The Islamic State’s official media arm, Furqan Media, has just released a video showing the beheading of American photojournalist James Wright Foley. The terrorist organization claims that the murder of an American citizen who went missing in Syria in 2012 comes as a warning to the White House to end its “intervention” in Iraq. If not, the video claims, ISIS will kill another U.S. journalist, Stephen Joel Sotloff. The Miami native, reported the Aleppo press center, was kidnapped on or around August 4, 2013. Sotloff’s life, says the video, “depends on Obama’s next decision.”

Foley and Sotloff are among a number of foreign journalists that have been taken hostage in Syria. Another is Austin Tice, taken in the summer of 2012, whose brilliant reporting on the military aspects of the Syrian war was informed by his experience as Marine. The video of Tice’s abduction raised suspicions that his kidnappers were not, as the video portrays, Islamist rebels. “It’s like a caricature of a jihadi group,” Syria expert Joseph Holliday told the Washington Post. “It looks like someone went to the Internet, watched pictures of Afghan mujahedeen, then copied them.” Many observers believe the Syrian government was behind Tice’s kidnapping and sought to blame the rebels and thereby doom American support for the Free Syrian Army.