MINNEAPOLIS—A Minnesota man who once fought for the ISIS terrorist group in Syria but now expresses remorse for joining a “death cult” and has been cooperating with federal authorities will have to wait to learn how much prison time he faces after his sentencing hearing set for Wednesday was canceled.
Federal prosecutors have recommended 12 years for Abelhamid Al-Madioum in recognition both of the seriousness of his crime and the help has he given the U.S. and other governments. His attorney says that seven years is enough and that Mr. Al-Madioum, 27, stopped believing in the group’s extremist ideology years ago.
A court notice posted online just over two hours before the hearing was to begin said it would be rescheduled for a date to be determined. The notice did not give a reason for the cancellation.
Mr. Al-Madioum was 18 in 2014 when ISIS recruited him. The college student slipped away from his family on a visit to their native Morocco in 2015. Making his way to Syria, he became a soldier for ISIS, until he was maimed in an explosion in Iraq. Unable to fight, he used his computer skills to serve the group. He surrendered to U.S.-backed rebels in 2019 and was imprisoned under harsh conditions.
Mr. Al-Madioum returned to the United States in 2020 and pleaded guilty in 2021 to providing material support to a designated terrorist organization. According to court filings, he has been cooperating with U.S. authorities and allied governments. The defense says he hopes to work in future counterterrorism and deradicalization efforts.
“The person who left was young, ignorant, and misguided,” Mr. Al-Madioum said in a letter to U.S. District Judge Ann Montgomery, who will sentence him.
“I’ve been changed by life experience: by the treachery I endured as a member of ISIS, by becoming a father of four, a husband, an amputee, a prisoner of war, a malnourished supplicant, by seeing the pain and anguish and gnashing of teeth that terrorism causes, the humiliation, the tears, the shame,” he added. “I joined a death cult, and it was the biggest mistake of my life.”
Prosecutors acknowledge that Mr. Al-Madioum has provided useful assistance to U.S. authorities in several national security investigations and prosecutions, and that he accepted responsibility for his crime and pleaded guilty promptly on his return to the United States. But they say they factored his cooperation into their recommended sentence of 12 years instead of the statutory maximum of 20 years.
“The defendant did much more than harbor extremist beliefs,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo. “He chose violent action by taking up arms for ISIS.”
Mr. Al-Madioum, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was among several Minnesotans suspected of leaving the United States to join ISIS, along with thousands of terrorists from other countries worldwide. Roughly three dozen people are known to have left Minnesota to join terrorist groups in Somalia or Syria. In 2016, nine Minnesota men were sentenced on federal charges of conspiring to join ISIS.
But Mr. Al-Madioum is one of the relatively few Americans who have been brought back to the United States who actually fought for the group. According to a defense sentencing memo, he’s one of 11 adults as of 2023 to be formally repatriated to the United States from the conflict in Syria and Iraq to face charges for terrorist-related crimes and alleged affiliations with ISIS. Others received sentences ranging from four years to life plus 70 years.
Mr. Al-Madioum grew up in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park in a loving and nonreligious family, the defense memo said. He joined ISIS because he wanted to help Muslims he believed were being slaughtered by Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime in that country’s civil war. ISIS recruiters persuaded him “to test his faith and become a real Muslim.”
But he was a fighter for less than two months before he lost his right arm below the elbow in the explosion that also left him with two badly broken legs and other severe injuries. He may still require amputation of one leg, the defense says.
While recuperating in 2016, he met his first wife, Fatima, an ISIS widow who already had a son and bore him another in 2017. They lived in poverty and under constant airstrikes. He was unable to work, and his stipend from ISIS stopped in 2018. They lived in a makeshift tent, the defense says.
He married his second wife, Fozia, in 2018. She also was an ISIS widow and already had a 4-year-old daughter. They had separated by early 2019. He heard later she and their daughter together had died. The first wife also is dead, having been shot in front of Mr. Al-Madioum by either rebel forces or an ISIS terrorist in 2019, the defense says.
The day after that shooting, he walked with his sons and surrendered to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which held him under conditions the defense described as “heinous” for 18 months until the FBI returned him to the United States.
As for Mr. Al-Madioum’s children, the defense memo said that they were eventually found in a Syrian orphanage and that his parents will be their foster parents when they arrive in the United States.
By Steve Karnowski
