Boston jihadi terrorist plot gets top ISIS leader in Syria killed
It was dark and dank early on the morning of June 2, 2015, as a pelting rain slicked the roads and pinged off the windows of a townhouse in the bucolic blue-collar Boston neighborhood of Roslindale. The noise woke Usaamah Abdullah Rahim with a start just before 5 a.m., but he was happy to be awake. It was a good day to die.
He had begun preparing for this day a week earlier with a buying spree on Amazon.com, purchasing three military-style knives, including the one he would tuck into a sheath at his back, a Model SP-6 Fighting Knife with an 8-inch double-edge blade. He also bought a knife-sharpening tool and a messenger bag to hide the blades. Total cost for his weapons of terror: $395.19.
Rahim was 26, a Brookline High School graduate who still lived with his parents in a complex surrounded by meticulously groomed landscaping and patrolled by guards around the clock. Six-foot-two and lanky, he had undergone in recent years a dramatic makeover from the gold chains and backward baseball caps he wore in high school. He now had a beard, shaved his head and face clean, and liked to wear long white robes, even when he wasn’t attending Friday prayers at the Islamic Society of Boston mosque.
When those massive blades arrived, Rahim gleefully shared the news with his nephew, David Wright, a former football player whose 6-foot-8 frame and massive gut could have made him a standout lineman. Except, his coach says, Wright took the “easy way out most of the time.” He graduated from high school, barely, and got a job, briefly, at Home Depot, but filed a discrimination complaint on his first day, claiming his manager was offended when he wouldn’t return her handshake (“Due to my religious beliefs [Muslim], I told her I could not shake it”).
He was fired months later and said it was because of his religion. The state threw out the complaint, but that didn’t stop Wright from bragging about the big settlement he was going to get—cash, he told his jihadi compatriots, including an FBI informant, that would help fund attacks.
Wright and his cell of bumbling attackers had been recruited by Junaid Hussain, the notorious propagandist for the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), who urged them and other young Americans to get off their mom’s couch and join the jihad by launching attacks in the U.S. He was so good at seducing losers like Wright that he climbed to No. 3 on the Pentagon’s secret ISIS kill list, but for all the computer savvy Hussain exhibited, his sloppy communications with Rahim did him in. A little more than two months after Rahim got out of bed that wet morning determined to slaughter infidels, Hussain got a bomb dropped on his head by a drone steered from Nevada.
Hussain’s correspondence with Rahim offers a rare insight into how ISIS is trying to bolster its dwindling ranks with the unemployed and disillusioned in the West, using the internet and encrypted apps in a macabre version of online dating—ISIS recruiters stroke the would-be egos of wannabe jihadis and convince them that a martyr’s death is far better than spending yet another night in their parents’ basement. Now that ISIS has been routed on the battlefield, terrorism experts predict there will be more and more lone wolf attacks in the West.
Source: Newsweek
