Three Brooklyn residents have been arrested and charged by federal authorities with attempting to provide material support to ISIS; one of the men was detained at JFK airport while attempting to board a flight to Istanbul. Two of the men, ages 24 and 30, are citizens of Uzbekistan. The other, 19, is a citizen of Kazakhstan. At least from initial accounts, they do not appear to have been extremely sophisticated in their planning; two of them allegedly initiated a plan to travel to Syria (a trip to be at least partly financed by the third) after one of them (Abdurasul Hasanovich Juraboev) had already told federal agents that he supported ISIS and wanted to injure President Obama. From the New York Times:
On Aug. 26, Mr. Juraboev emailed with an administrator of a website affiliated with the Islamic State, asking about how to travel overseas now that he was being monitored.
“If right now I decide to go to the airport and go anywhere, except for Uzbekistan, they may arrest me. It’s because of what I told them about Obama,” he wrote. “What should I do? I need to sneak out of here with extreme caution without being noticed by them.”
Their efforts to avoid detection, of course, were unsuccessful. The 19-year-old who was arrested at JFK, Akhror Saidakhmetov, allegedly told a federal informant at one point that his travel plans had been complicated when his mother, who had become afraid he would do exactly what he is now charged with doing, took his passport.
The men face a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.
