On Friday, Oct. 3, nearly a year to the day of his capture, Peter Kassig appeared in a video purporting to show a masked militant threatening to behead the 26 year old U.S. Army veteran.
Kassig is threatened with being the next in a series of westerners who have been beheaded by ISIS terrorists because of the victims’ countries’ military actions against ISIS.
First American journalist James Foley was beheaded, then another American journalist, Steven Joel Sotloff. Then a British aid worker, David Haines was executed. And on Friday, the world learned that another British national, Alan Henning, who had been traveling with a humanitarian aid convoy from Turkey into Syria, was beheaded.
Kassig appears at the end of a video following the confirmed beheading of Henning.
In a statement issued late Friday, Oct. 2, U.S. National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden confirmed that Peter Kassig was being held by ISIS militants.
Kassig had been working as a medical assistant and humanitarian aid worker in Lebanon, providing for some of the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria.He was apparently en route to eastern Syria when he was kidnapped by ISIS terrorists on Oct. 1, 2013.
Before turning to international aid work, Kassig had been a member of the U.S. military. He trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 2006 and was deployed to Iraq from April to July 2007. He served in Iraq as an Army Ranger. He was discharged for medical reasons in September, 2007, with the rank of private first class.