Suburban Man Charged With Attempting To Join ISIS

By Chuck Sudo in News on Oct 7, 2014 2:20PM

A Bolingbrook man is facing 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine after federal prosecutors charged him with material support to a federal terrorist organization Monday. Mohammed Hamzah Khan, 19, of Bolingbrook, was ordered by U.S. Magistrate Susan Cox to be held pending a detention hearing. Khan was arrested Saturday at O’Hare International Airport with a ticket for an Austrian Airlines flight bound for Istanbul. Federal authorities allege Khan was flying overseas to join the Islamist State, aka ISIS or ISIL.

Agents say they have in their possession journals where Khan planned his trip and a note to his family indicating his displeasure that, as an adult, the taxes he was obligated to pay would be used to fund bombing runs on fellow Muslims, and encouraged his family to join him.

“We are the lions at war,” the letter read, in part. “My nation, the dawn has emerged.”

While federal authorities will no doubt use the evidence they gathered to portray Khan as a zealot, friends and family paint a different picture of a nice, polite individual. Bahauddin Ali Khan, a member of the Bolingbrook mosque Khan’s family attends, told WLS, "He's the last person that we'd think that would happen to.” Steve Moore, a neighbor of the Khans, told the Sun-Times Khan was “soft-spoken.”

The United States doesn’t have specific laws preventing individuals from joining groups like ISIS, but it has used anti-terrorism statutes to charge individuals associated with them. Khan’s arrest follows those of Ahmed Tounisi, who was arrested in April 2013 of attempting to join al-Qaeda offshoot Jabhat al-Nusrah, and Adel Daoud, who was charged with attempting to blow up two downtown Chicago bars in September 2012.