El Shafee Elsheikh was found guilty on Thursday of playing a critical role in holding innocents hostage for the Islamic State.
His victims included four Americans, several Britons, and other captives between 2013 and 2014 at several ISIS-controlled prisons in Syria. This is an important victory for the families of victims. Elsheikh’s trial and Alexanda Kotey’s court appearance last year brought into much sharper relief the importance of seeking justice for hostage families through the U.S. legal system. Victims’ families were able to watch Kotey plead guilty and a jury find Elsheikh guilty in federal court. These terrorists played roles in the kidnappings that led to the savage murders of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aid workers Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller. The three men were horrifically beheaded on camera in videos posted online. Kayla Mueller died senselessly in unknown circumstances after being sexually enslaved by ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.
The brutal beheading, propagandizing, and killing of hostages carried out by the British ISIS cell known as the “Beatles” shocked the world. Now that the trial is done, there are a few crucial points that people should know about hostages and terrorist hostage-takers.
First, justice in these cases is often at the crossroads of law enforcement and counterterrorism operations. In addition to being an important principle to uphold, the rule of law is an indispensable tool for policymakers. Still, much of the early fight against ISIS involved direct action on the battlefield, aimed at terrorists in their self-proclaimed caliphate. It was not centered on legal trials taking place in U.S. courtrooms.
My counterterrorism team at the National Security Council benefited from U.S. and coalition capabilities that supported the tracking and targeting of ISIS fighters on the battlefield. The killing of these terrorists was rough justice, but it was justice nonetheless.
But it wasn’t enough.
At least in the case of the ISIS hostage-takers, legal arrows in terms of investigations, extraditions, and trials are more potent than simply killing terrorists. After years of painstaking hostage work, learning about the former lives and agonizing plight of hostages, and knowing hostage families, family feelings on justice are crucially important. Put simply, the families I talked to wanted a trial and conviction in a U.S. court.
Second, people should know that Elsheikh’s trial sought justice and accountability for the barbarism of an ISIS hostage-taker. Elsheikh made claims at his trial that he was a “simple ISIS fighter” and not involved with the torture and deaths of innocents. In the end, the evidence revealed the truth. However, had Elsheikh simply been killed in a drone strike on the battlefield, like executioner Mohammed Emwazi/”Jihadi John,” would justice truly have been served for the hostages’ families? Justice here is subjective and deeply personal. Families must be at the forefront of policymakers’ strategy for dealing with hostage-takers.
Third, we can do counterterrorism work without straying from important American values. Constitutional rights and broader rule of law matter deeply in counterterrorism and hostage work.
Fourth, as an extension, we must balance values with effective counterterrorism efforts. Many terrorists want to provoke a state to overreact and overmilitarize responses to their atrocities. They know that this can serve their interest in creating more terrorists, more hostage-taking, and can inadvertently erode hard-fought successes achieved on foreign battlefields.
The future will include more terrorist hostage-taking. An overriding imperative for the U.S. hostage recovery enterprise is thus to remember something important — namely, that if hostage families don’t see their loved ones freed, then, despite the pain of confronting those who aggrieved them in a U.S. courtroom, that’s exactly where many families want to see justice done.
Retired Army Col. Christopher P. Costa, the executive director of the International Spy Museum and a former career intelligence officer, was special assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2018.
