San Bernardino terrorists Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik reportedly had to Google the Islamic State leader’s name before declaring their allegiance to him on Facebook.
“You would think that somebody that truly wanted to do that, somebody that was truly committed, certainly wouldn’t be researching on that particular day,” San Bernardino’s police chief told ABCNews. Malik reportedly declared her allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi on the day of the attack, when she and her husband killed 14 at Farook’s workplace.
Farook and Malik were killed by authorities hours after the attack in a shootout with police. Malik and Farook’s prime motivation seems to have stemmed from anger at Farook’s required attendance at an office Christmas party.
“She had essentially made the statement in an online account that she didn’t think that a Muslim should have to participate in a non-Muslim holiday or event,” San Bernardino’s police chief told ABCNews, describing Farook’s wife and co-terrorist Malik. “That really is one of the very, very few pieces of potential evidence that we have that we can truly point to and say, ‘That probably is a motive in this case.”
The couple’s ignorance is not unique to other Western terrorism cases. Two British jihadis reportedly bought “Islam For Dummies” off Amazon in 2013 before departing for Syria to fight for ISIS.
The Associated Press recently obtained thousands of ISIS intake documents for arriving foreign fighters in 2013 and 2014, which revealed a shocking ignorance of the basic tenants of Islam among ISIS fighters. Seventy percent of foreign fighters reported just a “basic” knowledge of Shariah law upon their arrival to ISIS territory, according to the Monday AP report.
Mohamad Khweis, an American citizen raised in Virginia, turned himself over to Kurdish fighters in Iraq after he realized living under ISIS control was not what he thought it would be.
“It’s not like the Western countries, you know, it’s very strict. There’s no smoking. I found it hard for everyone there,” a stunned Khweis told Kurdistan 24 News Channel upon his capture. “I found it very, very hard to live there.”
Upon Khweis’s return to the U.S., he told his FBI debriefers he “knew ISIL used violence in its expansion of the caliphate, but also stated that ISIL engaged in peaceful and humanitarian efforts.”
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