US Officials: ISIS Executioners being Extradited from Iraq

Unnamed government sources in Washington are being quoted as saying that two members of a four-man Islamic State execution squad dubbed “The Beatles” are being extradited to the United States from Iraq on Wednesday. El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey were captured in Syria in 2018 by Kurdish forces; they were transferred to a US military facility in Iraq the next year. Both insist they were only jailers and never took part in executions. Elsheikh’s mother petitioned Britain’s top court to block the transfer of evidence to the US, saying she feared her son would be executed. After US Attorney General William Barr promised no executions if there were to be trials, the court turned her down. A third member of the group, Mohamed Emwazi, dubbed “Jihadi John,” is said to have been the one who beheaded US journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley on camera in 2014. He himself was killed in a US airstrike. The fourth member is imprisoned in Turkey. They were dubbed The Beatles by their captives because of their British accents. Emwazi also delivered English-language diatribes to the camera in a thick British accent before killing his victims.