A Chicago man was sentenced yesterday to 25 years in federal prison for conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) by using social media to encourage attacks on ISIS’s enemies and recruit ISIS members.
Ashraf Al Safoo was a leader of Khattab Media Foundation, a sophisticated online organization that swore allegiance to ISIS and created and disseminated threats and ISIS propaganda on social media and other online platforms. Al Safoo and other members of Khattab created and posted pro-ISIS videos, articles, essays, and infographics at the direction of, and in coordination with, ISIS. Much of Khattab’s propaganda promoted violent jihad on behalf of ISIS, which has been designated by the United States government as a foreign terrorist organization. In one posting, Al Safoo encouraged Khattab members to post pro-ISIS information “to cause confusion and spread terror within the hearts of those who disbelieved.” In another posting, Al Safoo wrote, “Work hard, brothers, edit the issue into short clips, take the pictures out of it and publish the efforts of your brothers in the pages of the apostates. Participate in the war, and spread terror, the [Islamic] State does not want you to watch it only, rather, it incites you, and if you are unable to, use it to incite others.”
Many of Khattab’s postings included images of violence, celebrations of terrorist attacks and mass shootings in the United States, and encouragement for “lone wolf” attacks in western countries.
Al Safoo, 41, has been in federal custody since his arrest in Chicago in 2018. Al Safoo immigrated to the U.S. in 2008 and naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2013.
After a bench trial last year in U.S. District Court in Chicago, U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey found Al Safoo guilty of conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, conspiracy to transmit threats in interstate commerce, conspiracy to intentionally access a protected computer without authorization, providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization, and intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorization. Judge Blakey imposed the 25-year prison term during a hearing today in federal court and ordered that it be followed by ten years of court-supervised release.
The sentence was announced by Andrew S. Boutros, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, John A. Eisenberg, Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the Department of Justice, and Douglas S. DePodesta, Special Agent-in-Charge of the Chicago Field Office of the FBI. The government was represented by Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas P. Peabody of the Northern District of Illinois and Trial Attorney Andrew J. Dixon of the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section.