Original subtitles

This programme contains some strong language and scenes which some viewers may find disturbing.

It was a beautiful August day.

Warm, sunny, beautiful.

Out of the blue, two FBI agents whom I'd never met before

came to our door.

They were very cordial, very nice -

I mean, they were lovely -

and asked for DNA samples.

And here, this is nearly two years

after Jim had been kidnapped.

We rummaged through one of Jim's trunks

for Jim's sample, and found a toothbrush of his.

Gave our own.

And then they left.

They gave us no context at all.

Something bad was happening.

PHONE RINGS

I got this phone call from this journalist,

sobbing on the phone.

"Who is this?"

And just told me to look at the internet,

look at Twitter.

And that's when we saw the horrific image

of Jim...

..being beheaded.

Er...

I never watched the video,

but it was an image of Jim on the ground with his head on his back.

You know, it's just awful. Awful.

That was... That was a terrible day, yeah.

That was a really, really bad day.

I was furious.

I wasn't just sad and shocked.

I was enraged.

Yeah, yeah.

I was in, yeah, a killing rage.

INTERVIEWER: Did you watch the entire thing?

I didn't see James get his head cut off.

I saw him make his speech.

I wish I had more time.

I wish I could have the hope of freedom

and seeing my family once again.

I was so proud of him -

because he was so brave.

I was just so proud of him.

He was so good.

Just good. Very good.

This is James Wright Foley,

an American citizen of your country.

The man - you know, he had, like, a strong British accent.

I was very, very angry.

You know, they killed him very, very,

very bad, man.

And killed him, like, cowardly, you know?

So cowardly.

So cowardly.

Today, the entire world is appalled by the brutal murder

of Jim Foley by the terrorist group Isil.

From governments and peoples across the Middle East,

there has to be a common effort to extract this cancer

so that it does not spread.

And we will continue to confront this hateful terrorism -

and replace it with a sense of hope and civility.

That's what Jim Foley stood for.

May God bless him, keep Jim's memory,

and may God bless the United States of America.

President Obama did call us from the golf course to tell us he was sorry.

Yeah, that was kind of unfortunate.

We heard from Pope Francis before we heard from President Obama.

As the world reacts to James Foley's shocking murder...

Here's Jim doing dishes.

..his friend, the British photojournalist

John Cantlie, is still being held.

- REPORTER: - John Cantlie, believed to be being held

by extremists.

This is the golden era of jihad.

Islamic State militants have released a video

showing the killing of American journalist James Foley.

The jihadis are holding many more foreign hostages.

The relationship between torturer and tortured

is extremely complex,

but John had been trained in hostage survival skills.

Make yourself useful.

The location of John Cantlie and his fellow captives remains unknown.

With the Islamic State Group

threatening to murder more hostages, the world holds its breath.

I didn't know at what stage John Cantlie

was going to be killed.

So there was this awful wait,

and I think it was a fortnight.

Good morning, this is Breakfast with Bill Turnbull and Louise Minchin.

Islamic State militants murder a second American journalist -

and say a British hostage could be next.

Steven Sotloff is murdered.

Another barbaric beheading,

another unwatchable video.

The same British accent behind the mask and the knife.

So this terrible cycle has begun.

David Haines is the third Western hostage to be killed.

Prime Minister, what are your thoughts about the hostage?

David Haines was a British hero.

The fact that an aid worker was taken, held

and brutally murdered at the hands of Isil

sums up what this organisation stands for.

This was brutality on a scale that, you know, we really...

We've had terrorist IRA problems.

We've had, you know...

But this was on another level.

They claim to do this in the name of Islam.

That is nonsense.

Islam is a religion of peace.

They are not Muslims.

They are monsters.

I thought it was right for me to personally watch

these appallingly gruesome beheading videos -

because I wanted, you know...

Well, I wanted the families to know

that this was not being dealt with in some dusty corner of Whitehall.

That I was directly engaged.

This British man has to pay the price for your promise,

Cameron, to arm the Peshmerga against the Islamic State.

There were some people in the intelligence services

who said, you know, "Do you really want to do this?

"In a way, this is Jihadi John trying to sort of

"get inside your head."

And I thought, "No, it's important. I'm the Prime Minister.

"These are my citizens."

Now, a new propaganda video has been released

showing a British man who's being held by Isis militants.

Each time there was a video,

I'd go to the various, you know, download sites

and watch the video.

Hoping that it wasn't John.

A new video has appeared

showing a British hostage being held by extremists

from Islamic State

My name is John Cantlie.

I'm a British journalist who used to work

for some of the bigger newspapers and magazines in the UK.

Seeing as I've been abandoned by my Government

and my fate now lies in the hands of the Islamic State,

I have nothing to lose.

John Cantlie is alive.

He's seen for the first time in two years.

Over the next few programmes,

I am going to show you the truth -

as the Western media tries to drag the public back

to the abyss of another war...

It became apparent that he hadn't been beheaded,

and then we started to see these films pop up.

And he'd obviously, you know, found a way to survive.

And I don't want to judge him in any way.

I mean, who knows what any of us would do in those circumstances.

Neither David, nor his family, nor we wanted your sympathy,

Prime Minister.

What we wanted was your help,

which, as leader, you could have given.

I deeply resent it, Prime Minster.

Thanks a lot.

I remember I thought, "Wow, John - you managed not to be beheaded.

"That's fucking impressive."

H-However you are manipulating them is impressive.

You saw it as that, actually, he's manipulating them...?

Yeah. Definitely, yeah.

If...

Why not kill him like the rest?

Now, I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking, "He's only doing this because he's a prisoner.

"He's got a gun at his head

"and he's being forced to do this," right?

Well, it's true.

I am a prisoner. That I cannot deny.

When I saw he hadn't had his head cut off, I was very excited.

Because it's a proof of life.

John was not angry at the British government.

He knows the system and he knew fully what was happening.

He was doing everything within his power to just stay alive.

As I always told him: preserve and prolong life.

That's all you have to do.

Help will come, even if it takes ten years.

Preserve and prolong life.

That's what he was doing -

preserving and prolonging his life.

There are two sides to every story.

Weeks after this video,

the remaining hostages,

two aid workers -

one a British national, Alan Henning,

the other an American, Peter Kassig -

are beheaded.

The Islamic State Group is now a threat on the global stage.

And America has been unleashing cruise missiles,

fighter aircraft and drones.

Hello, I'm John Cantlie,

and today we're in the city of Kobane

on the Syrian-Turkish border.

There's suddenly something different -

John's in Kobane with this kind of dyed hair.

And he appears to be reporting on the Islamic State side.

That was, like, "What is going on here?"

The Western media -

and I can't see any of their journalists

here in the city of Kobane -

have been saying recently that the Islamic State

are on the retreat.

All I've seen here is Mujahideen.

I remember thinking, "That's been edited nicely.

"That's been really pieced together.

"That's been cut really well."

Kobane is now being...

This is a guy who's a hustler.

He's got chutzpah. He's constantly hustling,

trying to stay in this industry.

So he knows how to adapt to survive.

He's working as a journalist,

showing them how to run the propaganda machine.

And he's the last man standing -

because he's giving them PR advice.

By 2015, the Islamic State Group had taken over large swathes

of land in Syria and Iraq,

reshaping society with its own ideology.

In Iraq, Islamic State Group fighters

are on the doorstep of the capital city, Baghdad.

And in Syria, the group is claiming half of the country as its own.

The revenue streams to Islamic State were coming from all sides.

They were trading illegal artefacts, diamonds, gold - you name it.

I mean, they were basically a crook state.

And obviously, they were buying equipment.

We will shortly be introducing a counter-terrorism bill,

which will include new powers to disrupt the ability

of people to travel abroad to fight,

as well as their ability to return here -

and combat the underlying ideology that feeds,

supports and sanctions terrorism.

Thousands leave their homes across the world,

including young people and teenagers from Britain.

Islamic State Group is in full recruitment mode.

Then came this avalanche of social media messaging.

A message to all the brothers in the UK -

know that the Caliphate has been established.

What prevents you from attaining martyrdom

and the pleasure of your Lord?

Look around you while you sit in comfort and ask yourself,

is this is how you want to die?

GUNSHOTS

The great advertisement of the Caliphate

as a place you would want to come and live in.

I couldn't find anyone in UK that was, you know,

willing to just sacrifice their life in this world

for the life in the hereafter.

This was a whole new level of death cult recruitment.

But there is nothing more barbaric

than those human beings did

to innocent human beings, right?

Right, this pool is like an ice bath.

Freezing cold!

Woohoo, cold!

"Come out and join us -

"we'll give you as many girls as you want."

Right? "Come and live like kings."

Yeah, it worked, right?

These guys, they used to use the internet every single day,

putting up the tweets, putting up pictures.

When they go to a restaurant, take a picture of a coffee.

He just wanted to feel,

or she just wanted to feel like she's having a normal life.

Islamic State's message was broadcast

fairly unfiltered.

"This is how we look after the community. This is..."

You know, "We're giving food to the poor.

"We are helping with education.

"We're helping with infrastructure projects."

They continue to build new dwellings out of this gorgeous white stone.

And, er, John was very much part of the marketing machine.

This is a waiting room

where normal civilians wait to see a Sharia court judge.

And like any other waiting room

of any other law court in the world,

they're playing TV in the background.

This being the Islamic State,

they're playing Islamic State videos.

And I must say, they are a lot more entertaining

than watching the News at Six.

Sharia courts.

"It's OK to cut someone's hand off

"because look how much it creates discipline," -

all that jazz.

The Mujahideen are not fazed by the bombings at all

and continue to conduct classes on the banks

of the Euphrates River.

He finds himself very quickly as their little media guru.

But if he made another video and was allowed out,

is that an opportunity to escape?

The Islamic State media wing was huge -

spread across different cities, different towns.

And the great advertisement of the Caliphate

varied from, you know, hearts and minds

to extreme violence -

of your kind of worst, most twisted imaginings.

You know, immolation of the Jordanian pilot in the cage,

through to, in Iraq, people getting dunked in cages

in swimming pools.

For many people,

extreme violence had not a message of repulsion,

but a message of attraction.

Thousands of young men and women from around the world

felt like that and went to join.

Hello, I'm John Cantlie,

and today we're on top of the world in Mosul,

overlooking the second largest city in Iraq -

and under the complete control of the Islamic State

for over five months.

It's the absolute heartland of the Caliphate

and home to nearly two million people

from every walk of life.

Suddenly, video came out of Mosul,

and that was even more radical.

John's driving around, reporting.

No visit to a Muslim country would be complete

without doing some shopping at a souk.

And everywhere you look, everywhere you come

here in this old, old souk -

it's one of the oldest in Mosul -

you're struck by just how...

Whoop!

..normal and crazy and busy everything is.

This is not a city living in fear,

as the Western media would have you believe.

This is just a normal city going about its daily business.

We have to wrap up at the souk now and move on to the next place,

but there's a huge crowd of people around us.

This is not an empty, deserted, depressed place at all.

This is bustling, and we have to move on.

It's clear from his body language and from his speech

that he wasn't immediately worried about being killed.

He's had a bit of sun on his face.

He's got a bit condition back.

He's having a bit of a laugh, too.

Down here! Over here!

Jeering at coalition aircraft.

Try to rescue me again!

Do something!

Useless! Absolutely useless!

And one of his big loves was motorbikes.

Suddenly, he's back on a bike.

Here we are patrolling the streets of Mosul.

It's been a while since I've ridden a motorcycle

so excuse me if I wobble around a bit.

But it seems that the police are almost redundant,

despite having a very firm presence here in Mosul.

There's really very little crime being committed

from what I can see.

Just people going about their business.

And nothing like the police before,

who would run at the slightest sign of trouble.

Anyway, we've got to go and patrol now.

SIREN WAILS

In one way, you could see it as looking quite complicit.

And some people did see it as quite complicit.

They were like, "Oh, he's either got Stockholm syndrome

"or he has, you know, been exposed to so much sort of

"radicalisation in his time as hostage

"that he's kind of gone off that way himself."

Playing in the background is a screen.

This is a media place here in Mosul showing me reporting from Kobane.

Around the city, John's propaganda videos are being screened

by the Islamic State Group.

Media booths were places where there was a screen,

where Islamic State films -

by this time, usually atrocity films -

were shown to the public.

Those booths were by every kind of big roundabout or intersection,

and often people were corralled at gun point

to sit down and watch them.

It wasn't like getting a ticket, right?

And he's referencing the screen behind him

in which he, John Cantlie, appears.

And there I am in the background.

All the way here in Mosul,

and here I am on the streets.

That was me then, and this is me now -

and it just shows how much territory the Islamic State are controlling.

Before his kidnapping,

he wanted to be a foreign correspondent.

You know, a war reporter going into the field.

Ironically, he's now become famous -

you know, doing pieces to camera and stuff.

The videos that he made were becoming quite viral.

So there was a lot of reporting around that.

There was no-one really actually telling the story

of his survival or going into it in a deeper way.

He was basically the bad guy,

and that's how he was coming across.

There was no counter-argument.

And a lot of people that knew John felt that this was unfair, right?

John is not the bad guy.

He's trying to survive in any way that he knows how.

Like most of us would, right? We would try and survive.

Because what's the alternative?

Because, you know, the alternative is he's beheaded.

In Madrid, John's former fellow hostage,

Javier Espinosa,

is facing some resistance in publishing his story

about his own captivity.

I published the story of my kidnapping

one year after I was released.

The sister of John told me,

"Please don't publish this in English,

"because it will affect John."

We strongly challenge those holding John to return

to your previously opened channel.

We implore IS to reinitiate direct contact.

During the phone call, Javier is asked not to publish

the article in English.

She stopped the articles,

and the articles were not published.

Because I couldn't... I mean, it was the sister

of a guy who was kidnapped.

I couldn't.

But I'm sure, from my conversation with her,

the government was still putting pressure on her

not to allow this information to be released

The British government, I think, would say

it is unsafe for him, it raises his profile.

What do you say to that?

At that time, it's...

I mean, everybody was killed.

What they care is about more public pressure.

Foreign Office are advising the family

that you must not speak to the press.

I understand if you have a government

that's advising you not to speak,

then you're going to take the advice.

But was the advice in John's interests?

I found it troubling. The family don't want this.

So no newspaper wants to touch it,

no magazine wants to touch it.

The broadcasters were having the same problem.

I was aware there was a Panorama going on.

They were making a BBC documentary - which never saw the light of day.

Because lots of stories are told without the consent of families.

It happens all the time.

This seems to be an extraordinary exception.

And then here's the worst thing for me about that is that...

Let's just assume that John managed to get onto Google, right?

In a moment. Maybe a guard gave him a phone and just said, you know,

"You can look on Google for 20 seconds."

He wouldn't have seen anything about himself.

All he... All John would've seen was a blank space.

What's that going to do?

It's going to push him further towards his captors.

And that is the worst.

That's a betrayal.

In Paris, shocking images capture two masked men

killing 12 people in and around the office

of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo

for publishing controversial Prophet Muhammad cartoons.

Europe is on high alert.

In response to the attacks, a French foreign fighter tells John

about the necessity of spilling blood in Europe.

Some people are... "Hang on."

Like, "What's going on here?"

And there were definitely senior officers

in the British military who said

if he ever comes back, he's going to be charged for treason.

And I know that -

not as supposition, but for fact.

Because I've sat in on those conversations.

I would have people say to me, "Did you see what's...?"

Like, what are you on? Smack?

You honestly think this guy is going to believe this shit?

I mean, come on, you know?

It's like, what is wrong with you people?

But people drink the Kool-Aid, you know?

What were people saying about him?

Well, people began to take the view

that he was a turned Islamic State asset.

I mean, think about that.

What does that even mean?

This is a death cult.

It has no sophistication to turn assets!

- KEVIN SCOFFS - Right? He was useful. The end.

These people are scum.

He wasn't.

Going from being a middle class white boy

with military roots and connections

to a death cult raping and burning people alive, what?

- Come on. - Who were these people saying this stuff?

Well, I mean, I had military commanders in Britain

at quite senior level.

And intelligence officers I knew.

You know, career intelligence officers.

There were drones in Mosul,

and now there are drones flying overhead here in Al Bab -

just northeast of Halab.

But life continues.

The Mujahideen really don't care how many eyes in the sky

are looking down on them.

If John Cantlie was going to survive,

he could not look too challenging or too cynical.

Indiscriminate bombing...

John had to have this chameleon role.

..by American jets...

I spoke to someone very close to John

who explained to me that America had declared John a person of interest

because of his relationship with Isis.

Potentially directly involved in war crimes,

but certainly, you know,

directly in league with the terrorists.

And that really cut me to the quick,

because, you know, it's clear, right,

that he is adapting to survive.

Was he ever considered a person of interest by the UK?

Person of interest in...?

Was John Cantlie ever considered a person of interest?

Not to my knowledge.

Do you think he was ever considered a person of interest by the US?

I-I don't...

I don't know.

I don't recall ever hearing that.

The search continues to identify a British member of Islamic State

who's suspected of killing the American journalist

James Foley.

Britain's, you know, not looking great here.

Everyone's British.

The kidnappers are British.

John's British.

I mean, so it's a mess.

The person who kills James Foley - British, right?

So everyone's like, "Oh, my God, who is the masked killer?"

Then it is revealed, his identity,

Mohammed Emwazi, from West London.

It was very shocking that someone who was brought up in London,

educated at a school -

you know, not far from where I live in West London -

could behead British citizens in the desert

on behalf of some crazed Islamist extremist death cult.

This is Emwazi's family home in West London.

A couple of the hostages come out and say,

"Yeah, and the guys with him,

"John used to nickname the Beatles."

They were involved directly in John's torture.

The remaining Beatles are also from West London.

A former drug dealer, Alexanda Kotey,

and his friend, El Shafee Elsheikh.

The two men were known around the community

and were friends with Hamza.

Alexanda and Shafee, both of them, are...

Were very good friends of mine.

Hamza claims to not know that his two close friends

were holding John captive.

I really didn't know what they were working as, at all.

I didn't even have, like, an idea.

I thought they were in something to do with the military.

There was no signs or telltale signs that they were working

in what they say that they were working as.

Did you do anything out there that you regretted?

HAMZA STAMMERS

In Syria?

Or Iraq?

No.

Did you kill anyone?

No. No.

I didn't kill anyone. I didn't take any hostages.

Did you witness any executions with IS?

No.

Did you take part in any executions under IS?

No.

Did you meet James Foley?

No.

Nero Saraiva posted a tweet

weeks before James' death,

foretelling the murder to come.

It read:

Was that tweet from you? Yes or no?

No.

It came from your account.

I don't know this. I don't...

I remember using it...

I didn't even use Twitter that much.

I remember just using it maybe once or twice.

The Ayes to the right, 524.

The Noes to the left, 43.

In September, 2014,

David Cameron was granted permission by Parliament

to strike Islamic State Group insurgents in Iraq,

with the support of the Iraqi government.

This struggle against Islamist, extremist terrorism -

this is the struggle of our generation.

Across the region, Islamic State Group is reinventing warfare,

using inexpensive commercial drones -

not only to film propaganda videos,

but to carry bombs and explosives.

Britain commissioned our own sovereign drone programme,

under our control,

so we were bringing our own assets and our own ability

to take out a terrorist target -

as well as working alongside the Americans.

You need the capability to act,

and I was very keen that we should do that.

More often it was Reaper drones.

Sometimes targets that were being piloted from some distance.

And sometimes being guided onto targets

visible to special forces.

We were always hoping some little piece of intelligence

would come up about where the Beatles themselves were.

This is the first time in any recent conflict

that British forces have targeted a British national

suspected of terrorism.

This is a message to the brothers who've stayed behind.

Reyaad Khan, 21 years old, from Cardiff,

appearing last year in this Islamic State

recruitment video.

Now he's been specifically targeted and killed by his own country.

A lot of Brits got hit by drones.

I've been in a car.

The rocket's come from the window and has hit the guy next to me.

A rocket flew past me,

and it turned a guy into...

I'm sorry, and it turned a guy into minced meat.

He's in the passenger seat.

Nothing happened to me.

Good morning.

Last night, the United States carried out

an air strike in Raqqa, Syria,

targeting Mohammed Emwazi,

the Isil executioner known as Jihadi John.

He posed an ongoing and serious threat to innocent civilians -

not only in Syria,

but around the world and in the United Kingdom, too.

He was Isil's lead executioner.

And let us never forget that he killed

many, many Muslims, too.

It was an American and British operation.

It was ultimately an American strike,

but it could just as well have been a British one.

And if it had been, I'd be sitting here defending it.

But ultimately his appalling reign of terror

was brought to an end.

I would have much preferred

he'd been brought to justice

and had an opportunity to explain his why

and face the consequences of his actions.

Er...

I was rather horrified by the drone strike, to be honest.

So I don't think that kind of brutality

fixes the brutality we had endured, to be honest.

David Cameron, the Prime Minister of six years,

resigns.

I leave office in 2016,

but by this time we had started working

with the legitimate Iraqi government,

with Prime Minister Abadi,

who wanted to be a non-sectarian leader of Iraq

and wanted to help the Iraqi army defeat Isil.

The international fightback against the Islamic State Group has begun.

And now, across the border in Syria,

President Assad is pushing out the Islamic State Group

with the support of his ally,

Russian president Vladimir Putin.

And back in Iraq,

the Iraqi army is being supported by the UK, US,

and a coalition of other countries,

to take back the last Islamic State Group stronghold, Mosul.

The place where John has last been seen.

Hello, I'm John Cantlie,

and today we're at Mosul University,

or at least what's left of Mosul University.

If you look behind me...

John disappears for a while,

and then suddenly he starts popping up in 2016 again,

by which time his condition has worsened significantly.

By this stage, John has been held for nearly four years.

He's thin, gaunt,

moving with a slight cramp on one side of his body,

suggesting he might've been wounded or badly beaten

or otherwise injured,

or that he's being held in an extremely confined

kind of space.

This is the Yabessat district of Mosul.

It's a very normal region.

Normal people live here.

The thing for me was the degradation of John on camera.

That's what upset me.

H-His cheekbones hollowed out.

He looked gaunt, right?

Psychologically lost.

The way that he spoke,

it was just an absolute deterioration

of a person.

All that energy that John had, all that potential,

all of that restlessness -

and probably that idealism, right - it had gone.

It had just been stripped away from him.

Stripped bare.

Andre Liohn, a photographer from John's

freelance circle, arrives in Mosul...

..and embeds himself with the Iraqi federal police.

Many times in my life, I have decided,

"I will never go back to war."

And I found a girlfriend, I fall in love.

But when she broke up with me, I was totally destroyed.

And suddenly, everything like...

You know?

"Let's go to war!"

They gave me a name,

which was Andre Al-Jabahat.

"The front line."

You know, Andre The Front Line.

SHOUTING

Mosul is...

..a million and a half, I think, people living there.

And it's divided by the river, the Tigris.

The East Side was easily taken -

like, because all the civilians,

they managed to escape to Erbil, to Kurdistan.

I was there during the battle for Mosul.

By that stage, the Iraqis had taken most of the East Bank -

but only a tiny bit of the West Bank.

And saw some fairly intense stuff there.

Half the guys that I encountered, they'd got suicide belts on.

So, if it gets too much, then they just click and "gadoom".

And I remember very well,

this Islamic State woman had come.

She'd rushed. She'd rushed a Humvee.

And she had a suicide belt on.

So she pops herself, and her head went off like a champagne cork.

On the East Bank,

there was a hospital.

It was in an Islamic State area,

close to the area where John was last seen.

One day in December, 2016,

a huge Iraqi column pushes forward to the hospital

to try and secure it.

They get in, and they secure it,

but they don't completely secure it.

Other Islamic State guys come pouring in from the city

and cut them off.

There was a whole lot of Islamic State fighters -

with a whole lot of terrified doctors and nurses.

The Iraqi army, though, get annihilated.

Their APCs are blown up,

the tanks are blown up,

loads of guys killed.

Suddenly, two or three days after that battle,

John pops up again.

OK, we're absolutely on the front line now

of the fight here in Mosul.

We're in the centre of Mosul,

a little way east,

and behind me it looks like a scene out of a Steven Spielberg film,

except this is for real.

This was an Iraqi army base here in the centre of Mosul,

and now you can see behind me it's complete destruction.

I've counted about 18, 25 BMPs destroyed.

Now, speaking with some of the Mujahideen,

they say the Iraqi army took the bait.

This is exactly what they wanted them to do.

They took the bait like a fish that grabs a lure.

OK? The Mujahideen have drawn them in

to the centre here in Mosul.

So we're going to walk down there

and get a closer look at some of the stuff down there now.

Come with me now and we'll go down there.

Come with me. You've got to be careful of your step here.

There's a lot of grenades

and unexploded ordnance all around.

Like I said, this was the Al-Salam Hospital.

Literally, it's just here.

So there were a few casualties, I believe.

Fortunately, I think the Mujahideen got most of the people

evacuated out of this area before the fighting started.

But I mean, the destruction, the carnage is total.

I haven't seen war like this for a long time.

It's absolutely... There's still smoke

coming out of that BMP there.

This is part of the hospital network here, so...

Oh, here we are.

This used to belong to an Iraqi soldier,

but I don't think he's going to be needing it now, huh?

For many Iraqi soldiers watching that,

they were like,

"You, my friend, are dead.

"You are one of them.

"You are celebrating their victory over our soldiers,

"and you are abusing our dead soldiers."

This is one guy that didn't make it.

Another Iraqi soldier bites the dust.

And this is exactly what's waiting for all the Iraqi soldiers

in this area.

The Mujahideen draw them in

and their anti-tank hunting teams smash them and their vehicles -

like this one, this fellow next to me.

And this is pretty much all that's waiting for the Iraqi army

here in Mosul.

I'd had a few phone calls

from associates

who had asked me very specifically -

one call was a good friend -

about what I thought about John Cantlie.

About, personally, now,

what was my now new view?

To which, of course, I said I have no new view.

I only have the same view.

He's not selling the secrets, is he?

He's not disclosing where the UK Special Forces

are based, right?

He's helping them make a fucking video.

Big wow.

But it was propaganda.

And when you make propaganda,

you're seen as being very much part of the problem.

The harder the guy plays to survive,

the more and more his chances narrow

as members of the establishment,

who might actually be those who can secure his release, become...

..to believe that, in fact, maybe

he has become part of the enemy.

If your job is only to close off Isis and destroy them,

you have to kill all the young men.

They are bombing the very last point where there were...

..members of Daesh, you know?

They just went for a final push.

And, like, a week later,

they had declared victory.

EXCITED CHATTER DISTANT GUNFIRE

The United States killed civilians, as well.

Lots of people that had been killed there, their children.

Russia had done the same with Aleppo.

You know, there is a body of a small baby.

The baby was born in the war

and killed in the war as a soldier,

because he was already dressed as a soldier.

They made no distinctions, you know?

Because many people say, "They were all Isis."

I say, "Well, fair enough, they were Isis.

"But they were not combatants."

You know, they were not combatants.

And this group here of soldiers that I am with,

they are here...

EXCITED SHOUTING

They are here to...

..to take any member of this Islamic State that tries

to escape through the river here.

OFF-CAMERA: How did it feel to round up the Isis suspects?

I saw them torturing people,

you know, and immediately, I imagined John,

because no-one had been talking about John any more.

John had completely disappeared.

And I asked the commander,

"Do you know about John?"

You know, "This British journalist," so on, so on, so on.

"Yes, we know about him. He's Isis now.

"If we meet him, we kill them.

"We will kill him."

You know.

OFF-CAMERA: Do you think that some people were justified in thinking

he'd maybe turned or joined Isis?

I just, I don't know. Erm...

As I say, I don't want to judge him.

He was in appalling circumstances.

He had to make, you know, choices.

And who knows what any of us would do in those circumstances?

Erm, I never heard anyone, you know,

make any particular judgments about him.

It was just this, you know, tragic case of...

..someone we hadn't been able to find and hadn't been able to rescue.

We're interested in John Cantlie, and finding out about

what happened to him. What have you heard from other people?

They say that, you know, John Cantlie was inside.

He was, like, he chose to be inside, and he wanted to be inside.

And he made a video from inside, from inside the siege of Mosul,

and he was actually - he chose to stay in Islamic State,

er, and he liked it.

You have to understand, I'm in prison with people that was there.

They bombed Mosul.

He was in it.

So, they say they never made it out alive.

I know, from what I know I heard one guy say this,

that the building that these people were in was bombed.

You know, that's it.

This building got, er...destroyed.

And he must have been inside

and no-one made it out of it.

Kev is in a unique position,

and it's not the same position that I'm in -

in that he signed the Official Secrets Act,

and he was a member of the Special Forces community.

So, he will know far more context about Special Forces' view

in what happened in Mosul.

OFF-CAMERA: What do you know about the circumstances of John's death?

I don't know anything to do with his death.

I mean, it was a very kinetic period.

There was a lot of people they wanted to get,

that they knew of.

And so...

..I don't know.

HE SIGHS

What have you heard?

What have I heard?

Well, I've heard that he's dead.

Which is kind of self-explanatory.

Was John...killed by people that knew it was him?

I don't know if people had a particular view that,

if he's in a car or he's in a building,

and he happens to be close to a target,

we won't call that off as a result.

I don't know how they deconflict.

And the procedure for signing off on those are not known to me.

We know who he was with and around which time,

and we know how many of those people

are probably now not around any more.

So, you don't really need to be too smart

to draw linear conclusions.

The state will always do what's best for the majority,

not for an individual.

There isn't the resources to care about everyone.

So, the state has acted, I think,

as appropriately as it is capable of doing with the resources it has,

and the means of which to execute them.

The outcome is the same.

The Islamic State was destroyed,

but a lot of people had to die.

I kept my eyes open for John.

You couldn't walk without stepping on dead people.

You couldn't walk.

Everywhere you went, you couldn't walk.

And a soldier came to me.

He said, "Come with me. I'm going to show you something."

And there was a man lying with this camera.

And the body was very, you know, decomposed.

The skin was very dark already, like, decomposed,

and the camera was with him.

I went to see, where is the memory card?

"Oh, we took the memory cards."

There was no lens in the camera, nothing.

And I said, "Can I take the camera?"

"Yeah, you can take the camera. Go on," you know?

And I took the camera with me.

John had the exact same camera. Right?

Maybe the person who had the camera was him.

I don't know.

John Cantlie's body has never been found.

I got to know John Cantlie after his death...

..as a journalist.

I went to many of the places that had been held,

speaking to dozens and dozens of people.

Ultimately, it was a very sad journey, but illuminating.

I found out that John managed to get coded messages out to his family.

On July the Fourth, Independence Day,

the Americans did try to get us out of prison.

He managed to reference a bogus American official,

giving the name, actually, that it's of his nephew, Pocock.

"We're not sure if we missed him by 12 minutes or 12 hours",

said Hector Pocock, a Special Operations spokesman.

These were just messages for his family to know

that he was still thinking of them,

and probably, too, to prove that he still had the wit to be able

to get a subliminal message out to them,

to prove that he wasn't merely a tool of Islamic State propaganda.

- DANIEL: - He didn't want to be used the way they ended up using him.

The last thing John said to me was that,

"If you ever have the opportunity, then when you come home,

"please tell our Secret Service,

"like, if they ever have an opportunity,

"just put a bomb onto our heads

"so we will not end up as propaganda tools".

That was the last thing he said to me before I was released.

"Please kill us before they use us."

And that...that was difficult.

But to hear people speculate and things like that is like...

..you know.

So, I think John is very good at... keeping himself alive.

And he also did that for a long time.

Much longer than anybody could expect him.

When I talk today with, like, for example, students,

that are 16, 17, 20 years old,

Isis is being forgotten already, you know?

We think that people know, but they don't.

And more than that, more than that,

John's story has been forgotten.

They don't know even about, like, you know James Foley, nothing.

You know, jihadists may have killed his body,

but Jim's spirit and his goodness,

they just live on.

You know, we need stories of real heroes,

just ordinary people like Jim,

who chose to do the brave thing, the right thing, you know?

John. Jim and John.

OFF-CAMERA: Should John be remembered as a hero?

Completely, he is a hero.

100%, a hero.

Incredibly brave and heroic.

He has furthered the process of journalism in its purest form,

which is to go into harm's way when everybody else tells you not to.

And if you don't have people who are willing to do that,

men and women that are willing to resist and go in harm's way,

then you won't ever have truth.

That should be the legacy that people remember.

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