Feds Take Down NYC Man Allegedly Trying to Join ISIS

Federal agents busted into 22-year-old U.S. citizen Ali Saleh’s home in Queens on Thursday morning and arrested him for providing “material support” to ISIS, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn (where Saleh will be tried).

The “material support” being, in this case, Saleh himself — as he was allegedly trying to fly to Syria and offer himself up as personnel for ISIS.

In a thick complaint and affidavit from the FBI special agent in charge of busting Saleh (embedded below), the feds detail Saleh’s Twitter activity over the past year, which serves as the bulk of their evidence against him.

His alleged retweets included “I’m ready to die for the Caliphate, prison is nothing” and “Let’s be clear that Muslims in the [Caliphate] need help, the one who is capable to go over and help the Muslims must go and help.”

Twitter also handed over direct-message conversations between Saleh and an “unidentified coconspirator” to the feds. In these messages, printed word-for-word in the complaint below, Saleh says that his dream is to join ISIS in Syria but that it might be easier for him to represent ISIS in Yemen, his home country.

(The Twitter accounts associated with Saleh have since been taken down, but traces of them on the web show he would argue with other Twitter users about the legitimacy of ISIS and post pro-ISIS, and some anti-Semitic, images.)

What really drove the U.S. Department of Justice’s case against Saleh home, though, was his persistence in trying to find an airline that would take him to the Middle East.

Saleh allegedly made multiple attempts to travel to Syria by way of Ukraine, Egypt, Turkey, Qatar — even Canada. However, the suspect was questioned for hours by law enforcement at each airport and train station where he tried to buy tickets, and was never given the go-ahead to leave the country.

“The persistence of Saleh in his alleged attempts to travel overseas in order to ‘die for the Caliphate,’ did not match the dedication of New York’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) to work quickly to identify and interrupt this threat,” FBI Assistant Director in Charge Diego Rodriguez said in a statement.