ISIS defector says group plotted to send terrorists into the US through border with Mexico
An ISIS defector has claimed that the terror group plotted an attack on the U.S. by sending operatives from Syria through the southern border with Mexico.
The astonishing revelation was shared in a report by researchers for the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE), who interviewed the former ISIS fighter on May 12.
Going by the pseudonym ‘Abu Henricki al Canadi’, the Canadian fighter with dual Trinidadian citizenship spoke to the researchers while in custody of a militia in Rojava, Syria.
At the end of the lengthy interview, as the researchers were about to leave, Abu Henricki opened up about a sickening ISIS plot he said he was recruited for in 2016, after traveling to Syria to join the group.
Abu Henricki said that he and other Trinidadian citizens were recruited to infiltrate the U.S. through the southern border with Mexico.
He said that the mastermind of the plot was an individual in New Jersey, but that he wasn’t certain of the targets, and refused to participate in the plan.
‘What they wanted to do, basically is they wanted to do financial attacks. Financial attacks to cripple the [U.S.] economy,’ Abu Henricki explained.
‘Apparently, they have the contacts or whatever papers they can get to a false ID, false passports,’ he said. ‘They have their system of doing it. So that’s maybe the way that I could have gone out with other individuals. It wasn’t me alone.’
‘That information, the plan came from someone from the New Jersey state from America. I was going to take a boat into Mexico. He was going to smuggle me in,’ Abu Henricki said.
‘I don’t know where I’d end up. Please be advised, I was not willing to do it. But this is one of their wicked, one of the plans that they had, and which I would like to think I foiled the plan by not being part of it,’ he said.
Abu Henricki said that when he refused to participate in the plot, he was imprisoned and tortured by ISIS.
Earlier in the interview, he had told of how ISIS had imprisoned him and his Canadian wife in late 2016 and early 2017, but had been vague about the reason.
The former ISIS fighter also shocked the interviewers by claiming he had met ISIS fighters in Syria who were American citizens.
‘There was a Bengali American. Abu Adam,’ he said, trying to recall the names of the American fighters.
‘Two cousins. They were from New York. One was American, but Turkish—Abu Ilias. He was from Texas,’ he continued.
ISIS has been decimated in Syria, but there remain fears that remnants of the group will launch revenge attacks on Western countries.
The ICSVE researchers say that one tactic is for the group to declare certain foreign fighters dead, allowing them to slip back into their home countries under assumed identities.
The revelation comes amid a massive influx of illegal crossings into the U.S through the southern border.
Last month, apprehensions of illegal migrants on the southern border exceeded 140,000, the highest in 13 years.
The Trump administration has claimed that the influx represents a national security crisis, in part due to the threat of foreign terrorists slipping through the border amid the chaos.
Democrats have sneered at those claims and insisted that the situation at the border is not a security crisis or emergency.
‘Whatever one thinks of President Donald Trump’s heightened rhetoric about the U.S.- Mexico border and his many claims that it is vulnerable to terrorists, ISIS apparently also thought so,’ the ICSVE researchers wrote.
The researchers cautioned that their report was ‘not published here as a warning bulletin for an imminent attack against our country, nor is it a fear mongering attempt to suggest that a wave of ISIS terrorists are waiting to cross our southern border, but a reminder to diligently consider leads and sources that confirm terrorists’ intentions to exploit one of the weakest links in our national security—our borders.’
Source: Daily Mail
