A solider in the Army National Guard pleaded guilty on Monday to attempting to support Islamic extremists in the Middle East, in what officials described as part of a broader plot including a planned attack in the United States.
According to federal charges, 23-year-old Hasan Edmonds took steps to travel to the Middle East and join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in March of this year. He had reportedly been under watch since 2014, when officials feared he had made plans to use his training to fight on behalf of the group.
Edmonds’s cousin, Jonas Edmonds, had allegedly planned to use Hasan’s National Guard uniforms as a disguise to carry out an attack at the National Guard base in Joliet, Ill., where Hasan had trained.
{mosads}“They admitted planning to wage violence on behalf of ISIL in the Middle East and to conduct an attack on our soil,” John Carlin, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement announcing the plea, using an alternative acronym for ISIS. “Thanks to the efforts of many prosecutors, agents and analysts, we were able to ensure these plotters did not attain their violent endgames, and with these guilty pleas, they will be held accountable.
“Counterterrorism remains the department’s highest priority, and we will continue use all available tools to combat ISIL, a foreign terrorist organization that rapes, murders and enslaves Muslims and non-Muslims alike.”
Hasan was arrested at the airport before he could leave the U.S. on March 25, and Jonas was arrested at his home shortly afterward.
On Monday, Edmonds pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to provide material support to ISIS and one count of attempting to provide it with material support.
Jonas pleaded guilty to similar charges last week.
Federal law enforcement and intelligence officials have sounded increasingly dire alarms about efforts by ISIS supporters to launch attacks in the U.S. and travel to join the group’s ranks in its self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
Concerns about ISIS’s have only grown following the killing of 130 people in Paris and 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif. on Dec. 2.