IS has one more United State hostage

Beirut: The extremists didn’t show her off in their latest snuff film. And her family doesn’t want her name released. But what is known about IS’s remaining U.S. captive is heartbreaking.

With IS’s brutal murder of Peter Kassig, a 26-year-old American aid worker who dedicated his life to the plight of Syrian refugees, the militant group has one more U.S. citizen remaining in its clutches, according to current and former U.S. officials, as well as individuals involved in efforts to free the Americans.

The hostage is the only American woman held by the militant group. She is the same age as Kassig, and, like him, was kidnapped while trying to help people whose lives have been upended by the long Syrian civil war.

She was particularly moved to help children who have been orphaned and separated from their families. The woman was taken in August 2013, along with a group of other aid workers who have reportedly been released.

U.S. officials and the woman’s family have requested that her name not be made public, fearing that further attention will put her in greater jeopardy. No news organization has published her name. But the general circumstances of her capture and captivity have been known and widely reported for more than a year now.

IS’s intentions for its remaining American prisoner are unclear. But current and former U.S. officials told The Daily Beast that it was notable she doesn’t appear at the end of a video, released Sunday, that shows the aftermath of Kassig’s beheading. That breaks with IS’s pattern of showing the next hostage it intends to kill.

IS has killed Muslim women, as well as children. But it has never murdered a female Western hostage on camera. Doing so would mark a radical departure even for a group that has relied on bloody propaganda to lure foreign fighters to its ranks.

Kassig’s family said it was “heartbroken” by the killing, claimed by IS in a gruesome video that also showed the simultaneous beheadings of at least 18 men described as Syrian military personnel.

It was the latest in a series of atrocities by IS, a Sunni Muslim extremist group that has seized control of large parts of Iraq and Syria. Kassig was captured last year and was the fifth Western hostage beheaded by IS after two US reporters and two British aid workers.

“Abdul-Rahman was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group that the world rightly associates with inhumanity,” Obama said.

In the undated video released on Sunday, a man who appears to be the same British-accented jihadist who beheaded previous Western hostages stands above a severed head. “This is Peter Edward Kassig, a US citizen,” the black-clad masked executioner says, urging Obama to send more troops back to the region to confront IS militants.