Three Michigan residents were arrested Monday afternoon for conspiring to provide material support to ISIS and pledging their allegiance to the terrorist organization, the Department of Justice announced this week.
According to a DOJ press release, Muse Abdikadir Muse, Mohamud Abdikadir Muse, and Mohamed Salat Haji were arrested Monday by members of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Muse Abdikadir Muse was taken into custody at the Gerald R. Ford Airport in Grand Rapids where he was attempting to board a flight to Mogadishu, Somalia with intention of joining ISIS. His two coconspirators drove him to the airport and were arrested shortly after.
MLive reports that undercover investigators began monitoring the three in April 2016 in response to questionable Facebook posts they had made, and began communicating with the ISIS aspirants via social media.
One of the agents posed as an ISIS recruiter, and was told by Muse Abdikadir Muse that he “wanted to join ISIS in Raqqa, Syria,” and that “he planned to die with a gun in his hand fighting for ISIS,” according to a criminal complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Michigan.
The complaint reveals that the three men exchanged numerous Facebook messages with undercover agents over the course of multiple years, and sent the agents videos of themselves pledging their support to ISIS in Arabic.
In one case, two of the men discussed their “desire to join ISIS, to kill non-believers, and even to potentially use a car for a martyrdom operation to run down non-believers here in the United States if they could not travel overseas to fight for ISIS.” Private Facebook conversations between the three were obtained by undercover agents after a search warrant was issued to Facebook.
“Kuffar [Arabic word for non-believers] I want to kill one inshaAllah [Arabic phrase for God willing] one day,” Mohamed Salat Haji said in one conversation. “My days are coming I want a lot of this kuffar dead.”
All three are naturalized U.S. citizens who were born in Kenya, and each faces up to 20 years in federal prison.
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Anthony Gockowski is managing editor of Battleground State News and The Minnesota Sun. Follow Anthony on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Should have let them fly out. Maybe they would have gotten killed overseas. Good riddance to that scum.