Former National Guardsman Arrested for Plotting ISIS Attack

26 year old Mohamed Jalloh of Sterling, Virginia, was arrested on July 3rd and arraigned in court on Wednesday for plotting a terrorist attack. The Sierra Leone national who became a naturalized US citizen after joining the National Guard in 2009, was ordered by the court to be held without bail until a detention hearing next week.

Jalloh was ensnared by an informant working for the FBI during a three month sting operation. According to the informant, Jalloh quit the National Guard in 2015 after listening to lectures by Anwar al-Awlaki. He traveled to Africa for six months where he met up with a member of ISIS. That ISIS fighter put him in contact with the informant. Over the next few months he expressed interest in carrying out an attack similar to the 2009 Fort Hood shooting.

After promising an ISIS representative that he would carry out an attack during Ramadan, Jalloh traveled to a North Carolina gun store accompanied by an as yet unnamed person, and tried to buy an AR-15. However, he failed to buy the gun because he didn’t have the proper paperwork. He tried again at a different gun store in Virginia, and successfully bought a rifle that unbeknownst to him, was disabled. He was arrested the next day.

There is of course, one question that remains. The FBI is notorious for using informants to radicalize people who were previously nonthreatening, and then arresting them before they can carry out their attacks. They routinely ensnare people who are either mentally ill or suffering from low IQs; people who never posed a real threat until the FBI got in contact with them. Would Jalloh have ever come this close to carrying out an attack without the help of the FBI?