How a grieving mother tried to ‘build a bridge’ with the militant convicted in her son’s murder
WASHINGTON — After hours of talking about faith and family, redemption and war, the grieving American mother had an additional question for the Islamic militant convicted of her son’s murder.
Do you know, Diane Foley asked, where my son is buried?
The exchange is detailed in a new book by Foley, which recounts personal encounters she had with the British-born Islamic State fighter charged in connection with the brutal beheading in Syria of her son James, a freelance journalist.
Sitting in a windowless conference room with the man who contributed to her son’s death, Foley said in an interview, was meant to be a “small step” toward recovery — “that he would begin to understand where we came from.” came and for me to try to hear him.
The conversations provided an opportunity for Foley to remember a son everyone knew as Jim: curious, full of energy and with strong moral character. Across the table, Alexanda Kotey, with his ankles shackled, expressed sympathy for the suffering of the Foley family, but he also made clear his resentment of American actions in the Middle East and remained adamant that he would serve as a soldier in wartime had acted.
He couldn’t say where Jim’s body was buried – he wished he knew, he said, but he didn’t – but for Foley the conversations were nevertheless very worthwhile.
“I just wanted to build a bridge somehow, that’s all,” Foley said. “The pain and hatred will continue unless you take the time to listen to each other.”
It is very unusual for a family member of a victim to have meaningful interactions with someone convicted of harming their loved one. But this matter has never been ordinary – nor has it ever been a certainty.
Jim Foley was part of a group of mostly Western journalists and aid workers who were taken hostage in Syria and eventually murdered by a group of British-born Islamic State militants during a reign of terror that also included waterboarding and mock executions. The kidnappers became known by the incongruously light-hearted nickname “The Beatles” because of their accents.
It wasn’t until nearly four years after Foley’s 2014 murder at age 40 that Kotey and a future co-defendant, El Shafee Elsheikh, were captured by a Kurdish-led, U.S.-backed militia. A US drone strike killed the militant actually responsible for Foley’s murder, Mohammed Emwazi, known as ‘Jihadi John’.
After legal wrangling, the pair were brought to the US for prosecution in 2020 after the Justice Department agreed to forego the death penalty as a possible punishment.
The book details Diane Foley’s dismay at what she describes as a coldly bureaucratic response by the US government to the disappearance of her son, two years before his death.
The kidnappers demanded a ransom of millions of dollars, but the Obama administration warned her that she could be prosecuted if she paid one. Officials struggled to convey meaningful, timely information.
The first clue that something terrible might have happened to her son, Foley says, was a phone call, not from the government, but from a reporter — though in retrospect, one possible clue came earlier that morning when two FBI agents showed up at her New Hampshire home. arrived to request Jim’s house. DNA.
President Barack Obama announced her son’s death and later called the family, insisting that the government had done everything possible to save Jim, even revealing to them a botched military operation to rescue the hostages. But the Foleys were not convinced, and during a subsequent visit to the White House, Foley said she was annoyed by Obama’s assurance that Jim was his top priority, telling him that the hostage families had felt abandoned.
Foley turned that sadness into action and pushed the government to do better. The administration revised its approach to handling hostage situations in 2015, with Obama saying he had heard “unacceptable” feedback from families about the administration’s interactions with them. An FBI-led hostage rescue team was created, along with a new State Department special envoy position.
But the heart of “American Mother,” written with Irish author Colum McCann, is about Foley’s interactions with Kotey — conversations mandated under Kotey’s 2021 plea deal. (El Sheikh was convicted at trial).
In a conference room at a federal courthouse in Virginia, Foley asked Kotey to describe what he thought of Jim — a “typical white American” was the answer, plus naive and optimistic. He was a seeker of truth, she told him, a teacher, a journalist. In another world, she said, you and Jim could have been friends.
Kotey also shared details about his own life, pulling out photos of his daughters in bright blue and pink dresses taken in a Syrian refugee camp. Foley was immediately moved by the girls’ beauty.
He acknowledged his role in Jim’s captivity, but to a limited extent; yes, he had punched him and written the message Jim delivered on camera before his murder. But he said he was not present at the murder itself. The indictment does not describe any specific role for the defendants in the deaths of the Western hostages. What he had done, Kotey said, was what he had been told to do as a soldier in the war.
At one point, he opened a pack of tissues and wiped his eyes as he described being moved by an HBO documentary he had seen about Jim’s life, especially seeing his father crying. He said he was sorry for causing the family pain.
But, he said, he wanted Foley to understand how he got his grudge.
He told a story about how he once recovered the remains of a baby from the rubble of a US drone strike, lamenting that no one had been interested in making a documentary about that child, as was done for Jim , as she was not white or American.
The first two conversations took place over two days in October 2021, weeks after Kotey’s guilty plea. She returned the following spring, weeks before he was to begin his life sentence, after receiving two handwritten letters from him.
He wrote of his “condolences and sympathy for your collective anguish and grief as a family,” but also of his ambivalence upon learning that Jim’s brother was a U.S. military pilot — something he said he was reluctant to bring up during their previous meetings had brought.
He said he had “struggled to disentangle the ‘sins of the US government’ from ‘our own misguided and unjust responses to these grievances’, but that he now saw things ‘with greater clarity’.”
During their last meeting, they once again returned to the issue of regret. He said he wished he hadn’t done certain things he was told to do, and burst into tears as he remembered the look on Jim’s face during one particular beating.
He told her that his wife and children had left the refugee camp and were now in Turkey, and that he hoped he would eventually be able to serve his sentence in England. Foley reached out her hand and shook it. She said she would pray for him and wished him peace.
By the end of their time together, Diane Foley said in the interview, the sadness in the room was palpable. Everyone, she says, had lost.
She had lost her son; Kotey, even younger than Jim, “lost his freedom, his family, his country – everything, too.”
“For me,” she said, “that was incredibly moving, and yet I think somehow listening to each other created a little more understanding.”