Steven Sotloff, Journalist Held by ISIS and beheaded brutally.

An Islamic militant group released a video on Tuesday showing the second beheading of an American hostage in two weeks and blamed President Obama for the killing. The video of isis beheading raised the pressure on the president to order military strikes on the group in its sanctuary in Syria.

The hostage, Steven J. Sotloff, in sotloff,beheading is shown in the video kneeling like theprevious victim, James Foley, while a masked figure stands above, wielding a knife. Mr. Sotloff addresses the camera and describes himself as “paying the price” for Mr. Obama’s decision to strike the group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, in northern Iraq.

The apparent murder of Mr. Sotloff, 31, came despite televised pleas and steven sotloffvideo  from his mother to the leader of ISIS seeking mercy for her son, a freelance journalist who was captured in northern Syria a year ago. Although the administration said it had not yet authenticated the video, members of Mr. Sotloff’s family issued a statement saying they believed he had been killed

The videotaped of steven sotloff  beheadings and threats by ISIS, which have followed its lightning conquest of broad areas of Syria and Iraq, have transformed the group into one of the most urgent threats facing a president who is also wrestling with crises from Ukraine to Gaza.

The killing raises difficult questions for Mr. Obama, who last Friday said he had not yet formulated a strategy for using military force against the militants in Syria. As news of Mr. Sotloff’s death broke on Tuesday afternoon, just before Mr. Obama left for a weeklong trip to Europe and a NATO summit meeting, the White House struggled to deal with the implications for the president’s policy.

“If genuine, we are appalled by the brutal murder of an innocent American journalist, and we express our deepest condolences to his family and friends,” a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, Bernadette Meehan, said of the video.

The exact timing of Mr. Sotloff’s killing was not clear. Many American counterterrorism and intelligence officials had assumed that he died earlier — probably killed, they said, at the same time that Mr. Foley was murdered two weeks ago