ISIS Snuff Films’ Sleight Of Hand

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This wouldn’t be the first time ISIS has tried to create the illusion that its hostages might still be alive, and that the group might be open to negotiating for their release. ISIS has made a practice, U.S. officials and terrorism experts said, of airing videos showing hostages alive when they actually are already dead, dragging out their inevitable demise into an agonizing ordeal for hostage families that pays dividends as a recruitment tool for ISIS’s fanatical followers.

“There have been reports that the Islamic State is killing its captives long before their executions are distributed through social media and other means of transmission,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a terrorism expert and fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Daily Beast.

Multiple senior U.S. officials concurred with that assessment and said that ever since ISIS beheaded its first American hostage, journalist James Foley, last August, American officials have assumed that any subsequent hostages shown alive on camera may well have already been killed.
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