By the time of the video’s release, the U.S. Department of Justice was already knee-deep in the prosecution of several domestic Islamic State supporters who allegedly assisted Hoxha in his travel to join the group. One of these individuals, David Daoud Wright, was sentenced in December 2017 to 28 years in federal prison, after being convicted of providing material support to ISIS and conspiring to murder U.S. citizens. As a result of evidence introduced at Wright’s trial, a number of details about Hoxha, his connections to Wright and his co-conspirators, and his role in ISIS quietly became available.

At the time of the video’s filming, Hoxha was about 25 years old. Records of his travel from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, filed as court exhibits, show him departing the States for Istanbul, Turkey, on April 6, 2015. He arrived in ISIS-held territory in Syria shortly thereafter. According to its sentencing memorandum in the Wright case, U.S. law enforcement now assesses that Hoxha “has become an ISIS senior commander,” but the filing provides no further details as to his role or current whereabouts. However, the May 2017 video puts him in northwestern Iraq.

This is so far the only instance in which the U.S. government has confirmed the name (and American citizenship) of an ISIS member who appears in one of the group’s media products. While a number of Americans have appeared in terrorist propaganda videos over the years, law enforcement rarely comments on their identity. Moreover, the government does not often publicly release its assessments of American ISIS members’ role or rank. Hoxha’s apparent status in the group places him in an elite category of its American members who have risen to some level of leadership. Most American ISIS supporters never made it to Syria. In the past three years, more than 50 were arrested while attempting to the make the journey. Still others were charged for activities ranging from raising money for the group to planning attacks.

Following the Wright trial, we made repeated attempts to gain more information on Hoxha from official channels. A representative from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts declined to comment, as did the FBI’s national office. Matthew Reilly, spokesperson for the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office stated, “No defendant by that name has been charged in the district of New Jersey.”

Unofficially, intelligence sources confirmed a rumor we had quietly chased for months. In October 2015, a video was released by the Islamic State of a purported American brutally beheading a Kurdish peshmerga soldier. The 15-minute video, shot from multiple camera angles, features four individuals dressed in black and standing behind captured Kurdish soldiers. Its subject speaks with the same accent and inflection as Hoxha in the May 2017 release. Multiple law-enforcement officials told us that the individual who says he is “delivering a message to Obama” and then commits the first execution is Hoxha. If officially confirmed, it would be the first case of an American ISIS member beheading someone in a propaganda video.