that than Gov's will admit to...
    Isis hostage threat: Which countries pay ransoms to release their citizens?

    The report says...

    Europe Italy, and Spain, have directly paid ransoms to hostage-takers. The nations are in turn accused of funding terrorism, with al-Qa'ida alone making $125 million (£75 million) from global ransom transactions since 2008 - $66m (£40m) of which was made last year, the New York Times reported. It is believed that North African al-Qa'ida agents have benefited most from this indirect European funding......

    Israel With its unrelenting approach, the state will strike deals and offer concessions for the release of its citizens, and even for the remains of soldiers killed in battle. But it is most unique for its policy of killing anyone who abducts its citizens, and has re-arrested prisoners it has released as part of an exchange, the Telegraph has reported.

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  2. Frankie, I understand the US position that payment of ransoms encourages more hostage taking. But they had no problem in paying the banks a ransom when they (supposedly) held their countries fortunes hostage.
    I wonder if they considered the bank bailouts would encourage bad investment practices?
    Id pay the money to save a life, they print money for less noble causes.

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  3. Daithi,
    Not only do banks print money for less noble causes than saving someones life they also accept money from less nobles causes.. According to a Guardian Newspaper report...

    'A report compiled for the committee detailed how HSBC's subsidiaries transported billions of dollars of cash in armoured vehicles, cleared suspicious travellers' cheques worth billions, and allowed Mexican drug lords buy to planes with money laundered through Cayman Islands accounts. Other subsidiaries moved money from Iran, Syria and other countries on US sanctions lists, and helped a Saudi bank linked to al-Qaida to shift money to the US....

    cont...

    'HSBC's Mexican operations moved $7bn into the bank's US operations, and according to its own staff, much of that money was tied to drug traffickers. Before the bank executives testified, the committee heard from Leigh Winchell, assistant director for investigative programs at US immigration & customs enforcement. He said 47,000 people had lost their lives since 2006 as a result of Mexican drug traffickers.'.......

    What happened? HSBC get a fine of 1.6 Billion green backs... Not a bad return when you think about it.. But the more I think about banks and the system.. The more it pisses the 32A's off me..The whole system is rigged.. (Maybe I'm not joining the dots up....) Whats wrong with giving IS or who ever a few billion to save the lives of all the hostages etc and simply do what the Northern Bank done after the heist in Belfast a few yrs back and simply change the colour of the ink making the paper IS or who ever have worthless...

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  4. Frankie, i think you make very sound points, but i think that IS fully understand the effect that these beheadings have on us - the west - and i think the shock value, the horror, is more valuable to them at the moment than dollars are.

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  5. I understand what you mean Sarah about the shock value but it has to be worth a try.. if giving IS a few million saves even one life it has to be money well spent. The west can bankrupt themselves to go to war..

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  6. You can believe that France didn't pay.. I don't

    France denies paying ransom to Syrian Islamists for freed journalists

    'By RFI Sunday 27 April 2014
    The French government has denied paying a ransom to free four journalists who had been held by an Islamist group in Syria for 10 months. German magazine Focus claimed that Ffance paid 18 million dollars (13 million euros) via the Turkish secret services.....
    Didier François, Edouard Elias, Nicolas Hénin and Pierre Torrès were kidnapped while working in Syria in June and held by an Islamist armed group.

    “Eighteen milion dollars, that’s flattering!” Torrès declared on Saturday, adding that he was “convinced that it was not France that paid”.

    Focus, citing Nato sources in Brussels, claimed that Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian personally took the money to Ankara during the week before the hostages were freed and that it was passed on to the kidnappers by the Turkish secret services.

    “Everything was done through negotiation, discussion,” Fabius insisted last week.

    President François Hollande has publicly ruled out France paying ransoms for hostages, a practice that is often criticised as encouraging further abductions, but there have been unconfirmed reports of cash being handed over in previous cases.

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  7. A new video has emerged , reportedly showing a British man..

    ' BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said the hostage was speaking to the camera in a "kind of parody of a chat show".

    "The latest video, which does not feature a beheading, shows a third British man wearing orange clothing who says he is a prisoner.. He asks why he and others have been abandoned by the US and UK governments. The hostage says other European governments have negotiated for the release of their hostages but says the US and UK have done things differently.. He also says this is the first of several of what he calls programmes in which he will explain the philosophy of IS.....'

    Maybe America & the UK need be-headings to continue so they can play Team America together. Other countries have tried and in some cases been successful in freeing their citizens, no matter how unpalatable the deal was..

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  8. Meet Jamal Maarouf Syria's most moderate rebel leader supported by the US Govt. Notice the flag at 2mins 04 seconds..

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  9. Turkish hostages held by IS in Iraq released

    Dozens of hostages seized by Islamic State (IS) from the Turkish consulate in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul have been freed and are back in Turkey. Details are unclear but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said it had been a "detailed and secret operation".

    The hostages were seized after IS militants overran Mosul in a rapid advance in June. Turkey has refused direct involvement in the military campaign against IS partly because of fears over the hostages' safety.

    Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said the 49 hostages were employees from the consulate - 46 Turks and three local Iraqis - and included Consul General Ozturk Yilmaz, other diplomats, children and special forces police.

    Cont....

    He did not give details on the circumstances of their release but broadcaster NTV reported that Turkey had not paid a ransom. It did not say how it obtained the information. More than 30 Turkish lorry drivers, who were also seized in Mosul in June, were freed a month later but details of their release were not made public.........

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