Sotloff was in Qatar and[citation needed] wrote a letter of application dated May 29, 2010, to the Arabic for Non Native Speakers (ANNS) faculty at Qatar University.[19] He later traveled around the region with a Yemeni mobile number. His career began during the Arab Spring.[20] Sotloff had worked for the news magazine Time, as well as Christian Science Monitor,[21] The National Interest, Media Line,[5] World Affairs,[22] and Foreign Policy, and has appeared on CNN and Fox News.[9] His work has taken him to Syria a number of times, as well as taking him to Egypt, Turkey, Libya, and Bahrain.[23]

In 2012 he reported in Time magazine, about Al-Qaeda fighters and commanders from Libya flocking to Syria, and shipping Libyan captured arms and ammunition on its way to join the fight to topple Bashar al-Assad‘s regime.[24][25] He was also was in a reporter team that returned to the compound in Benghazi where the US ambassador and 3 other Americans had been killed on the night of 9/11 that year. He interviewed Libyan security guards who were at the site during the attack.[24][26][27] Fox News reported accordingly aided by an animation, that black Islamist flags were seen and foreign words heard, concluding that the claims by ‚Nusrat Al-Sharia‘ – affiliated with Al-Qaeda, were in fact correct.[28] He named a Libyan militia operative, Ahmad Abu Khattallah, as the head of the Al Qaeda affiliated group (Nusrat al-Sharia) that attacked the US compound and as the man who himself masterminded and lead the attack.[29] He later reported on a tit for tat retaliation pattern following the US attacks on those that committed the attack on the ambassador‘s compound in Benghazi. A week before entering Libya, he had written from Turkey about the Alawites – believers of Assad‘s religion, and their support for Assad in Turkey, while another article written on the same day, told about Alawites inside Syria who were against Assad.[30]