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Special Report: Obama says U.S. won't back down in the face of ISIS atrocities

President Barack Obama on Wednesday declared himself “heartbroken” by the beheading of U.S. journalist Jim Foley by ISIL extremists but defiantly vowed to press on with American military operations to cut the group’s “cancer” out of the Middle East.

“Jim was taken from us in an act of violence that shocks the conscience of the entire world,” the president said from the makeshift workspace for media covering his Martha’s Vineyard vacation.

Obama said he had spoken to Foley’s parents and told them “we are all heartbroken at their loss and join them in honoring Jim and all that he did.”

His remarks came a day after the release online of a stomach-turning video showing a black-masked jihadi fighter from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) beheading Foley in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes against the group in Iraq. The video also warned that the extremists would murder American journalist Steven Joel Sotloff if Obama did not halt the bombardments.

“The United States of America will continue to do what we must do to protect our people. We will be vigilant and we will be relentless. When people harm Americans anywhere, we do what’s necessary to see that justice is done and we act against ISIL standing alongside others,” Obama said.

CLICK IMAGE for slideshow: This photo posted on the website freejamesfoley.org shows journalist James Foley in …

The president also had a direct message to American allies in the Gulf region that have reportedly been funding and arming ISIL to fight forces loyal to Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad.

“From governments and peoples across the Middle East, there has to be a common effort to extract this cancer so it does not spread,” he underlined. “A group like ISIL has no place in the 21st century.”

Obama spoke shortly after the National Security Council disclosed that American intelligence officials had confirmed the authenticity of the video.

Across the Atlantic, British officials were scrambling to identify Foley’s masked killer, who spoke in English with what sounded like a British accent.

British Prime Minister David Cameron cut short his vacation to discuss the situation in person with top aides, and his office called the reporter’s slaying “shocking and depraved.”

It was not the first time that extremists claiming to champion Islam killed an American journalist. In February 2002, a Pakistani group released a video showing the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

A day after the release of that video, then-President George W. Bush spoke out during a trip to China, saying all Americans were “sad and angry.”

“Those who would threaten Americans, those who would engage in criminal, barbaric acts, need to know that these crimes only hurt their cause and only deepen the resolve of the United States of America to rid to world of these agents of terror,” Bush said.

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Special Report: Obama says U.S. won't back down in the face of ISIS atrocities

WASHINGTON (AP) — American fighter jets and drones continued to pound Islamic State militants in Iraq on Wednesday, and military planners weighed the possibility of sending a small number of additional U.S. troops to Baghdad, U.S. officials said, even as the insurgents threatened to kill a second American captive in retribution for any continued attacks.

The airstrikes came in the hours after militants released a gruesome video Tuesday showing U.S. journalist James Foley being beheaded and underscored President Barack Obama's vow Wednesday afternoon to continue attacks against the group despite its threats.

According to a senior U.S. official, the number of additional troops currently under discussion would be fewer than 300, but there has been no final decision yet by Pentagon leaders. Officials said that the forces were requested by the State Department and, if approved, would mainly provide extra security around Baghdad.

The 14 latest airstrikes were in the area of the Mosul Dam and were aimed at helping Iraqi and Kurdish forces create a buffer zone at the key facility. The strikes, which now total 84 since operations began, have helped Iraqi and Kurdish troops reclaim the dam from the insurgents.

The militants threatened to kill Steven Sotloff, an American journalist who is also being held captive, if the U.S. continued to conduct airstrikes.

The officials were not authorized to discuss the ongoing operations publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

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FILE - This undated file still image from video released April 7, 2011, by GlobalPost, shows James F …

It was not clear Wednesday if Obama would have to adjust his recent notifications to Congress under the War Powers Act to accommodate the higher U.S. troop level in Iraq if more soldiers and Marines are deployed.

Currently there are about 748 U.S. forces in Iraq, in addition to the approximately 100 troops that have routinely been assigned to the Office of Security Cooperation in Baghdad. Under the current war powers resolutions sent to Congress, Obama authorized up to 775 U.S. troops for security assistance, assessment teams, and advisers at two joint operations centers in Baghdad and Irbil.

Foley, a 40-year-old journalist from Rochester, New Hampshire, went missing in northern Syria while freelancing for Agence France-Presse and the Boston-based media company GlobalPost. Officials have said the video appears authentic.

Released on websites Tuesday, the video shows a man in an orange jumpsuit kneeling in the desert, next to a black-clad militant with a knife to his throat. Foley's name appears in both English and Arabic graphics on screen.

After the captive makes a statement, the masked man is shown apparently beginning to cut at the neck of the captive.

At the end of the video, a second man — identified as Sotloff — is shown and the militant warns that he could be next captive killed. Sotloff was kidnapped near the Syrian-Turkish border in August 2013 and freelanced for Time, the National Interest and MediaLine.

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There was little violence after the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's killer last July. Peace prevailed when at least four other unarmed black males were killed by police in recent months, from New York to Los Angeles.

Then Michael Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, Missouri. And waves of rioting have convulsed the St. Louis suburb for more than 10 days.

Why Ferguson?

The response to Brown's death turned violent because of a convergence of factors, observers say, including the stark nature of the killing in broad daylight, an aggressive police response to protests, a mainly black city being run by white officials — and the cumulative effect of killing after killing after killing of unarmed black males.

"People are tired of it," said Kevin Powell, president of the BK Nation advocacy group, who organized peaceful protests after the Florida neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman was found innocent in Martin's killing.

Powell is headed to Ferguson as an organizer and peace activist after the killing of Brown, the unarmed black 18-year-old who was shot by white police officer Darren Wilson. Battles have raged in Ferguson almost nightly, with stores looted, police firing tear gas and rubber bullets, people tossing Molotov cocktails, and dozens of arrests.

When police first confronted protesters with armored military vehicles, assault weapons and dogs, it reminded Powell of images from the 1960s civil rights movement.

"Just a reckless disregard for the safety of the community they're supposed to be protecting," he said. "They just don't care, it feels like they don't care at all."

"Zimmerman was one person. This is an entire police force. It feels like the whole system doesn't care."

It is not all that unusual for an unarmed black person to be killed by police. There are no reliable national statistics on people of any race killed by police, but anecdotal reports count significant numbers. One study, relying on Internet searches of media reports, found 18 unarmed black people killed in the first three months of 2012, including Trayvon Martin.

More recently:

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Police officers point their weapons at demonstrators protesting against the shooting death of Michae …

On July 17, Eric Garner was killed by a chokehold after an arrest for illegally selling loose cigarettes in New York City.

On August 5, John Crawford III was killed while handling a toy gun in a Walmart outside Dayton, Ohio.

On August 11, Ezell Ford, a mentally disabled man, was shot dead in South Los Angeles.

The circumstances of each case are different, of course, and investigations continue.

Brown was killed Aug. 9. The riots erupted Aug. 10, when more than two dozen businesses were damaged and looted. Some of the rioters, according to media reports, are hardened, violent young men who speak of seeking "justice," which is often confused with revenge. Some are coming to Ferguson from out of town, whether to show solidarity or fight the crackdown, or possibly drawn to the media spectacle. Police have reported arrests of people from New York and California.

"It feels like a turning point," said Blair L.M. Kelley, a history professor at North Carolina State University. "I think because so many black men die at the hands of the state."

Kelley and Powell both said that the nature of Brown's killing fueled anger: He was shot six times in broad daylight, in the middle of the street, in his own housing complex. Then his body lay in the street for hours, uncovered, in a pool of blood, before being taken away.

"There were more than 100 people there looking at his body," Kelley said.

She mentioned the killings of Jonathan Ferrell, an unarmed black man who was shot by a white officer after crashing his car in Charlotte last September, and the black woman, Renisha McBride, who crashed her car in Detroit, went to a nearby house for help, and was shot dead through the front door.

"Those happened at nighttime, away from the public gaze," Kelley said. "To leave Brown in the street like that, it was a disregard they could feel and taste and see."

The last riots over an unarmed black death were in 2009, when Oscar Grant was killed by a white officer while lying face down on a train platform in Oakland, California. Hundreds of businesses were damaged, cars were overturned and smashed, and more than 100 people were arrested.

Similar circumstances led to unrest in Cincinnati in 2001 and in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1996. One of America's worst race riots ever was in 1992 in Los Angeles, after the acquittal of four white officers who beat the black motorist Rodney King. And people in many cities rioted against racial oppression during the turmoil of the 1960s.

"Riots erupt when all other options have been closed," said Cathy Schneider, an American University professor who studies race riots. "When people really feel vulnerable in the face of police violence and local authorities are totally impervious to community demands."

Ferguson is 67 percent black; the mayor, city council, school board and police force are almost all white.

Schneider said that the riots of the 1960s gave rise to individuals and groups who could effectively negotiate tensions with police. That infrastructure may not exist in Ferguson, where the population has rapidly changed due to white flight, she said. Local officials promised Tuesday to make changes and be more receptive to community concerns.

Powell sees Michael Brown as a bookend of sorts to Trayvon Martin.

"Many of us who were involved in Trayvon thought we could get through this summer without another incident," he said. "Sad to say, this relit another fire."

___

Jesse Washington covers race and ethnicity for The Associated Press. He is reachable at http://www.twitter.com/jessewashington.

Related Video:

Why Ferguson exploded, but other cities didn't

At least four other recent police killings of unarmed black males, from N.Y. to L.A., were met with relative calm.
'People are tired of it'

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Air attacks resume between Israel and Hamas

By Noah Browning

RAMALLAH West Bank (Reuters) - A top Hamas official said members of his militant group kidnapped three Israeli teenagers whose deaths in June provoked a spiral of violence that led to the war in Gaza, the first acknowledgement of the movement's involvement.

Hamas, which controls Gaza, has up to now refused to confirm or deny Israeli accusations that it masterminded the abduction and killing of the three young men, one of them a joint U.S.-Israeli citizen, in Hebron.

"There was much speculation about this operation, some said it was a conspiracy," Saleh al-Arouri told delegates at the International Union of Islamic Scholars in Istanbul on Wednesday, according to a recording of the meeting posted online by organizers.

"The popular will was exercised throughout our occupied land, and culminated in the heroic operation by the Qassam Brigades in imprisoning the three settlers in Hebron," he said, referring to Hamas's armed wing.

"This was an operation from your brothers in Qassam undertaken to aid their brothers on hunger strike in (Israeli) prisons," he added.

Jewish seminary students Eyal Yifrach, 19, and Gilad Shaer and Naftali Fraenkel, both 16, were abducted while hitchhiking in the Israeli occupied West Bank on June 12 and killed.

Israel promptly accused Hamas, which is based in Gaza but has a presence in the West Bank, of masterminding the attack and began a crackdown on the group in which over a thousand Palestinians were arrested.

Tensions already ran deep in the West Bank after weeks of a mass hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, who is in exile in Qatar, denied knowledge of the abduction but praised its perpetrators.

Nearly three weeks after the kidnappings, 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khudair, a Palestinian living in East Jerusalem, was abducted, beaten and burned to death by, prosecutors said, a group of Jewish extremists.

Protests broke out in Abu Khudair's neighborhood and Hamas responded by firing rockets at Israel from Gaza.

That escalated into a full-scale war with Israel in which more than 2,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed, as well as 64 Israeli soldiers and three civilians in Israel.

Two Palestinian suspects Israel has named as the kidnappers of the three seminary students remain at large.

Israel said a third suspect arrested by its security forces admitted under interrogation to organizing the kidnapping with funds from Hamas in Gaza.

(Writing by Noah Browning; Editing by Luke Baker and Andrew Heavens)

Hamas reverses course with kidnapping admission

Until now, the Palestinian militants had denied involvement in the eventual deaths of three Israeli teens.
'Heroic operation'

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Raw: Grief After Deadly Airstrikes

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — An Israeli airstrike in Gaza killed three senior Hamas military commanders Thursday, delivering a likely blow to the organization's morale and highlighting the long reach of Israel's intelligence services.

The strike marked a further escalation in fighting after Egyptian efforts to end the war collapsed earlier this week, and signaled no end in sight for violence that has killed more than 2,000 Palestinians and 67 Israelis.

The pre-dawn strike leveled a four-story house in a densely populated neighborhood of the southern town of Rafah, killing six people, including the three senior Hamas commanders.

Israel said the trio had played a key role in expanding Hamas' military capabilities in recent years, including digging attack tunnels leading to Israel, training fighters and smuggling weapons to Gaza.

Thousands of Palestinians marched through Rafah in a funeral procession Thursday afternoon firing guns, waving flags of different militant groups and chanting religious slogans. Those killed were carried aloft through the crowd on stretchers, wrapped in green Hamas flags.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, said Israel "will not succeed in breaking the will of our people or weaken the resistance," and that Israel "will pay the price."

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(L-R) Raed al-Attar, Mohammed Abu Shammala and Osama Abu Atah from Hamas, stand before a Palestinian …

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the "superior intelligence" of the Shin Bet security service and the military's "precise execution" of the attack.

An Israeli defense official said that tens of thousands of reserve soldiers would be called up for duty later Thursday. The official spoke anonymously as he is not allowed to brief the media. About two thousand reservists who were sent home about two weeks ago, when the violence appeared to have subsided, were called back for service on Wednesday.

The killing of the three Hamas commanders will likely buy Netanyahu some time as the Israeli public becomes increasingly impatient with the government's inability to halt rocket fire from Gaza.

Gaza police and witnesses said several missiles hit the four-story building. Israel and Hamas identified the three commanders killed in the 3 a.m. airstrike as Mohammed Abu Shamaleh, Raed Attar and Mohammed Barhoum.

In pinpointing the whereabouts of the Hamas commanders, Israel likely relied to some extent on local informers. Israel has maintained a network of informers despite its withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, in some cases using blackmail or the lure of exit permits to win cooperation.

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Graphic tracks fighting and cease-fires in the latest Israel-Palestinians war. 2c x 5 inches; 2c x 5 …

Al Majd, a website linked to the Hamas security services, said Thursday that seven suspected informers were arrested in recent days and that three were killed "after the completion of the revolutionary procedures against them."

It was the second time during the Gaza war that the website announced suspected informers had been killed by Hamas.

The Rafah attack came a day after an apparent Israeli attempt to kill the top Hamas military leader, Mohammed Deif, in an airstrike on a house in Gaza City. Deif's wife and an infant son were killed in that strike, but the Hamas military wing said Deif was not in the targeted home at the time.

The body of his daughter, five-year-old Sara Deif, was recovered from underneath the rubble on Thursday, the Gaza Health Ministry said.

The back-to-back targeting of top Hamas military leaders came after indirect Israel-Hamas negotiations in Cairo on a sustainable truce broke down Tuesday. Gaza militants resumed rocket fire on Israel, even before the formal end of a six-day truce.

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Smoke, dust and debris rise after an Israeli strike hit Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip, Wednes …

Since then, Gaza militants have fired dozens more rockets, and Israeli aircraft have struck dozens of targets in Gaza, dimming prospects for a resumption of the talks.

For now, the sides are sticking to unbridgeable demands. Hamas is demanding an end to an Israeli-Egypt blockade of Gaza. Israel, unwilling to grant Hamas any major concession it could claim as a victory in the six-week war, is demanding that Hamas disarm.

Despite the crisis, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was holding talks in Qatar on Thursday with Hamas' top political leader in exile, Khaled Mashaal, and the emir of Qatar.

Hamas has rejected the Egyptian proposal, saying it contained no commitments by Israel to ease the border blockade of Gaza, which was imposed after the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007.

Israel says the blockade is needed to prevent Hamas and other militant groups from getting weapons. The restrictions prevent most Gazans from traveling outside the crowded coastal strip and bar most exports.

Raw: Grief After Deadly Airstrikes in GazaPlay Video

Since the Gaza war erupted six weeks ago, more than 2,000 Palestinians have been killed and about 100,000 left homeless, according to the U.N. and Palestinian officials. Israel has lost 67 people, all but three of them soldiers.

It was unclear if the killing of the three Hamas commanders would affect its ability to fire rockets. Israel estimated that Hamas had 10,000 rockets before the war and has lost about two-thirds of its arsenal since then.

Israel's military and Shin Bet internal security service emphasized the importance of the three Hamas commanders.

Abu Shamaleh had been the top Hamas commander in southern Gaza, while Attar was in charge of weapons smuggling and the construction of attack tunnels, and had played a role in the capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit in 2006. Barhoum was a senior Hamas operative in Rafah, a joint statement said.

Abu Shamaleh was a comrade of Deif's who was involved in planning and carrying out at least four major attacks on Israeli soldiers since the 1990s, including one in 2004 that killed four and wounded 10, the statement said.

Attar, it said, was responsible for orchestrating a series of complex attacks on Israeli targets, including through the Sinai Peninsula in neighboring Egypt.

In addition to the Hamas operatives, three others were killed in the Rafah strike, including a resident of the house and two neighbors, according to Palestinian health official Ashraf al-Kidra.

At least 20 people, including four children, were killed in 31 airstrikes across Gaza, according to al-Kidra. Israel also targeted smuggling tunnels along the Gaza border with Egypt.

The military said 55 rockets and mortars were fired from Gaza since midnight Wednesday, compared to more than 210 over the previous 30 hours.

An Israeli was seriously wounded when a mortar hit south of the southern city of Ashkelon on Thursday, it said.

In a nationally televised address Wednesday, Netanyahu showed little willingness to return to the negotiating table after six weeks of war with Hamas.

"We are determined to continue the campaign with all means and as is needed," he said.

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Enav reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writers Karin Laub in Gaza City and Ian Deitch in Jerusalem contributed to this report.