An al Qaeda commander tweeted his support for Abdul Rahman Kassig, the American captive threatened with execution by ISIS. “The doctor who welcomed me in the [the city of Deir Ezzour] hospital and performed a successful operation was Peter,” Abu Omar Aqidi, a local commander with the Al-Nusra Front. “Naturally, I assumed he was a Muslim doctor who had come to Syria,” he wrote in Arabic.
Members of Al-Nusra rivals ISIS have said the deadline for his execution was last Wednesday. Both are classified as terror organizations and fighting the Syrian and Iraqi governments, although ISIS and Al-Nusra have diverged in the past. On Friday, Kassig’s mother made another plea to the terror group, begging the Islamist militants who have seized large parts of Syria and Iraq to get in contact with the family. The 26-year-old from Indiana was working as a humanitarian aid worker in Syria when he was captured by ISIS in October 2013. Kassig, who was born Peter Kassig but changed his name after converting to Islam, was threatened with execution in an ISIS video released by the terror group Oct. 1 that showed the beheading of British aid worker Alan Henning.
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