Accessibility links

Breaking News
USA

Texan Who Sought to Join IS Gets 7 Years


Michael Todd Wolfe is seen in an undated photo released by the Austin Police Department in Austin, Texas.
Michael Todd Wolfe is seen in an undated photo released by the Austin Police Department in Austin, Texas.

A Texas man who planned to join the militant group Islamic State in Syria was sentenced Friday to almost seven years in prison.

Michael Todd Wolfe, 24, who called himself Faruq, was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Texas' Western District for “attempting to provide material support to a designated terrorist organization.”

Wolfe was arrested a year ago in an airport in Houston, Texas, where he was about to board a flight to Toronto, Ontario. He was ticketed from there to Iceland and Denmark.

Wolfe had arranged to meet with an FBI undercover employee, who he believed would help him travel through Turkey to Syria. There, he planned “to join with ISIL [Islamic State] and engage in armed conflict,” the Justice Department said in a statement.

The department said Wolfe admitted that he “had participated in physical fitness training, practiced military maneuvers and made efforts to conceal his communications about his plans to travel overseas to engage in violent jihad.”

Wolfe pleaded guilty to the charges against him in June 2014.

  • 16x9 Image

    VOA News

    The Voice of America provides news and information in more than 40 languages to an estimated weekly audience of over 326 million people. Stories with the VOA News byline are the work of multiple VOA journalists and may contain information from wire service reports.

XS
SM
MD
LG