A former prisoner of war who was friends with murdered American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff told
Newsmax TV on Wednesday that they died as bravely as they lived, and that their videotaped beheadings mark the beginning of the end for their executioners — the radical Islamic State (ISIS).
"If they had focused on just the regional ambitions and not started executing U.S. citizens on video . . . they would have possibly had their Islamic State last for two or three years," Matthew VanDyke told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner, speaking of the jihadist group's effort to build a new Muslim caliphate.
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"At the rate they're going now, the full weight of the United States is about to come down on them — hopefully," said VanDyke, a writer and filmmaker who was captured in Libya as a volunteer fighter with the rebel movement against then-dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
VanDyke, who also was detained once by Iraqi security forces during his own time as a Middle East journalist, said that provoking the United States by ostentatiously killing captive U.S. citizens will ultimately "be proven not to have been a smart move on their part."
VanDyke joined a
growing contingent questioning the supposed strategic brilliance and foresight of the Islamic State, or ISIS, which overran portions of Syria and Iraq with rapid military strikes that caught the world off guard.
"It's very hard to explain these people," he said, "but whether or not they're intelligent — I mean, they've just picked a fight with the most powerful country in the history of the planet, and it's not going to turn out well for them."
But for that to be true, VanDyke said, President Barack Obama will have to act as decisively as he sounded in
his remarks on Wednesday after the
murder of Sotloff.
"There's been a lot of tough talk in the last 24-48 hours," said VanDyke.
But he said the Obama administration's Middle East policy is "lacking in so many ways" that it's not unreasonable to question whether the U.S. response to ISIS now will be "any different."
"I still have my doubts," he said.
VanDyke said that dealing personally with the deaths of Sotloff and Foley has been "difficult."
"I've lost two friends in two weeks," he said, describing his reaction as "a mixture of sadness, anger, outrage that this has happened again."
He said the time lapse after Foley's murder briefly gave him hope that Sotloff might be spared.
"I prepared myself at first" for Sotloff's death, said VanDyke. "But after two weeks went by, and U.S. airstrikes had continued, and there was no video of Sotloff, I thought maybe there were negotiations going on behind the scenes.
"So, I sort of had a false hope that now has been crushed," he said.
Asked how both captives — speaking directly and calmly to the camera in the moments before their executions — could appear so composed, VanDyke said the poise was a product of each man's individual courage, coupled with a kind of serenity that washes over some people confronting imminent death.
"It takes a lot of courage for them to have gone to Syria and Libya in the first place," he said.
"From my own experience, I know, once in Iraq when I was mock-executed by Iraqi security forces, and also in Libya when I felt I was facing death during my prison escape — when I thought at first that there were guards coming to kill me — I was the same way," he said.
"You want to keep your head up. You want to go out with dignity," said VanDyke, adding, "In my case, I didn't want Gadhafi to hear that the American was begging for his life or anything like that.
"There's a number of reasons, but there's kind of a peace that comes to you when you know that death is imminent. And it's strange: it's like a calm that comes over you that gives you composure that you wouldn't otherwise think you would have," he said.
VanDyke said he blames ISIS above all for his friends' killings.
"They are the ones responsible," he said. "They are the ones who put the knives to their throats and that's where the blame needs to be."
But he said the Obama administration may share some blame if
reports are borne out that the White House failed to act quickly on intelligence identifying Foley's whereabouts.
"That disturbs me greatly, and that may have cost them their lives," he said. "But I hope that the press will look into that. "
VanDyke also offered a portrait of his friends' killers, based on his own observations and experiences in the Middle East.
"The people that join ISIS are a mix of psychopaths, of religious zealots and adventure seekers that first show up to fight because they believe in the Syrian cause, and then they end up indoctrinated," he said.
He said some Westerners who join are typically second- and third-generation Mideast expatriates who have become "dissatisfied" with their lives in the West, "and they look for adventure, like young men do."
"But once there," he said, "they start becoming indoctrinated."
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