Chicago Man Sentenced To 25 Years For Conspiring With ISIS

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

Ashraf Al Safoo from Chicago has been sentenced to 25 years in federal prison for conspiring to provide material support to ISIS, which involved recruiting members into the terror group and encouraging attacks on its enemies.

Al Safoo, 41, was a leader of online organization Khattab Media Foundation, which pledged allegiance to ISIS, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in an April 17 press release. The foundation created and spread threats and ISIS propaganda online, with Al Safoo and other members posting pro-ISIS articles, videos, infographics, and essays in coordination with the terrorist outfit.

Most of the propaganda spread by Khattab promoted violent jihad on behalf of ISIS.

The organization’s posts celebrated mass shootings and terror attacks in the United States and encouraged people to engage in “lone wolf” attacks in Western nations.

In one post, Al Safoo asked Khattab members to “cause confusion and spread terror within the hearts of those who disbelieved,” according to the DOJ press release.

In another post, 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.”

Al Safoo immigrated to the United States in 2008 and was naturalized in 2013. In 2018, he was arrested and has since been in federal custody.

A bench trial was conducted last year, after which U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey found Al Safoo guilty of various charges.

On April 16, Blakey imposed a 25-year prison term for Al Safoo, followed by 10 years of court-supervised release.

The State Department designated ISIS’s predecessor group, al-Qaeda in Iraq, as a foreign terrorist organization in December 2004 under the George W. Bush administration. When ISIS was formed in 2013, the designation carried over.

Over the past several months, multiple individuals have been detained for their support of ISIS.

In December 2025, a Texas man alleged to be an ISIS sympathizer was charged with an international terrorism offense. The man allegedly provided funding and bomb making equipment to people he believed were acting on behalf of ISIS.

Earlier in November, a dual American Albanian national was arrested and charged in New York for allegedly providing support to ISIS and distributing instructions for homemade bombs.

During a testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security on Dec. 11, Michael Glasheen, operations director at the FBI, highlighted how ISIS continues to pose a threat to American interests, both domestically and abroad.

The terror outfit is able to “direct, enable, and inspire attacks through their successful use of social media and messaging applications to attract individuals. ISIS seeks direct confrontation with the United States, and almost certainly would exploit any opportunity to attack the U.S. or Western interests,” Glasheen said.

Like other foreign terrorist organizations, he said, “ISIS advocates for lone-offender attacks in the U.S. and Western countries via videos and other English-language propaganda that have specifically advocated for attacks against civilians, the military, law enforcement, and intelligence community personnel.”

The 2025 Worldwide Threat Assessment report from the Defense Intelligence Agency said that ISIS and al-Qaeda have implemented a decentralized plotting approach toward Western nations.

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Both groups are referencing Israel’s operations in Gaza to generate revenue, hire new members, and inspire attacks against U.S., Jewish, Israeli, and European interests internationally.

“The groups are also seeking to improve their weapons capabilities, including with commercial technologies such as UAVs and artificial intelligence,” the report said, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles.

In December, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said it had initiated Operation Hawkeye Strike in Syria following an attack that killed two Army soldiers and a civilian interpreter.

CENTCOM said in a Feb. 14 update that since the launch of Operation Hawkeye Strike, “more than 50 ISIS terrorists have been killed or captured and over 100 ISIS infrastructure targets have been struck with hundreds of precision munitions during two months of targeted operations.”