Feb. 2 (UPI) — A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced a man in Ohio to a 10-year prison sentence for attempting to join the terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq.
Naser Almadaoji also will be subject to 15 years of supervised release following the prison sentence, the Justice Department confirmed in a statement.
The 23-year-old is an Iraqi-born U.S. citizen and in 2021 pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to foreign terrorist organizations.
Almadaoji bought a plane ticket to Kazakhstan in 2018, but agents with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested him at John Glenn International Airport in Columbus, Ohio, before he could depart.
He later admitted to investigators that he planned to smuggle himself into Afghanistan and join the Islamic State to receive military training, including how to make a car bomb, kidnap priority targets and break into homes. He would then return to the United States with the ultimate goal of starting an armed conflict between the federal government and anti-government militias.
Earlier in 2018, Almadaoji traveled to Jordan and Egypt in an attempt to join an Islamic State affiliate in the Sinai Peninsula. He was not successful and returned to the United States.
Almadaoji later told a man he believed to be an ISIS member that he was interested in assisting with “projects” in the United States and recorded a video of himself wearing a headscarf while pledging allegiance to ISIS.
