An unlikely FBI counterterrorism case now wrapping up in Ohio casts a bright and shining light on a gaping national-security hole at the US southwest border as the greatest mass migration crisis in American history overwhelms its defenses.
The Ohio FBI field office last year busted Iraqi asylum seeker, former al Qaeda fighter Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab, in the midst of orchestrating a credible international plot to assassinate former President George W. Bush in Texas using a remarkable tactic.
A federal judge in Ohio has just accepted Shihab’s guilty plea on charges that he was going to smuggle at least four Iraqi nationals over the southern border for the Bush assassination, court records show.
(Plea deal papers showing all but one charge were dropped indicate that Shihab is cooperating with US intelligence on overseas issues related to his plot.)
Lost in general media disinterest in terrorism cases that don’t involve white supremacists is that this FBI investigation exposed — in rare, multi-colored detail — that serious Islamic terrorist operatives outside the country now see the overwhelmed southern border with Mexico as a breach-able route into America.
Of course they do.
A record-smashing 4.8 million illegal immigrants have crossed since President Biden took office, according to Homeland Security boss Alejandro Mayorkas and other sources, by far the most ever in the time span. At least 1.5 million of those are presumed to have entered the country undetected as “gotaways.”
A former al Qaeda fighter who killed many US soldiers during the early phases of the Iraq war, Shihab himself somehow managed to fly into an America airport with a tourist visa under intelligence radars, in September 2020, before the current mass migration crisis began.
He overstayed the tourist visa, lodged an asylum claim forestalling deportation and began contemplating the border, an arrest warrant affidavit shows.
As border defenses collapsed, Shihab clearly realized that crossing terrorist operatives among the millions had become less risky than the tourist visa overstay method he’d used.
He claimed to undercover FBI informants that he’d successfully smuggled in two Hezbollah operatives across it, the records allege, without elaboration, then turned to replicating that success for the Bush assassination plan.
Shihab reached out to his former terrorist comrades with whom he’d killed Americans in Iraq, a unit once known as “Thunder” in Arabic, and began working with a new unit leader in Qatar.
Thankfully, the FBI introduced informants into Shihab’s circle, records show.
Inside the conspiracy
Plans called for at least four of eight Thunder terrorists to pay $40,000 each for travel into Brazil on fraudulently obtained visas, then up through the notorious Darien Gap jungle smuggling passage between Colombia and Panama.
A record-setting 250,000 immigrants from 150 countries crossed through the gap in 2022, compared with fewer than 10,000 most years in normal times, for perspective.
From Central America, Shihab’s terrorists would meld in unnoticed with the multinational masses moving north to the US-Mexico border, then cross maybe wearing faux Border Patrol uniforms, the informants reported.
As the plot progressed, Shihab actually flew to Texas and conducted surveillance of Bush’s homes in Dallas and a central Texas ranch.
He was figuring out how to provision weapons for the arriving operatives for when they could stalk and kill Bush.
His May 2022 arrest certainly foiled the plot but sounded an important alarm that must be heard as the historic multinational mass migration continues into its third year at ionospheric heights.
What this case demonstrates, beyond the fact that these particular bad guys saw the border as more vulnerable to entry than before the crisis started, is that the rest of the jihadist universe must also see it that way.
They’d be correct.
Flood of migrants
Since Biden’s January 2021 inauguration, a record-breaking 169 illegal immigrants on the FBI terrorism watch list have been caught after their crossings, Customs and Border Protection statistics show.
How many others got through among the 1.5 million “gotaways” who reached the interior and have disappeared is the crucial question at hand.
Shihab undoubtedly hoped his terrorist brothers would be among those gotaways.
So many immigrants are now coming from countries of terrorism concern in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa that a nonprofit saw enough demand for services to open up a shelter in Tijuana last April, just two blocks from the border wall, that caters only to Muslims.
It’s always packed to capacity with Muslim migrants of unknown and unchecked backgrounds who all plan to cross into America one way or another.
When I investigated this facility last fall, I met Russian Chechens, Tajikistanis, Syrians, Uzbeks and Somalis.
The shelter’s director admitted in November that since her grand opening, no one from US intelligence had ever reached out to ask her anything, and neither had the Mexicans.
The American indifference is just one of many pieces of evidence indicating security breakdown.
As I also recently reported, a Lebanese-Venezuelan migrant who swam the Rio Grande from Matamoros to Brownsville, Texas, in early December 2021 was on the FBI terror watch list.
FBI agents who still managed to interview him amid that month’s record crush of humanity, found “substantial derogatory intelligence” on the Venezuelan and counted him as “high-risk” and a “flight risk,” recommending that he remain in custody, records I have show.
Normally, such individuals are deported.
But instead, ICE headquarters ordered the man released for fear that, due to his weight, he might catch COVID.
He remained free last time I checked, pursuing an asylum claim in Detroit.
Another fouled-up case happened on the Mexican side, where the FBI is supposed to closely collaborate.
According to other documents leaked to me, Mexican immigration officials in April 2021 caught a watch-listed Yemeni named Ahmed Mohammed Ahmed just as he was about to cross into Del Rio.
Mexico tried deporting him. But in July 2021, a moment when the border was swamped on both sides, the Yemeni came back.
Rather than deport Ahmed, as I reported, the Mexicans simply let him go to clear out detention centers.
A “Be On the Lookout” went to law enforcement along the US border, which I have. It’s unclear if American law enforcement ever found him.
Worst-case scenario
There’s worse.
In late May, Fox News’ Adam Sabes and Bill Melugin reported that Border Patrol somehow missed that Colombian national Isnardo Garcia-Amado was on the FBI’s terror watch list after they caught him crossing in April near Yuma, Ariz.
In the chaos that month, Border Patrol released the suspected terrorist and gave him a GPS monitoring device as an alternative to detention, a common way now for the agency to process the hundreds of thousands of migrants overwhelming detention centers.
Garcia-Amado was free inside the US for two weeks before ICE arrested him in Pinellas County, Florida on May 6, Fox News reported.
Before the feds wrap up the Shihab case with a final bow and move on, America should pause and see it for what it means as the historic Biden border crisis rages on for at least the next two years.
