Al-Qaida lets journalist go after 2 years

American captive in Syria released in Golan Heights

In this image made from undated video obtained by The Associated Press, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, a man believed to be Peter Theo Curtis, a U.S. citizen held hostage by an al-Qaida linked group in Syria, delivers a statement. The U.S. government said on Sunday, Aug. 24, 2014 that Curtis, who had been held hostage for about two years, had been released. (AP Photo)
In this image made from undated video obtained by The Associated Press, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, a man believed to be Peter Theo Curtis, a U.S. citizen held hostage by an al-Qaida linked group in Syria, delivers a statement. The U.S. government said on Sunday, Aug. 24, 2014 that Curtis, who had been held hostage for about two years, had been released. (AP Photo)

An American journalist held captive for nearly two years by al-Qaida's official branch in Syria has been freed, according to a representative of the journalist's family and a report Sunday by the Al-Jazeera network.

The journalist, Peter Theo Curtis, was abducted near the Syria-Turkey border in October 2012. He was held by the Nusra Front, the al-Qaida affiliate in Syria, which has broken with the more radical Islamic State. Curtis' release comes less than a week after the execution of American journalist James Foley by Islamic State militants.

White House national security adviser Susan Rice said Curtis is now safe outside Syria.

President Barack Obama, who was wrapping up a vacation in Massachusetts, was briefed Sunday morning on Curtis' release.

"The president shares in the joy and relief that we all feel now that Theo is out of Syria and safe," said White House spokesman Eric Schultz. "But we continue to hold in our thoughts and prayers the Americans who remain in captivity in Syria, and we will continue to use all of the tools at our disposal to see that the remaining American hostages are freed."

A senior administration official said Curtis was released in the Golan Heights, where he was met by U.S. government personnel who were transporting him to Tel Aviv. The official was not authorized to speak by name and discussed the release on the condition of anonymity.

Qatar's Foreign Ministry confirmed late Sunday that the Persian Gulf emirate succeeded in gaining Curtis' release. A government statement released by the official Qatar News Agency said he was kidnapped in Syria in 2012 and that Qatar "exerted relentless efforts to release the American journalist out of Qatar's belief in the principles of humanity and out of concern for the lives of individuals and their right to freedom and dignity."

The agency said Curtis was handed over to United Nations representatives.

Curtis' family said they believe he was captured in October 2012, shortly after crossing into Syria.

"My heart is full at the extraordinary, dedicated, incredible people, too many to name individually, who have become my friends and have tirelessly helped us over these many months," Curtis' mother, Nancy Curtis, said in a statement from the family. "Please know that we will be eternally grateful."

In a video obtained by The Associated Press and dated July 18, Curtis sits cross-legged on a floor with his hands bound, and appears to read from a sheet placed in front of him on the floor. Addressing the U.S. and European governments, he pleads for them to contact a named intermediary before it is too late.

"They have given me three days to live," he says as a man holding an assault rifle and dressed in camouflage stands next to him. "If you don't do anything, I'm finished. I'm dead. They will kill me. Three days. You have had 20 days, and you've done nothing. "

A June video obtained by The New York Times shows Curtis looking disheveled, with long, unkempt hair. But speaking from a script, he said his captors had treated him well and that he "had everything" he needed.

"Everything has been perfect: food, clothing, even friends," he says in the video.

That description of his captivity is at odds with the accounts given by the American photojournalist Matthew Schrier, who escaped in July 2013 after being held for seven months, much of the time alongside Curtis in the same prison.

Schrier described being tortured and starved by his masked jailers. In an interview soon after his escape, Schrier said his captors had forced a car tire over his knees, immobilized him with a wooden rod slid behind his legs, rolled him facedown on a cement floor and beat the soles of his feet until he could not walk.

Desperate to escape, Schrier said in the interview, he managed, while standing on his cellmate's back, to unravel some wires in an opening in the wall of their cell. That allowed him to wiggle through the opening, he said. But his cellmate, who was slightly heavier, got stuck and decided to stay in the cell, urging Schrier to go on without him.

The cellmate was Curtis, who endured 13 more months in captivity before the announcement of his freedom Sunday. At the request of his family, news organizations, including The Times, agreed not to identify him in their reports of Schrier's experiences, until now.

Curtis, under the byline Theo Padnos, has written for the New Republic and in 2011 wrote a book called Undercover Muslim: A Journey Into Yemen, which studied the radicalization of disaffected youths.

Before leaving for Yemen in 2005 to study Islam, he worked in the Vermont prison system teaching teenage inmates and wrote a book about the experience titled My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun.

"He seems to be in good health," Curtis' cousin Viva Hardigg said. "We are deeply relieved and grateful for his return and the many people who have helped us secure his freedom. At the same time, we are thinking constantly of the other hostages who are still held and those working to help them be freed. We want to do everything we can to support their efforts."

Ideological split

The Nusra Front and the Islamic State were once a single organization, but the two groups split over ideological and tactical differences, with the Islamic State going its own way and Nusra remaining loyal to al-Qaida's central command. One of the issues that divided them was the acceptable level of brutality; since the split, al-Qaida has criticized the unrestrained attacks by the fundamentalist Sunni militants of the Islamic State against Shiite Muslims.

Three Americans are now believed to be captives of the Islamic State -- two men and one woman. The group has threatened to behead one of them, the journalist Steve Sotloff, if the United States does not meet its demands, including stopping airstrikes in Iraq.

The Islamic State has mounted an aggressive push to create a self-styled caliphate straddling the Syrian-Iraqi border.

On Sunday, fighters from the Islamic State captured a major military air base in northeastern Syria, eliminating the last government-held outpost in a province otherwise dominated by the jihadi group, activists and state media said.

Tabqa airfield -- home to several warplane squadrons, helicopters, tanks, artillery, and ammunition bunkers -- is the third military base in the area to fall to the extremists since last month.

The jihadis launched their offensive last week to seize the sprawling Tabqa facility, located about 25 miles from the extremists' stronghold in the city of Raqqa along the Euphrates River.

After several failed efforts to breach the walls in recent days, Islamic State fighters managed to punch through and storm the air base Sunday, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Government warplanes carried out waves of airstrikes to try to beat back the attack, but those ultimately proved unable to stem the assault.

"Some of the Syrian regime troops pulled out, and now the Islamic State is in full control of Tabqa," said Observatory director Rami Abdurrahman. "This makes Raqqa province the first to fully fall out of government hands."

Another activist group, the Local Coordination Committees, also said the extremist group was in control of Tabqa.

The SANA state news agency confirmed that the government had lost the air base, saying troops "are successfully reassembling after evacuating the airport." It said that the military was still "striking terrorist groups, inflicting heavy losses on them."

The Observatory said that at least 100 Islamic State fighters were killed and another 300 wounded in the fighting, numbers that exclude casualties from the final assault. It said more than 170 government troops also were killed Sunday alone, and there were reports that another 150 may have been captured.

Tabqa is the latest in a string of bases to fall to the Islamic State group as it strengthens its hold over a vast swath of territory in northern and eastern Syria. Last month, the extremists overran the Division 17 military base in Raqqa, killing at least 85 soldiers. Two weeks later, they seized the nearby Brigade 93 base after days of heavy fighting.

The group's brutality was on full display after those victories. Militants killed army commanders and pro-government militiamen, decapitating them before putting their bodies and heads on display. The Observatory reported similar acts after the fall of Tabqa on Sunday.

In response to the group's violence, the top Islamic authority in Egypt, revered by many Muslims worldwide, launched an Internet-based campaign Sunday challenging the extremist group and saying it should not be called the Islamic State.

The campaign by the Dar el-Ifta, the top authority that advises Muslims on spiritual and life matters, adds to the war of words by Muslim leaders across the world targeting the Islamic State group, which controls wide swaths of Iraq and Syria.

The Grand Mufti of Egypt, Shawki Allam, previously said the extremists violate all Islamic principles and laws and described the group as a danger to Islam as a whole. Now, the Dar el-Ifta he oversees is suggesting that foreign media drop using "Islamic State" in favor of the "al-Qaida Separatists in Iraq and Syria," said Ibrahim Negm, an adviser to the mufti.

It's part of a campaign that "aims to correct the image of Islam that has been tarnished in the West because of these criminal acts, and to exonerate humanity from such crimes that defy natural instincts and spreads hate between people," Negm said. "We also want to reaffirm that all Muslims are against these practices which violate the tolerant principles of Islam."

Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi also weighed in. On Sunday, speaking to editors of Egyptian newspapers, he said the extremist group is part of a plot aiming to "undermine Islam as a belief."

The current religious discourse in the region only feeds "minds that believe that killing and bloodshed is the way to defend Islam," he said in comments carried by Egypt's MENA news agency.

Information for this article was contributed by Rukmini Callimachi and Karam Shoumali of The New York Times and by Jim Kuhnhenn, Ryan Lucas, Darlene Superville, Abdullah Rebhy, Mariam Rizk, Aya Batrawy and Sarah El Deeb of The Associated Press.

A Section on 08/25/2014

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