President Obama has called the beheading of an American aid worker by Islamic State militants "an act of pure evil".
He issued the statement on his way home from the weekend's G20 summit in Australia, and after US intelligence had confirmed that an Islamic State video showing Peter Kassig's remains was authentic.
Mr. Kassig's family say the aid worker was their "treasured son", and the video also showed the brutal murder of a number of Syrian army troops captured by Islamic State.
Our Washington Correspondent Simon Marks says the battle against Islamic State is once again on the President's front-burner.
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The news of this latest horror by Islamic State came just as President Obama was flying home from the G20 summit in Brisbane.
The news was broken to him aboard Air Force One by National Security Adviser Susan Rice, and when the plane stopped to refuel in Hawaii, the White House issued a statement.
It called the murder of Peter Kassig - who converted to Islam while in captivity and changed his name to Abdul Rahman - "an act of pure evil", and said the world is right to associate Islamic State with an ideology of inhumanity.
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With the President in the air, it fell to senior Democrats in Washington to go on the air here….Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois told CNN the latest IS video does not mean American ground troops should commence combat and Syria.
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But the President's opponents see things differently.
And Mitt Romney the man who battled for the White House and lost in 2012…perhaps with an eye on another run in 2016 told CBS News the murder of another American shows President Obama is on the wrong track.
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And there was criticism on the same broadcast by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu….who says the murder of Mr. Kassig and several Syrian air force pilots brutally killed on the tape shows President Obama is wrong to to think that he can find common cause with Iran in the battle against the militants.
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This video was different from the others that have shown the murder of American and British captives at the hands of an Islamic State militant who has become known as Jihadi John.
This time round, there was no scripted event….no 2-camera shoot slickly recording the last moments of Peter Kassig, who converted to Islam in detention and changed his name to Abdul-Rahman.
Rather, a hurried series of images taken some time after Mr. Kassig was beheaded.
Intelligence analysts say that indicates the murderers may not have the time or space they've enjoyed in the past to create their made-for-internet horrors.
That comes as cold comfort to the Kassig family, who urged the world to remember the humanitarian work their son - a former Army ranger - had done in Syria….work that ultimately cost him his life.