A video posted online on Sept. 2, 2014 showed an Islamist militant beheading freelance American journalist Steven A. Sotloff, who disappeared in Syria in August 2013 while reporting on the ongoing conflict in the country. Like a video of the murder of fellow American journalist James Foley posted online two weeks earlier, the video of Sotloff’s death showed him in front of a black-clad man who said in British-accented English that the execution was in response to American airstrikes in Iraq on the Islamic State, a militant group seeking to carve out a caliphate in that country and Syria.