James Wright Foley was an American journalist and video reporter. While working as a freelance war correspondent during the Syrian Civil War, he was abducted on November 22, 2012, in northwestern Syria. He was beheaded in August 2014 purportedly as a response to American airstrikes in Iraq, thus becoming the first American citizen killed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
About James Foley (journalist) in brief
James Wright Foley was an American journalist and video reporter. While working as a freelance war correspondent during the Syrian Civil War, he was abducted on November 22, 2012, in northwestern Syria. He was beheaded in August 2014 purportedly as a response to American airstrikes in Iraq, thus becoming the first American citizen killed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Foley was born in Evanston, Illinois, the oldest of five children born to Diane and John Foley of Rochester, New Hampshire. In 1996, he graduated from Marquette University, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Spanish, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2002. In 2007, Foley enrolled in Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, which signaled the beginning of his career as a journalist. In 2008, he became an embedded journalist with USAID-funded development projects in Iraq. In 2011, while working for the Boston-based GlobalPost, Foley went to Libya to cover the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi, embedding himself with rebel fighters. On May 18, Foley, Clare Morgana Gillis and Manu Brabo, as well as Nigel Chandler, were brought to the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli after release. Foley returned to Milwaukee to thank the community for praying for his safe return. He also wrote an article for Marquette Magazine about how rosary prayers helped get him through his captivity. In an interview, he said, “You go through different emotions when you’re in captivity.
You don’t want to be defined as that guy who got captured in 2011.” He was released from jail 44 days later and returned to Libya, where he returned to the scene of the Gaddafi’s capture with GlobalPost correspondent Tracey Shelton on October 20, 2011. During the capture, Foley said: “Once I saw Anton lying there dead, it was like everything had changed. I don’t even know that I felt some of the blows.’” In 2010, he left Iraq and applied for military embed-journalist accommodation status in Afghanistan to become a freelance journalist. On March 3, 2011, Foley admitted that he had marijuana in his possession and resigned his position. In January 2011, he joined Stars and Stripes as a reporter on assignment in Afghanistan. Two months later he was removed from his post after being detained by U.S. military police at Kandahar Air Field on suspicion of possessing and using marijuana. In 2012, Foley was captured in Syria while he was working for Agence France-Presse and GlobalPost. Foley, Gillis, and Brabo were attacked and captured near Brega, Libya, by forces loyal to Gaddafi; fellow photojournalist Anton Hammerl was killed. Foley and Gillis were beaten by the pro-Gaddafi forces and then taken as their prisoners. Foley stated: “I don’t even know what happened after that to him. We weren’t able to see anything that happened after he was killed”
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