Kidnapper’s U.S. conviction a rare case of justice for Islamic State victims
For French journalist Nicholas Henin, confronting the Islamic State militant who was among the men who held him hostage in a makeshift prison in Syria for nearly 10 months was a long time coming.
Sitting in the witness box in a federal courtroom in Virginia, Henin detailed the torture and pain he endured at the hands of a terrorist cell nicknamed “the Beatles,” all while staring at El Shafee Elsheikh. Their eye contact was fleeting but important for Henin — occurring during a trial that was years in the making.
When Elsheikh and co-conspirator Alexanda Kotey were captured by Kurdish forces in early 2018 and identified as part of a group of militants that kidnapped, tortured and killed hostages for the Islamic State, it was unclear whether an American trial would happen at all. A federal prosecution was met with opposition at the highest levels of government on two continents.
Britain did not want to prosecute Elsheikh or Kotey, both from London, and had stripped them of citizenship. But evidence in British hands that could be used against them in an American court was held up over disagreement on whether they should face the death penalty.
And leaders at the Justice Department feared that a loss at trial could leave U.S. officials with the thorny legal and political question of what to do with noncitizens whose home country wanted them banished.
Elsheikh’s conviction last week on charges of kidnapping and murder is a welcome and rare case of justice for victims of the Islamic State and bolsters the argument for trying terrorists in federal court rather than sending them to other countries or into military detention, say experts, survivors and families of those killed.
“We defeated ISIS. There was lots of celebration and people move on, without realizing that accountability for these crimes remains quite low,” said Naureen Chowdhury Fink, executive director of the Soufan Center, which studies violent extremism.
Foreign fighters had often traveled to Iraq and Syria from Europe, where reluctance to prosecute remains high, and no international tribunal has been established to handle such cases.
Thousands remain in Kurdish detention camps in northeastern Syria, where violence and escapes are common.
Part of the reluctance to prosecute lies in the difficulty of securing strong evidence that proves crimes beyond membership in a terrorist group, which alone is unlikely to bring a stiff sentence in most European countries, said Stephen Rapp, former U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues in the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice. Thousands of phones seized by the Kurds are inaccessible, he said, and interviews can be hard to arrange.
“We spent so much blood and treasure to defeat ISIS; we really need to think about how this fits in with preventing them from rising again,” said Rapp, who advocates for an international task force to coordinate terrorism prosecutions. “Let’s document these crimes, let’s show who’s responsible.”
New information revealed in a trial also could benefit local victims, such as Yazidi women who were enslaved during the war.
“Gems of information were indeed revealed,” said Nessma Bashi, a lawyer for the nonprofit Syria Justice and Accountability Center who watched Elsheikh’s trial and learned of mass graves and other crimes against Syrian nationals who went unnamed. “Yet the responsibility for collecting these details cannot fall on the shoulders of civil society organizations monitoring ISIS-related trials.”
Elsheikh and Kotey were captured together by Kurdish forces while trying to flee Syria in early 2018 and were identified through their fingerprints. Intelligence officials and reporters had named them as two of “the Beatles,” a terrorist cell that imprisoned and killed Western hostages — including the Americans James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller. (“Beatles” leader Mohammed Emwazi was killed in a drone strike.)
The surviving hostages, Europeans released in exchange for ransoms after months of torture, knew their tormentors only by nicknames taken from the British rock group whose name they used to describe their sadistic guards with British accents.
Lorenzo Vidino, director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, said the prosecution of Elsheikh had particular resonance because of his group’s symbolic importance.
The gruesome beheadings they filmed and shared on social media “were among some of the most prominent horrors that ISIS perpetrated and led to public opinion and policymakers in the West rethinking the ISIS threat,” he said.
Elsheikh and Kotey are unusual also in that they gave extensive media interviews admitting their guilt before they were charged with a crime.
John Demers, who led the Justice Department’s National Security Division under Presidents Donald Trump and Biden, said there is “nothing more compelling to a jury” than a videotaped confession, but he noted that prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia had felt their case was strong enough for trial before the media interviews occurred.
But some administration leaders wanted Elsheikh and Kotey sent to the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and bristled at taking a death sentence off the table as demanded by Britain as a condition for transferring the prisoners to U.S. custody.
When Britain lifted the requirement, Elsheikh’s mother filed a lawsuit to have her son prosecuted in Britain. Former attorney general William P. Barr wrote in his memoir that sending the pair to Iraq for prosecution “was a viable alternative.” The Trump administration did not agree to give up on the death penalty until mid-2020, at the urging of the parents of the slain hostages.
By that point, Elsheikh and Kotey had started telling reporters, in taped interviews, that they were involved in the hostage-taking. Defense attorney Nina Ginsberg posited to jurors at trial that Elsheikh made those admissions only “to avoid being sent to Iraq for a summary trial and execution.”
In closing arguments last week, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Raj Parekh told jurors that the government had proved that Elsheikh was “unquestionably” guilty, even if the defendant hadn’t “brazenly told you so himself.”
He pointed to the testimony of confessed Islamic State member Omer Kuzu, who met Elsheikh and Kotey after all the hostages had been killed or released. Kuzu, who is awaiting sentencing in Texas, described Elsheikh and Kotey as “a tag team” and apparent “ISIS aristocracy.”
Elsheikh and Kotey had attended a protest in London that one of “the Beatles” mentioned to hostages. The survivors described clothing and weapons that matched both Kuzu’s description and a picture Elsheikh sent his brother from Syria.
In an interview with the FBI, Elsheikh described an itinerary in Syria that matched that of the hostages and said he carried out missions with Emwazi and Kotey.
Elsheikh in interviews also said that he wore a mask and recognized Emwazi in a mask, and that he knew another prison guard and shared a supervisor with Emwazi.
Prosecutors also had been prepared to bring in other evidence, including witnesses, to bolster the case.
Most federal terrorism cases involve people who traveled or tried to travel to Islamic State territory from the United States, or planned terrorist attacks within the United States.
This case was more challenging for prosecutors, Vidino said, because it involved testimony and evidence from the battlefield in Syria.
“This clearly shows the DOJ was able to handle that,” he said. “It was a bit of a test to the system.”
That challenge was highlighted during Elsheikh’s trial. An FBI agent testified how a nighttime military raid on a Syrian prison in 2014 to try to free the hostages doubled as an effort to collect evidence.
Unlike in the United States, where investigators might painstakingly pore over a crime scene, soldiers had just hours to grab what evidence they could find because they feared the Islamic State might launch a counteroffensive to retake the facility, the FBI agent testified.
Finding no hostages, soldiers threw shackles and clubs into sacks and quickly took photos of cells and graffiti scrawled on walls. After a similar raid in 2015, they seized weapons and documents that were used to account in part for Mueller’s last months.
After two weeks of testimony and less than six hours of deliberations, the jury on Thursday came back and declared Elsheikh guilty. (Kotey pleaded guilty last year to multiple charges, including hostage-taking resulting in death. He is to be sentenced this month.) The verdict prompted tears of relief from survivors and witnesses in the courtroom.
Henin tweeted after the verdict that he would not have testified about his torture and captivity if execution of Elsheikh had been a possible punishment. Henin praised the U.S. justice system for taking the “Beatles” case, noting that one of his initial kidnappers remains in a prison in Syria because France will not repatriate the suspect.
“A terrorist crime opens a gaping wound in a society,” he wrote. “Only justice can bring closure to such a monstrous chapter.”
In court, the former hostage — who had been shackled, beaten and starved — looked directly at Elsheikh while testifying that the defendant and his two companions “liked to consider that as long as they were masked, they were protected from prosecution.”
Source: Washington Post
