Alexandria Man, Who Joined ISIS, Has Been Sentenced

ALEXANDRIA, VA — An Alexandria man was sentenced on Friday to 20 years in prison on the conviction of joining and supporting ISIS, according to reports.

Mohamad Jamal Khweis, 28, was found guilty of crossing from Turkey into Syria, joining ISIS for two and a half months beginning in December 2015. The guilty verdict came from a federal jury on June 7, WTOP reported.

He was convicted on three counts: both providing and conspiring to provide material support or resources to ISIS, and a firearms count.

Khweis grew up in northern Virginia and is a 2007 graduate of Edison High School in the Alexandria area of Fairfax County. He had worked as a bus driver for the region's Metro system, according to court documents. He left the U.S. in 2015 and was smuggled across the Syrian border by the ISIS. In February, U.S. military forces found his intake form and his name on an ISIS camp roster.

WTOP reported that Khweis is the first American to join ISIS and be captured on the battlefield. He was captured by Kurdish Peshmerga forces in March of 2016 in Tal Afar, Iraq, just months after he joined the terrorist group. See a video taken during his capture here.

Kurdish fighters found his Virginia driver's license on him during the capture. He was taken to a Kurdish prison, and his lawyers said he was willing to return to the U.S., even if he faced criminal charges.

Prosecutors tried to get Khweis sentenced to 35 years for the act, which he told a Kurdish TV station he did because he "wasn't thinking straight," WTOP reported. They added that he traveled to several countries before Turkey as well as using encrypted devices in order to keep hidden from the U.S. intelligence community. The minimum sentence would have been five years.

In a statement, U.S. Attorney Dana J. Boente said “The evidence at trial demonstrated that Mohamad Khweis is an unpredictable and dangerous person who was radicalized towards violent jihad."

He strategically planned his travel to avoid law enforcement suspicion, encrypted his communications, and planned for possible alibis. Khweis knew exactly what he was doing, knew exactly who ISIS was, and was well aware of their thirst for extreme violence," Boente said.

Article image by Defne Karadeniz/Getty Images News/Getty Images: A member of the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) stand guarded in front of a ISIS flag in the border town of Jarablus, August 31, 2016, Syria. Turkish troops and Turkey-backed rebels have been fighting Kurdish-led forces and IS since Turkey's incursion into Syria on Aug. 24, with the swift capture of Jarablus, a town a few km inside Syria that was held by Islamic State.