Obama: ISIS killing ‘an act of pure evil’

President Obama on Sunday offered “prayers and condolences” to the parents and family of Peter Kassig, the U.S. hostage who was killed by Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants.

{mosads}“We cannot begin to imagine their anguish at this painful time,” Obama said in a statement released aboard Air Force One as the president returned from Asia.

“Abdul-Rahman was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group that the world rightly associates with inhumanity,” the president, using the name the 26-year-old former Army ranger and aid worker used after his conversion to Islam.

Obama said Kassig’s life and deeds, like those of other Americans executed by the terror group, “stand in stark contrast” to everything ISIS represents.

“While ISIL revels in the slaughter of innocents, including Muslims, and is bent only on sowing death and destruction, Abdul-Rahman was a humanitarian who worked to save the lives of Syrians injured and dispossessed by the Syrian conflict,” Obama said, using an alternate acronym for the terror group. “While ISIL exploits the tragedy in Syria to advance their own selfish aims, Abdul-Rahman was so moved by the anguish and suffering of Syrian civilians that he traveled to Lebanon to work in a hospital treating refugees. Later, he established an aid group, SERA, to provide assistance to Syrian refugees and displaced persons in Lebanon and Syria. These were the selfless acts of an individual who cared deeply about the plight of the Syrian people. “

Obama said that ISIS’s actions represent no faith, “least of all the Muslim faith which Abdul-Rahman adopted as his own.”

“Today we grieve together, yet we also recall that the indomitable spirit of goodness and perseverance that burned so brightly in Abdul-Rahman Kassig, and which binds humanity together, ultimately is the light that will prevail over the darkness of ISIL,” he said.