Colum

In August, 2014, Diane Foley went to church in Rochester, New Hampshire. Her son, Jim, a photojournalist, had then been a hostage of Islamic State in Syria for almost two years. It was late at night, and she was exhausted and alone. The US government, insistent that it would not pay ransoms to terrorists, would do nothing for her family; it was hellish living in fear of the sound of the telephone; the waiting and the wondering could drive a person mad. And so, here she was, clicking her rosary beads, kneeling to repeat…

To westerners, the public beheading of the US journalist James Foley in Syria was grim confirmation of the brutality of Islamic State and, more specifically, of the cruelty of a trio of British militants nicknamed “the Beatles”. For Foley’s mother, Diane, who since his kidnapping two years earlier had been pressing Barack Obama’s government to rescue him or negotiate his release, his death was incomparably more painful. But that didn’t deter her from meeting Alexanda Kotey, the man found guilty of conspiracy to murder her…