True or false: Federal agents have caught terrorists on the southern frontier.
True!
Meet nine of them:
• Abdullah Omar Fidse walked across a bridge over the Rio Grande, from Reynosa, Mexico, to Hidalgo, Texas, in June 2008. He requested asylum, claiming to be a Somali refugee. While in custody for years as officials weighed his case, Fidse told another detainee that he supported al-Qaeda and al-Shabab. His cellphone memory card included the telephone number of Mohamed Suleiman, subsequently arrested for aiding a 2010 al-Shabab suicide-bomb attack in Uganda, which killed 70 soccer fans.
Fidse eventually admitted to an undercover informant: “We are terrorists.” As the Center for Immigration Studies’ Todd Bensman reports, Fidse “believed all good Muslims must commit two acts of jihad a year.”
U.S. officials scotched Fidse’s asylum claim, prosecuted him for lying to federal agents, and sent him to prison for eight years.
Trending:
• Anthony Joseph Tracy (a.k.a. Yusuf Noor) was convicted in June 2010 of conspiring to smuggle aliens into America. Tracy told federal investigators that Cuban diplomats used his travel agency in Nairobi, Kenya — Noor Services Ltd. — to transfer 272 Somalis from Kenya to Dubai to Moscow and then to Havana. From there, they traveled to Belize, transited Mexico, and then trespassed into America. One U.S. prosecutor complained that officials had “no idea who these individuals are that he assisted.” Tracy pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to smuggle non-citizens into the U.S.
Tracy, an American citizen who became a Muslim in prison in the 1990s, denied that he helped al-Shabaab. But officials discovered an e-mail in which he casually wrote: “i helped a lot of Somalis and most are good but there are some who are bad and i leave them to ALLAH…”
• Said Jaziri was in a car trunk trying to enter the U.S. near San Diego when federal officers discovered him on January 11, 2011. Said said that he had traveled from his native Tunisia to Tijuana. He then paid coyotes $5,000 to whisk him north across the southern frontier. France previously convicted and deported Jaziri for assaulting a Muslim whom Said found insufficiently devout. In 2006, Jaziri advocated killing Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard for creating what Jaziri considered blasphemous drawings of the Prophet Mohammed.
• Four unidentified male members of the Kurdish Workers’ Party were arrested by Border Patrol agents in 2014. Washington has designated KWP as a terrorist group. Each of these men reportedly paid $8,000 to be trafficked from Istanbul to Paris to Mexico City and then on to America’s southern perimeter.
• Mukhtar Ahmad and Muhammad Azeem of Gujarat, Pakistan, were caught by Border Patrol agents just north of Tijuana in September 2015. The WashingtonTimes reported that databases tied Ahmad to a suspected or confirmed terrorist. An unnamed foreign intelligence agency warned U.S. officials about Azeem as he headed towards this country. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, “both migrants were on U.S. terrorism watch lists.”
• Sharafat Ali Khan, a Brazil-based Pakistani human smuggler was convicted in the U.S. in 2017 of sneaking between 25 and 99 illegals from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan into the U.S. They traveled on foot from Brazil, through Latin America, before penetrating Texas and California. Khan’s clients included, the Washington Times reported, an Afghan “who authorities said was involved in a plot to conduct an attack in the U.S. or Canada and had family ties to members of the Taliban.”
Remember: Everyone mentioned here got caught. How many others successfully penetrated America? Where are they? What’s up their sleeves? Nobody knows.
The borderphobic Left laughs this off as “only” nine terrorists. (Space constraints prevent discussion of at least three others; additional cases likely are classified.) But remember: “Only” one Islamic extremist in a truck murdered eight and injured 12 more on Manhattan’s West Side Highway in October 2017. Why let even one terrorist breach the border and leave his own bloody mark?
Courtesy of The Schpiel
Deroy Murdock is a contributor to The Schpiel.
