Sahim Alwan

Last updated January 06, 2020

Sahim Alwan is a Yemeni-American who grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York. In 2002, he was arrested and charged as part of the War on Terror together with the other members of the "Lackawanna Six", based on the fact the group of friends had attended an Afghan training camp together years earlier.^[1]

Like the others, although initially entering a plea of "not guilty", he eventually pleaded guilty to "providing material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization". He was convicted and received a 9.5-year sentence.^[2]

Life

Described as the "clean-cut" son of a steelworker, Alwan was noted for always wearing a shirt and tie, every day of his adult life, and studied criminal justice at the local community college.^[1] During the Gulf War, he and a group of friends were assaulted for their ethnicity outside a Lackawanna restaurant.^[1]

In the late 1990s, while working for Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, he cooperated with the FBI to help investigate a fraud case, and asked them about the possibility of working for them as a career.^[1]

A "local success story", he maintained a stable marriage, had three children, and worked with the Iroquois Job Corps Center to help employ indigent and troubled youth.^[1]

At al-Farooq training camp he was discouraged by the fact they were training for offensive wars and wars against fellow Muslims, rather than in defence of Muslim populations.^[1] He announced that he wanted to leave and return home. He met personally with Osama bin Laden, who wanted to convince him to stay and finish his training. Taher, Moseb and Galeb also decided to leave. They were all driven to Quetta, and rather than wait a day for the next plane, took a bus to Karachi so they could leave Pakistan immediately.^[1]

Immediately following the September 11th attacks, Alwan was interviewed as a man on the street by the Buffalo News as he left his mosque, to give his opinion on the attacks. He responded that Islam guaranteed hellfire to anyone who took part in a suicide mission.^[1] He phoned agent Ed Needham at the FBI that night, to promise his full cooperation in the Muslim community if the FBI needed help.^[1]

Related Research Articles

Lackawanna is a city in Erie County, New York, United States just south of the city of Buffalo in the western part of New York state. The population was 18,141 at the 2010 census. It is part of the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metropolitan area. The city of Lackawanna is in the county's southwestern part.

Yahya Goba is a Yemeni-American who grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York. In 2002, he was arrested and charged as part of the War on Terror together with the other members of the "Lackawanna Six", based on the fact that he and a group of friends had attended an Afghan training camp together years earlier.

The Lackawanna Six is a group of six Yemeni-American friends who pled guilty to charges of providing material support to al-Qaeda in December 2003, based on their having attended an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan together in the Spring of 2001. The suspects were facing likely convictions with steeper sentences under the "material support law" which requires no proof that a defendant engaged in terrorism, aided or abetted terrorism, or conspired to commit terrorism.

Shafal Mosed is a Yemeni-American who grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York. In 2002, he was arrested and charged as part of the War on Terror together with the other members of the "Lackawanna Six", based on the fact the group of friends had attended an Afghan training camp together years earlier.

Faysal Galab is a Yemeni-American who grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York. In 2002, he was arrested as part of the War on Terror together with the other members of the "Lackawanna Six", based on the fact the group of friends had attended an Afghan training camp together years earlier. Along with the others he was convicted of "providing support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization", and received a seven-year sentence.

Yaseinn Taher is a Yemeni-American who grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York. In 2002, he was arrested and charged as part of the War on Terror together with the other members of the "Lackawanna Six", based on the fact the group of friends had attended an Afghan training camp together years earlier.

Kamal Derwish was an American citizen killed by the CIA as part of a covert targeted killing mission in Yemen on November 3, 2002. The CIA used an RQ-1 Predator drone to shoot a Hellfire missile, destroying the vehicle in which he was driving with five others.

Iyman Faris is a Pakistani American who served for months as a double agent for the FBI before pleading guilty in May 2003 of providing material support to Al Qaeda. A United States citizen since 1999, he had worked as a truck driver and lived in Columbus, Ohio. As of September 2003, Faris is the "only confessed al Qaeda sleeper caught on U.S. soil."

Ali Al-Tamimi is a former Fairfax County resident, biologist, and Islamic teacher who was subsequently convicted of inciting terrorism in connection with the Virginia Jihad Network and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Michael Curtis Reynolds is an American who was convicted of terrorism-related crimes after a series of December 2005 online discussions with a US judge posing as a militant.

Jaber A. Elbaneh, also known as Gabr al-Bana is a Yemeni-American who was labeled a suspected terrorist by the United States after it emerged that he had attended the Al Farouq training camp alongside the Lackawanna Six, and remained on at the camp after they returned home. He fled to Yemen, where he worked as a cab driver before turning himself in to authorities.

Shahawar Matin Siraj is a Pakistani-American who was convicted in 2006 of plotting to bomb a New York City Subway station in Manhattan. Siraj was arrested in 2004 and found guilty of terrorism conspiracy in U.S. v. Shahawar Matin Siraj (2006). Siraj worked at an Islamic bookstore in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Over a period of several months in 2004 he was recorded by an FBI informer Osama Eldawoody plotting to plant a bomb in the 34th Street–Herald Square station. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison in January 2007.

Ali Asad Chandia was a teacher at a school in Maryland in the United States. Chandia was accused of provided material support to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a U.S.-designated Pakistani terrorist organization. On June 6, 2006, a jury unanimously found Chandia guilty. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, with three years of supervised release at the end of his incarceration, on three counts of conspiracy and providing material support to Lashkar-e-Taiba on August 30, 2006. Assistant U.S. Attorney David H. Laufman and Department of Justice Trial Attorney John T. Gibbs, who prosecuted the case, had sought a sentence of 30 years to life.

The 2007 Fort Dix attack plot involved a group of six Muslim men who were found guilty of conspiring to stage an attack against U.S. Military personnel stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey. The alleged goal of the group was to "kill as many soldiers as possible".

The Virginia jihad network was a group of young men centered in Northern Virginia that were accused of conspiring to train and participate in violence overseas. The men, Muhammed Aatique, Hammad Abdur-Raheem, Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Hamdi, Seifullah Chapman, Khwaja Hasan, Masoud Khan, Yong Kwon, Randall Todd Royer and Donald Surratt, were found guilty of various terrorism-related offences.

Bryant Neal Vinas is a Hispanic Muslim American convicted of participating in and supporting al-Qaeda plots in Afghanistan and the U.S.

In United States law, providing material support for terrorism is a crime prohibited by the USA PATRIOT Act and codified in title 18 of the United States Code, sections 2339A and 2339B. It applies primarily to groups designated as terrorists by the State Department. The four types of support described are "training," "expert advice or assistance," "service," and "personnel."

Najibullah Zazi is an Afghan-American who was arrested in September 2009 as part of the 2009 U.S. al Qaeda group accused of planning suicide bombings on the New York City Subway system, and who pleaded guilty as have two other defendants. U.S. prosecutors said Saleh al-Somali, al-Qaeda's head of external operations, and Rashid Rauf, an al-Qaeda operative, ordered the attack. Both were later killed in drone attacks.

Mukhtar al-Bakri is a Yemeni-American who grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York. In 2002, he was arrested and charged as part of the War on Terror together with the other members of the "Lackawanna Six", based on the fact the group of friends had attended an Afghan training camp together years earlier.

References

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Temple-Raston, Dina (2007). The Jihad Next Door: The Lackawanna Six and Rough Justice in the Age of Terror . New York: PublicAffairs. ISBN 978-1586484033.
↑ "Sahim Alwan Sentenced for Providing Material Support to Al Qaeda " Archived 2016-06-11 at the Wayback Machine , December 17, 2003, FBI.gov

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[lack-1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Temple-Raston, Dina (2007). The Jihad Next Door: The Lackawanna Six and Rough Justice in the Age of Terror . New York: PublicAffairs. ISBN 978-1586484033.

[2] "Sahim Alwan Sentenced for Providing Material Support to Al Qaeda " Archived 2016-06-11 at the Wayback Machine , December 17, 2003, FBI.gov