HASAKA, Syria — More than six years after he was abducted in Syria by the Islamic State, John Cantlie, a British journalist, is believed to be still alive, a British government official said on Tuesday.

Mr. Cantlie has been seen in several propaganda videos made by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, but the last one was released more than two years ago. On Tuesday, Ben Wallace, Britain’s minister for security, told journalists at a Home Office briefing that Mr. Cantlie was thought to be alive, though he did not disclose how the government might have knowledge of his condition.

Mr. Cantlie, a freelance photographer, was taken hostage along with the American journalist James Foley, who filed for GlobalPost and Agence France-Presse. They were abducted in November 2012 from Mr. Cantlie’s car on a road 25 miles from the Turkish border.

The Islamic State held Mr. Cantlie in a series of locations before moving him to a prison next to an oil installation near the Syrian city of Raqqa, where he became one of 23 Western captives held at the site.

A majority of the Europeans, including French and Spanish citizens, were released for multimillion-euro ransoms paid by their governments. But Britain and the United States are among the few countries that hew to a strict policy of not paying for hostages, partly to avoid financing terrorist groups.

When it became clear that neither country would pay for its citizens, the militants began killing them, starting with Mr. Foley, who was beheaded with a knife in 2014, a killing shown in a gruesome video released by the Islamic State.

In total, three Americans and three Britons were killed the same way, and recordings of their deaths sent shock waves around the world and pushed the Obama administration to intervene in a conflict it had tried to avoid.

Mr. Cantlie escaped that fate, and instead he was used — presumably under duress — in Islamic State propaganda videos, releasing a “lecture series” in which he criticizes the Western response to the group.

In one, he is seen in an orange jumpsuit, discussing the fates of his cellmates. In others, he is wearing civilian clothes and is presented as a war correspondent holding a microphone, but he appears increasingly gaunt and pale, suggesting mistreatment.

He was last seen in video recorded during the battle to liberate the Iraqi city of Mosul from Islamic State control in December 2016. At the scene of an attack in which the militants had wiped out a group of Iraqi soldiers in armored vehicles, Mr. Cantlie was shown walking through the carnage, at one point making fun of the dead.

“This used to belong to an Iraqi soldier,” he remarked as he passed a helmet lying on the ground. “I don’t think he’s going to be needing it now, huh?”

But since then, there has been no sighting of him and many believed him to be dead.

The Islamic State, which at its height controlled large parts of Iraq and Syria, is pinned down in a 1.5-mile-wide outpost in the village of Baghuz, in a bend in the Euphrates River in northeastern Syria.

Officials with an American-backed, Kurdish-led militia fighting to capture that stronghold said on Tuesday that they did not know if Mr. Cantlie was alive, but they confirmed that the Islamic State was holding numerous other hostages, including dozens of the militia’s own soldiers.

That has meant that the operation to take the area has stalled, as military commanders struggle with how to move forward without endangering the lives of either the hostages or the civilians trapped inside that pocket.

The continued captivity of hostages like Mr. Cantlie, and the continued resistance met by opposing forces, show that the Islamic State still has a corps of active fighters in the region. In announcing a decision to withdraw American forces from Syria, President Trump suggested in December that the group had been defeated, though he and other officials later qualified that assertion and delayed the pullout.

British officials have said that, out of about 900 British citizens thought to have traveled to the conflict zone in Syria, presumably to join the Islamic State, about 20 percent died there, around 40 percent returned and the rest are still there.

Western analysts say that as many as 30,000 former Islamic State militants have not been killed or captured, and that many of them are still in the region, having gone into hiding or, by all appearances, returned to civilian life. A crucial, unanswered question for the region’s security is what they would do if the group made a comeback.

At the briefing on Tuesday, Mr. Wallace, the British security minister, said fighters for the group were continuing to seek havens in Libya, Somalia, and sub-Saharan Africa.

The group was “massively downgraded,” he said, but “had not gone away.”

Rukmini Callimachi reported from Hasaka, Syria. David Kirkpatrick and Richard Pérez-Peña reported from London.

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