A spokesman for the family of murdered U.S. journalist Steven Joel Sotloff said Monday that the relationship between the family and the Obama administration was “very strained” while criticizing the administration for its treatment of the family during the ordeal.
Sotloff, who was beheaded by militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, had been missing since August 2013. Barak Barfi, a family spokesman and a research fellow at the New America Foundation, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Monday that the Sotloff’s family contact with the administration had largely been limited to two FBI agents.
“The administration could have done more. They could have helped us. They could have seen them through,” he said. “These are people of modest means. They are not cosmopolitan. They don’t have college educations. They don’t understand the larger ramifications in foreign policy and we just cannot believe that they were afforded the opportunities and the respect that they should have by this administration.”
The family had made a request to the administration after the video of Sotloff’s beheading was released, Barfi said, but they had been rebuffed. He didn’t specify what the request was.
Barfi described Sotloff and James Foley, the other U.S. journalist killed by ISIS, as “pawns in that game,” referencing bureaucratic infighting between the White House and U.S. intelligence community. He accused the Obama administration of releasing “inaccurate statements” about the situation.
“They have said that their families have been consistently and regularly informed,” he said. “That is not true.”
Barfi also said that, according to their “sources on the ground,” Sotloff had been sold to ISIS by members of the “so-called moderate rebels” for between $25,000 and $50,000 once he crossed into Syria.
