To Pay or Pay Not

Among the moral dilemmas a Western leader faces today, probably the most onerous comes from the Terror War. Does a self-respecting president or prime minister pay the ransom for fellow citizens kidnapped by terrorist organizations –thus financing the corresponding group of assassins– or should they be abandoned to a cruel assassination at the hands of their captors? ISIS began its terror marketing campaign with American journalist James Foley’s capture (2012) and murder (2014), after almost two years of negotiations that included a botched rescue attempt. Subsequent beheadings of American, British and French journalists preceded the hugely publicized capture and decapitation in 2015 of two Japanese citizens –journalist Kenji Goto and activist Haruna Yukawa– whose liberty had been priced by ISIS at 200 million dollars. ISIS makes most of its money from black-market oil sales -which garner a million dollars a day–, but it also rakes in between 20 and 30 million dollars a year in ransom payments. Much of this rescue money is reported to proceed from France, the country where –accordingly– a third part of ISIS and Al-Qaeda hostages come from. United States and United Kingdom have both refused to pay ransoms for their citizens abducted abroad, though Obama recently cleared the way for families to do so privately.

On May 7th three Spanish journalists kidnapped in 2015 in Syria by the Al-Nusra Front in were liberated, after the Spanish government reportedly negotiated a ransom price of 12 million euros. Two weeks later Spanish journalist Salud Hernández Mora has been kidnapped in Colombia by FARC terrorists. My last article for “The Objective” ended with the question: “How long before the next Spanish journalist is whisked away and an even higher payoff is asked for?” Unfortunately, the answer came before the month of May had ended.