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31 Suspected ISIS Terrorists Have Been Arrested In The U.S. In The Past Year

REUTERS/Stringer

Alex Pfeiffer White House Correspondent
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In the past year 31 suspected ISIS terrorists have been arrested by American law enforcement, and three attacks have taken the lives of 63 people and wounded an additional 81 civilians.

The suspected terrorists have been arrested for crimes ranging from planing to travel overseas to join ISIS fighters to soliciting the killing of American soldiers. Those arrested range from a 15 year old too young to be named to a former Army National Guardsman.

The arrests almost all share one thing in common: the involvement of a FBI confidential informant. For example, former National Guard member Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, 26, was in contact with a confidential informant for months prior to his July arrest. Jalloh praised the perpetrator of the Chattanooga, TN attack to the informant and sought to carry out his own.

When Jalloh thought he was sending money over to an ISIS contact he was in fact giving to an undercover FBI agent. Jalloh travelled to Virginia to buy a gun but was denied due to a lack of proper identification. When he subsequently returned with the right IDs he bought a rifle that was rendered inoperable and Jalloh was arrested the next day.

There isn’t immigration status information available for all the terrorists. Abdirizak Mohamed Warsame was described as a Minnesota man in a Department of Justice press release. Though the criminal complaint for Warsame describes him as “Somali-American” and includes transcripts of him speaking Somali.

Warsame was planning to travel to Syria to join ISIS, or go to east Africa with his family and join Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab with hopes they would pledge allegiance to ISIS.

The terrorist attacks perpetrated by ISIS members in the past year have been the San Bernardino shooting, a stabbing attack at a California university, and the Orlando shooting. The terrorists in all those incidents ended up deceased.

Suspected terrorist members of other organizations such as Al-Qaeda were also arrested in the past year, but the vast majority have been ISIS supporters.

Tags : isis
Alex Pfeiffer