“They tell us you have abandoned
us and/or don’t care but of course we know you are doing everything you
can and more,” Abdul-Rahman Kassig, born Peter Kassig, wrote to his parents, Ed and Paula,
when he had been held by the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham for
several months. He knew that his captors might kill him—“it may very
well be coming down to the wire here”—and in the end they did: over the
weekend, ISIS released a video of a member of the group
displaying Kassig’s severed head. He was twenty-six years old, and from
Indiana. In the letter, he’d sought to prepare his parents for that end,
and, perhaps, to forestall the visions they might have of his last
moments: “Don’t worry Dad, if I do go down, I won’t go thinking anything
but what I know to be true. That you and mom love me more than the moon
& the stars.”
Kassig was kidnapped delivering medical aid to people affected by the civil war in Syria. He had been a soldier, a Ranger in Iraq, then a college student, and, very briefly, a husband.
(The marriage ended in divorce.) Along the way, he took classes to
learn to be an emergency medical technician.* On a vacation to Lebanon,
where he encountered Syrian refugees, he realized that his medical
knowledge was an asset, a gift he could hand to desperate people. Just
before he was supposed to go home, he had, as he wrote in an e-mail to family and friends,
“the best conversation that I have ever had with my mom. From 4,000
miles away in a shelled out parking lot in Beirut I told her about what I
had been involved in over the last week.” He had found his “calling”:
More >>Yesterday my life was laid out on a table in front of me. With only hours left before my scheduled flight back to the United States, I watched people dying right in front of me. I had seen it before and I had walked away before.… I’m just not going to turn my back this time, it’s as simple as that.
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