But a USA official said the attack in the northern Syrian town of Raqqa, Islamic State’s de facto capital, had probably killed Emwazi.
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USA forces have carried out an air strike targeting the Islamic State (IS) group militant “Jihadi John”, with a “high degree of certainty” he was hit, the Pentagon said on Friday. The Observatory said the bodies were charred, and Observatory chief Rami Abdurrahman said the commander killed in the attack was most likely Jihadi John but that he does not have 100 per cent confirmation.
The USA says the drone strike targeted a vehicle in Syria believed to be carrying Emwazi Thursday. Born in Kuwait, Emwazi grew up in Britain, giving him added symbolic weight. “I try not to think about them”, she said of Islamic State militants.
She also had advice for press in the USA – don’t glorify “Jihadi John”.
In addition to Foley, Emwazi is believed to have appeared in videos about the killings of Britons David Haines and Alan Henning, Americans Steven Sotloff and Peter Kassig (who changed his first name to Abdul-Rahman during his captivity), and two Japanese hostages, Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa.
Emwazi is believed to have travelled to Syria in 2013 and later joined IS militants.
“You’re hearing it in your own language so the threat sounds all the more menacing”, said Raffaello Pantucci, the author of “We Love Death As You Love Life: Britain’s Suburban Terrorists” and the director of worldwide security studies at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute. His nickname “Jihadi John” was given to him by a group of hostages, who described him as part of an IS cell they named “The Beatles” due to their British accents.
Their friends and relatives all said Friday that even if Emwazi was dead, it would bring little comfort.
“Extra-judicial killing over justice in a court of law should not become the norm in the fight against terrorism”, he said in a statement.
The British government said it had “been working hand in glove with the Americans” to defeat Islamic State “and to hunt down those murdering Western hostages”.
Militant sympathizers uploaded the carnage to websites and shared them via mobile phone apps in a way impossible only 10 years earlier.
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The release of the video, on August 19, 2014, horrified and outraged the civilized world but was followed the next month by videos showing the beheadings of Sotloff and Haines and, in October, of Henning.
