John Cantlie

In January 2019, an official of the Syrian Democratic Forces stated Cantlie may still be alive inside Deir ez-Zor Governorate, Syria.

In February 2019, British Security Minister Ben Wallace stated that Cantlie is believed to still be alive. A British Home Office spokesperson said: "We do not discuss individual kidnap cases and speculation is unhelpful." Wallace declined to give details of where British intelligence believes Cantlie is still being held by IS.

On 28 July 2017, the Iraqi Al-Sura News Agency alleged that Cantlie had been killed, after the Agency conducted interviews with three captured IS militants.

In October 2017, a French ISIS fighter told French magazine Paris Match that he had seen Cantlie "seven or eight months ago" in Raqqa.

Cantlie's father Paul died on 16 October 2014, having released a video pleading for his son's release on his deathbed.

After disappearing for almost two years following his second abduction in late 2012, Cantlie resurfaced on 18 September 2014 in a video posted by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in the first episode of a multi-part series entitled Lend Me Your Ears. As of February 2015, ISIL has released a total of six videos in the Lend Me Your Ears series, all of which feature Cantlie speaking while sitting at a wooden table and wearing orange prison garb against a black backdrop. In the videos, Cantlie adopts a critical position toward Western foreign policy, including military actions, political statements, and media coverage. Cantlie is particularly critical of US and British hostage policy, comparing it unfavourably to the policy of other European countries that negotiate and pay for the release of hostages.

Cantlie was kidnapped in Syria with James Foley in November 2012. He had previously been kidnapped in Syria alongside Dutch photographer Jeroen Oerlemans in July 2012 but was rescued a week later. In July 2017, reports surfaced in Iraqi media claiming Cantlie had been killed in an airstrike sometime during the battle of Mosul. In October 2017, a French ISIS fighter told French magazine Paris Match that he had seen Cantlie “seven or eight months ago” in Raqqa. In January 2019, an official of the Syrian Democratic Forces stated Cantlie may still be alive inside Deir ez-Zor Governorate, Syria.

Cantlie was reportedly kidnapped by fighters while crossing illegally into Syria from Turkey on 19 July 2012, near Bab al-Hawa. Along with Dutch photographer Jeroen Oerlemans, Cantlie was shot whilst trying to escape their captors. In an interview with The Sun newspaper on 26 August 2012, Cantlie said it was "every Englishman's duty to try and escape if captured." In an account in The Sunday Times on 5 August 2012, Cantlie described his experience.

On 26 July 2012, one week after being kidnapped, they were rescued by four members of the Free Syrian Army. The rebels came into the camp shooting their weapons and held at least one jihad fighter at gunpoint while Cantlie and Oerlemans were helped into a waiting vehicle. Both photographers had to be assisted as their feet had been seriously injured when they tried to escape and neither could walk. They had lost all their camera equipment, passports and clothes in the incident, and were smuggled back across the border at a crossing used primarily by Syrian refugees. Both photographers claimed they were about to be handed over to a jihad unit affiliated with al-Qaeda for ransom when they were rescued. They were initially treated by a medic for The New York Times in Antakya before being debriefed by Turkish and then British intelligence.

On 9 October 2012, an individual suspected of being involved in the kidnap was arrested at Heathrow Airport, after arriving on a flight from Egypt.

This was Cantlie's second visit to Syria. In March 2012, he became the first Western photographer to witness first-hand an incursion by government ground troops into a city when T72 heavy tanks rolled into the city of Saraquib in Idlib province and started shelling indiscriminately. In a feature in The Sunday Telegraph published 31 March, Cantlie wrote: "Then the tanks opened fire. Fist-sized pieces of shrapnel sliced through the air, decapitating one rebel immediately. His rifle clattered to the ground as his friends dragged his headless torso from the line of fire." To illustrate what the Syrian rebels were up against, Cantlie took a photograph looking down the barrel of an advancing T-72.

Cantlie had not appeared in western print or on social media since late 2012, and the trial of one of his alleged captors collapsed in 2013, when he could not be summoned as a witness. In September 2014, it was revealed Cantlie had been abducted a second time, along with American journalist James Foley. Their taxi driver and Foley's translator were not taken, however. They had reportedly been working together on a film about Cantlie’s first abduction. Foley was beheaded in August 2014.

Cantlie started his journalistic career in the early 1990s as a tester for Sega video-games.

John Henry Cantlie (born 1970) is a British war photographer and correspondent.

John Henry Cantlie is the great grandson of Sir James Cantlie, a doctor who co-founded the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese in 1887 (later the University of Hong Kong). In 1896, he was instrumental in the protection of the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen who might otherwise have been executed by the Qing dynasty secret service. His grandfather, Colonel Kenneth Cantlie, designed the China Railways KF locomotive, at 260 tons the largest locomotive of post-war China that remained in service until 1972.