The Islamic State has killed a young U.S Couple who were on a biking expedition around the world. The young U.S Couple was on a cycling trip around the world to prove there was still some touch of human kindness in the World.
Both U.S citizens, Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, were a married Couple both in their late 20s who had quit their office jobs last year in Washington, DC, to embark on the journey.
Austin had worked for the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development while Geoghegan, worked in the Georgetown University admissions office.
The U.S Couple decided they were wasting their young lives working and decided to quit and travel around the world depending on human kindness in order to prove that human kindness exist and the world wasn’t such a bad place.
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The Couple documented their year long journey on social media, where they shared the openheartedness they wanted to embody and the acts of kindness reciprocated by strangers.
Austin had written in one of his posts,
“You read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place. People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil.
“I don’t buy it, evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own… By and large, humans are kind; Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind, Generous and wonderful and kind.”
The U.S Couple however had their lives taken away from them by the kindness of humans when they got to Tajikistan, a country with a known high Islamic State Presence. The U.S consulate often discourages U.S citizens from going to such violence prone places.
The Couple were riding bikes through Tajikistan when a car rammed into them alongside two other cyclists; one from Switzerland and the other from the Netherlands.
Five men then got out of the car and stabbed the entire party to death before jumping back in the vehicle and running away.
The Islamic State later released a video to state media showing the attack scene and the same men who carried it out sitting in front of a black Islamic State flag.
They vowed to kill as “disbelievers” while looking into the camera and brandishing weapons.