Homeland Insecurity: It’s disturbing enough that hundreds of Americans are fighting alongside the Islamic State, but now we learn that the terror group’s top recruiter is an American from Boston.
ABC News reports that the FBI suspects Bostonian Ahmad Abousamra of running the Islamic State media wing responsible for promoting the group’s beheadings and other atrocities through slick videos on the Internet. The brutally effective English-language media attract hundreds of Western jihadists.
The case of 32-year-old Abousamra, the college-educated son of a top Boston doctor, drives home the growing danger of homegrown terrorism.
By all appearances, Abousamra was no threat. He grew up in an affluent Boston suburb and went to private schools. He reportedly graduated with honors from the University of Massachusetts at Boston with a computer engineering degree before working for a telecommunications firm.
All the while, though, the privileged Muslim harbored deep-seated hatred for his fellow Americans, at least the nonbelieving ones.
The FBI says that Abousamra, who has a $50,000 bounty on his head, was inspired by the 9/11 terror attack and in fact “celebrated it.”
Radicalized in local mosques and on jihad websites, he traveled to Pakistan and Yemen to train to kill Americans. He justified murdering civilians because, under Islamic doctrine, he believed, they are legitimate targets of jihad. After all, their taxes support the government and they are “kaffir,” or non-believers.
An FBI indictment says he even plotted to randomly gun down shoppers in a Boston mall. But when he couldn’t obtain the automatic weapons for the attack, he moved to Syria to enter Iraq and kill U.S. soldiers.
Abousamra combined his hatred and his computer skills for our enemy. The FBI thinks he now operates out of Aleppo, Syria — Islamic State headquarters.
That a leader in this barbarically violent group could spring up from our own Muslim community underscores the need for homeland security to get serious about the threat lurking in our own backyard.
Some 300 Americans already are suspected of fighting for the Islamic State overseas. Three Americans have died fighting for the group. Several other American Muslims have been arrested trying to join up with their bloodthirsty “brothers,” who could reenter the U.S. with bomb-making skills and carry out suicide attacks.
President Obama says the Islamic State’s barbaric and horrific acts have stiffened his resolve to “take the fight against these terrorists.” But the fight must start here.