Steven Sotloff

On April 20, 2016, it was announced that the family of Steven Sotloff were seeking $90 million in damages from Syria in U.S. court. The family claims the Assad government provided support for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant which was responsible for his murder.

President Obama also signed an Executive Order dated June 24, 2015, in the presence of the Sotloff family and other hostage families, overhauling how the U.S. handles U.S. hostages held abroad by groups such as ISIS.

The Steven Sotloff Art Memorial, created by American artist Tracy Ellyn, first opened publicly just days after President Obama toasted to the memory of the slain journalist at the White House Correspondents Dinner of 2015, and just one day after Sotloff's birthday. It currently overlooks the Atlantic Ocean at Greenspoon Marder Law Foundation in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where viewers can face the Middle East in his memory, as his remains were never returned. Another original of the same memorial is placed at Temple Beth Am in Miami, Florida, where he and his family were and continue to be members.

The 2LIVES Foundation has thus far signed on with United Nations/UNESCO, Columbia University School of Journalism, Reuters, Associated Press and others who spearheaded the first ever Global Safety Principles and Practices for journalists in New York on September 30, 2015. The final draft was signed at UNESCO Paris headquarters on February 5, 2016. The group announced unprecedented initiatives to share security information, provide subsidized safety training to freelancers, end impunity, and more. Other media organizations that signed on include CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and finally 300+ more.

The foundation also worked tirelessly with the U.S. government and senior officials in Washington, D.C. to push for changes to its hostage laws. On June 24, 2015, President Obama signed an Executive Order, in the presence of the Sotloffs and other hostage families, for a broad overhaul regarding how it handles U.S. hostages held abroad by groups such as ISIS.

On September 2, 2014, ISIS released a beheading video, showing one of its members beheading Sotloff. Following Sotloff's beheading, U.S. President Barack Obama stated that the United States would take action to "degrade and destroy" ISIS.

On August 19, 2014, the terrorist organization The Islamic State (IS) released a video titled "A Message to America", showing the beheading of fellow journalist James Foley. At the end of the video, ISIS threatened President of the United States Barack Obama, telling him that "his next move" would decide the fate of Sotloff.

Shortly after the release of the video, a petition was started on WhiteHouse.gov, calling for President Obama to save Sotloff's life. The petition attracted thousands of signatures within days. On August 27, 2014, Sotloff's mother released a short video asking Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to release her son. Fellow journalists including Sotloff's friend Oren Kessler worked intensively for his release.

On September 2, 2014, the SITE Intelligence Group discovered the video of Sotloff's execution, entitled "A Second Message to America" and release by Al-Furqan Media Productions, on what they called "a file-sharing site" and released it to their subscribers.

On July 15, 2013, he arrived in Israel for his former roommate Benny Scholder's wedding and wanted to spend a couple of weeks there. Before his kidnapping he was in Kilis - a town at the border of Turkey and Syria. It was during his talk to Ben Taub, a journalist and philosophy student at Princeton University, that he confessed of being tired of Middle East, "he was sick of being beaten up, and shot at, and accused of being a spy". And his intention was to stop reporting and to come back to the United States, but first he wanted one more tour to Syria. According to Taub's statement it is likely that Sotloff was betrayed to jihadis by his fixer.

Sotloff was kidnapped along with his fixer and the fixer's brother and cousins on August 4, 2013, near Aleppo, after crossing the Syrian border from Turkey. The fixer and his family members were released 15 days later. He was held in Raqqa. Before his execution he criticized the foreign policy of Barack Obama for non-fulfillment of his pre-election promise to bring all American soldiers back home.

In 2012 he reported in Time magazine about Al-Qaeda fighters and commanders from Libya flocking to Syria and shipping Libyan captured arms and ammunition on its way to join the fight to topple Bashar al-Assad's regime. He was also one of a team of reporters that returned to the compound in Benghazi where the US ambassador and three other Americans had been killed on the night of 9/11 that year. He interviewed Libyan security guards who were at the site during the attack. He named a Libyan militia operative, Ahmad Abu Khattallah, as the head of the group (Ansar al-Sharia) that attacked the US compound and as the man who himself masterminded and led the attack. He later reported on a tit for tat retaliation pattern following the US attacks on those that committed the attack on the ambassador's compound in Benghazi. A week before entering Libya, he had written from Turkey about the Alawites there and their support for Assad, while another article written on the same day told about Alawites inside Syria who were against Assad. According to the words of Ann Marlowe who worked together with Sotloff in Libya "he lived in Yemen for years, spoke good Arabic, deeply loved (the) Islamic world".

According to Al-Jazeera, Sotloff was in Qatar and wrote a letter of application dated May 29, 2010, to the Arabic for Non Native Speakers (ANNS) faculty at Qatar University. He later traveled around the region with a Yemeni mobile number. His career began during the Arab Spring. Sotloff had worked for the news magazine Time, as well as Christian Science Monitor, The National Interest, Media Line, World Affairs, and Foreign Policy, and had appeared on CNN and Fox News. His work took him to Syria a number of times, as well as Egypt, Turkey, Libya, and Bahrain.

Steven Sotloff was the son of Arthur and Shirley Sotloff of Pinecrest, Florida, a suburb of Miami, and a grandson of Holocaust survivors, who inspired him to be "a voice for the voiceless." He was the brother of Lauren Sotloff. He grew up in Pinecrest, Florida, graduated from Rumsey Hall School, Kimball Union Academy, and later attended (but did not graduate from) the University of Central Florida with a major in journalism from 2002 to 2004. He transferred to the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel from 2005 to 2008, graduating cum laude with a major in government studies and counter-terrorism.

Steven Joel Sotloff (Hebrew: סטיבן סוטלוף ‎; May 11, 1983 – c. September 2, 2014) was an American-Israeli journalist. In August 2013, he was kidnapped in Aleppo, Syria, and held captive by militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS).