Barfi credited "sources on the ground" for providing the information, including details of the capture.
"Somebody at the border crossing made a phone call to ISIS and they set up a fake checkpoint with many people and Steven and his people that he went in with could not escape," he said.
Barfi says he was with Sotloff the morning he was kidnapped. Sotloff left for Syria around 7:30 a.m., and called him when he made it inside Syria. A few minutes later he was kidnapped.
Meanwhile, a journalist named Julian Reichert, who was reporting for the German paper BILD at the time, has written this article on the Sotloff kidnapping. He says he was just a few minutes from where Sotloff was kidnapped, doing a story.
We all knew that on the crossing in the Turkish town of Kilis, there were spotters working for ISIS, watching us while we stamped out of Turkey and headed into Syria. We all knew that on the other side, in the town of Azaz, ISIS had established a dangerous presence, roaming the streets in pickup trucks, watching all the strategic intersections one had to pass to drive on to besieged Aleppo.
...The drive through Azaz was nerve-wracking, rife with potential kidnappers — some motivated by money, others by ideology — waiting behind every corner of that sleepy, filthy town...This was where hardened jihadis came to gather, from all over the world. Battle-worn Jordanians who had fought the Americans in Iraq, Chechens with bushy red beards and AKs at the ready. That was what Steven Sotloff stepped into on that day in August. From what I know, he must not have made it past Azaz.
Reichert said his "fixer" was frantic all day after hearing of a kidnapping of a journalist at the border and wanted to leave, but he convinced him to let him do one more story in a nearby town and they stayed another day. He describes the protection the fixer arranged (through the Free Syrian Army (FSA)):
Walking through Minnagh, I was surrounded by three pickup trucks with mounted anti-aircraft guns and a dozen fighters forming a bubble around me. Journalists like Steven and me had been relying on people like this throughout the Syrian uprising: decent, hospitable locals fighting the regime to create a better Syria.
Reichert says the Syrian moderates and ISIS had an "shaky alliance" in Minnagh.
Putting the two stories together, it seems to me Barfi, although he doesn't name the moderate group, is referring to the Free Syrian Army -- the moderates Obama now wants to provide arms and training to in the fight against ISIS -- as the ones who sold him to ISIS. In other words, they are still capable of aligning with ISIS when it suits their needs.