To westerners, the public beheading of the US journalist James Foley in Syria was grim confirmation of the brutality of Islamic State and, more specifically, of the cruelty of a trio of British militants nicknamed “the Beatles”. For Foley’s mother, Diane, who since his kidnapping two years earlier had been pressing Barack Obama’s government to rescue him or negotiate his release, his death was incomparably more painful. But that didn’t deter her from meeting Alexanda Kotey, the man found guilty of conspiracy to murder her son and three other hostages.
Warm but steely, buoyed up by Christian faith but not the least “saintly”, she wanted to see how much sorrow, if any, he felt for what he had done. The meeting took place in a Virginia courthouse in 2021, two months after the murder trial and seven years after the beheading. It was an “intimate standoff”, with Kotey saying nothing of his involvement in waterboarding, chokeholds, electric shocks and other forms of torture, and apologising only for what Diane went through, which to her was “sorrow verging on the cheap”. He did offer a motive, though – his experience of pulling a dead baby from the rubble after a US drone strike. And “her heart vaulted” when he showed her photos of his three young daughters stranded in a Syrian refugee camp.
