From soldier to student and medical aide: fifth western hostage under threat of death

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/05/peter-kassig-isis-parents-pray

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The parents of a 26-year-old medical aid worker identified in an Isis video as the next western hostage the militants will murder unless the US-led coalition stops its bombing campaign have called on the world to pray for their son, Abdul-Rahman Kassig.

Ed and Paula Kassig said their son had been working for the relief organisation he founded, Special Emergency Response and Assistance (Sera), when he was captured a year ago on his way to Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria. The couple released a video statement on Saturday night that includes a personal message from Paula Kassig to her son.

They also said in a written statement: "As Muslims around the world, including our son Abdul-Rahman Kassig, celebrate Eid ul-Adha, the faith and sacrifice of Ibrahim, and the mercy of Allah, we appeal to those holding our son to show the same mercy and set him free."

Kassig first went to the Middle East in 2007 as Peter Kassig, a US soldier with an elite ranger unit. Five years later he felt compelled to revisit the region in an attempt to help ordinary people caught up in the fighting. He worked as a medical aide for Palestinian refugees and Syrians injured on both sides of the vicious civil war. The friendships he built drew him even deeper into the conflict and eventually he set up his own tiny aid group to ferry blankets, food, cooking gas, medical supplies and other necessities into some of the most dangerous parts of Syria.

"Our efforts, however small, are focused on providing acute logistical support and assistance in areas too difficult for other humanitarian organisations to effectively operate," the Sera website proudly announces.

Most of the funding for Sera came from Kassig's own savings, he said, and its biggest mission to date had cost just $2,000. But Kassig was confident, ambitious and already applying for bigger grants. "We don't need millions of dollars to be effective," he said in an interview with the Syria Deeply website last February.

He was organising an aid trip when he was captured on 1 October 2013 on his way to Deir Ezzor. His family and Sera had kept news of his kidnapping out of the media until Kassig appeared in an Isis video of the murder of British aid worker Alan Henning.

In the video released last Friday a masked man threatens that Kassig will be killed next in retribution for western air strikes on Isis positions, and names him as Peter Edward, although former hostages have said that he converted in captivity and changed his name to Abdul-Rahman. His newfound Muslim faith has been a source of comfort over the long months since he was seized, those prison friends have told his family.

Kassig grew up in Indiana and joined the US military at 18. Within months he was deployed to Iraq, but his tour of duty was cut short in 2007 when he was given an honourable discharge for medical reasons. He began studying for a degree in political science at Butler University in his home state, but after the violence and bloodshed he had witnessed in Iraq, he found college life unsettling. "I was going to school with kids who looked the same, were the same age as me, but we weren't the same," he told CNN in 2012. "I wanted more of a challenge, a sense of purpose."

So in 2010 he dropped out to train as an emergency medical aide, got married but quickly divorced, went back to university and then dropped out again to put his medical skills to use in Lebanon. "I am not a doctor," he said. "I am not a nurse. But I am a guy who can clean up bandages, help clean up patients, swap out bandages, help run IVs, and make people's quality of life a little bit better."

Although he had huge ambitions for his small organisation, he had no illusions about the risks the team were running. "The truth is, sometimes I really think I would like to do something else, but at the end of the day this work is really the only thing that I have found that gives my life both meaning and direction," he said in an interview with Time magazine just a few months before his abduction.

■ British schoolteacher David Bolam has been released after being held hostage by militants in Libya, the Foreign Office has confirmed. A spokeswoman said Bolam was "safe and well after his ordeal" and that he has been reunited with his family. Bolam was working at the Benghazi European School when he was abducted earlier this year. His kidnapping had not been reported at the request of the Foreign Office and his family.