In March 2013, David Haines and Frederico Motka were kidnapped while traveling together near the Turkish border in Syria.¹ The men were both foreigners and aid workers, they were held in the same prison by the same militant group, and yet they suffered sharply different fates. In May 2014, Motka was released, while four months later, Haines became the fourth Westerner to be beheaded by the Islamic State. Press accounts noted that the major difference between the men was their nationality: Motka was Italian, while Haines was British.²

In the summer of 2014, the Islamic State began its campaign of...

The two main empirical sections of this report rely on different data sources, but they employ complementary methodological approaches. A short review of the data used for each section and the associated limitations related to each section follows, but first a note on definitions.

According to the United Nations, a hostage is defined as “a person detained and under the threat of death, injury, or continued detention by an individual or group in order to compel a third party to do (or abstain from doing) any act as an explicit or implicit condition of the person’s release.”⁴ This report will...

Each individual kidnapping incident has its own unique challenges and manifestations. In some cases, the perpetrators kill hostages quickly. In others, hostages are released after negotiations. While the subsequent section in this report conducts a more nuanced investigation of kidnappings perpetrated by jihadist groups against Westerners, using the CTC-created dataset described above, in this section we temporarily set aside some of these nuances to conduct a macro-level examination of all kidnapping incidents perpetrated by terrorists (not just those against Westerners) from 1970 to 2013 using the GTD dataset. We argue that such an examination offers important contextual information for understanding...

Understanding the broad scope of the kidnapping threat by non-state actors is an essential part of grappling with the threat to Western citizens from jihadist groups. It is important to note at the outset that, compared to other terrorist events and the associated casualties of those events, relatively few Westerners are kidnapped by non-state actors generally and jihadist groups more specifically. However, it may be the case that the relatively rare nature of kidnapping events is also part of the reason that they have an impact much larger than the numbers alone would suggest. Even within these incidents though, there...

This report provides needed empirical data and critical insights into the increasing trend of non-state actors kidnapping Westerners, and it provides a more nuanced view of the behavior of jihadist groups who are employing this tactic in greater frequency. Below are some of the key takeaways and some areas that warrant more scrutiny to best inform policy on this topic. Recommendations for additional research for each of those takeaways are also included.

The preliminary data in this report largely confirms what many have suspected from casual viewing of the news and media reports. While there are undoubtedly some kidnapping cases...