July 28, 2015
A Georgia man was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison on Tuesday for attempting to support the Islamic State militant group as the number of individuals charged with ISIS-related offenses, which include traveling abroad to fight for the group or plotting acts of domestic terrorism, has risen sharply in recent months, according to a study by the Center on National Security at Fordham Law.
Leon Nathan Davis III, 38, received the maximum sentence from a U.S. district judge in Savannah, Georgia, after pleading guilty to charges in May, said Jim Durham, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Georgia.
Davis, of Augusta, Georgia, will also be placed on lifetime supervision after his release, Durham said.
Davis was arrested in October 2014 at the Atlanta airport after purchasing a plane ticket to Turkey, with the intention of traveling to Syria to join ISIS, according to court records.
Prosecutors on Tuesday read Davis's online writings in the courtroom, including statements that said he wanted "to kill Zionists" and to bring down Israel and, in his words, "the United Snakes of America," Durham said.
Davis told the judge, "I love my country, and I am an American," Durham said.
Davis had been under investigation by the FBI for a year, officials said. His prosecution comes as the U.S. government ramps up efforts to detain would-be Islamic State fighters.
Since March of last year, 56 individuals have been charged with supporting ISIS in some manner and an additional three have been killed, according to the Fordham study. But 40 of those cases occurred just since February, a period spanning the last five months of the 15-month study.
The study, which was also reported on by nj.com, said that the new group of recruits represented the next wave of post-9/11 terrorism.
“This new terror threat is distinctive largely because of the young age of the accused, the presence of women, the role of social media in their radicalization, and the desire of many of them to travel abroad and serve what they view as the caliphate,” Center on National Security Director Karen Greenberg said in a statement.
“Individuals charged with ISIS-inspired terrorism in the U.S. cannot be profiled,” said Greenberg. “They belong to a wide swath of ethnic backgrounds. … Few are of Middle Eastern Arab descent.”
The cases were divided chiefly into three categories: Individuals who wanted to travel abroad to join ISIS, individuals who wanted to help facilitate logistics or other activities locally and those who wanted to initiate attacks in the United States on behalf of the group. About half of those charged fell into the foreign fighter category, with almost 30 percent looking to attack domestically.
Commonly, American officials stopped people when they were at the airport ready to board a plane - a situation that happened in 16 of the cases, the study said.
Most of the cases are still pending; only a handful of individuals have been sentenced to terms ranging from four to 20 years.
Social media was the key recruitment tool.
“Forty-five of the 56 cases (80 percent) involve communications sympathetic to ISIS or recruiting on behalf of ISIS through social media,” the study said. “At least 18 individuals were confirmed to have been discovered by law enforcement because of their postings on social media sites.”
And similar to the demographic group most comfortable with social media, 61 percent of those who wanted to travel abroad to join ISIS were 21 or younger.
Reuters contributed to this report.
