Chicago man gets 25 years for serving as a ‘press person’ for the ISIS terrorist organization

A federal judge on Thursday handed a 25-year prison sentence to a former Chicago software developer who the feds say functioned as a “press person for the Islamic State” terrorist organization and held a sincere, “radical urge for bloodshed.”

Ashraf Al Safoo, 41, has already served more than seven years behind bars since prosecutors filed charges against him in 2018. His attorney sought a sentence of time-served, arguing he’s caused no trouble in jail and basically amounted to a “keyboard warrior.”

But U.S. District Judge John Blakey said Al Safoo’s crimes went beyond words — “it was material support for the murder and destruction of other human beings.”

“While you did not pull a trigger or detonate a bomb or behead someone with your own hand, by your own knife, you engaged in a course of conduct that facilitated and rooted them on,” Blakey told Al Safoo while handing down the sentence.

Blakey convicted Al Safoo in a bench trial last year of conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, among other crimes.

Before learning his fate, Al Safoo told the judge he’d fled Iraq with his family as a teenager before he could be enlisted in Saddam Hussein’s military. He said he’s betrayed the United States, the country that gave him a home, and cries when he receives photos of his children.

“I reap what I sow,” Al Safoo repeatedly told Blakey.

The sentence is among the stiffest in recent memory to be handed down in a terrorism case at Chicago’s Dirksen Federal Courthouse.

Adel Daoud, who pressed the detonator on an inert car bomb outside a downtown bar in 2012, was sentenced in 2024 to 27 years in prison. Hasan Edmonds was sentenced in 2016 to 30 years in prison for plotting a deadly attack on the Joliet Armory in the name of Islamic State terrorists.

But just last fall, a judge gave 12 years to Xuanyu Harry Pang, a former Navy sailor who helped plan an attack on Naval Station Great Lakes as payback for the 2020 death of an Iranian military commander. Pang wound up cooperating with authorities.

In a similar case to Al Safoo’s, a judge in 2022 gave 7 ½ years to Thomas Osadzinski for trying to aid the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria with a computer script.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Peabody argued that Al Safoo’s “apparent bloodlust” led him to Blakey’s courtroom. In a recent court memo, the prosecutor explained that Al Safoo once helped manage Khattab Media Foundation, which operated principally on Telegram and “existed exclusively to serve ISIS’s media needs and directions.”

Al Safoo supported the Islamic State by working on ISIS campaigns and making ISIS media, creating threatening propaganda that promoted violence and terrorism, and hacking Twitter accounts to spread ISIS media, the prosecutor wrote.

Al Safoo “reveled in the Las Vegas shooting” and used an email address containing “a perverse reference to James Foley, the American journalist publicly beheaded by the Islamic State in 2014,” Peabody argued.

Defense attorney James Vanzant stressed that Al Safoo has never been in legal trouble before and has spent years in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, without being disciplined.

After Peabody pushed back on his characterization of Al Safoo as a “keyboard warrior,” Vanzant compared Al Safoo to Daoud. The Hillside man tried to set off a 1,000-pound car bomb filled with fertilizer in the Loop with roughly 200 people nearby.

It all turned out to be part of an undercover federal operation.

Meanwhile, Vanzant on Thursday said Al Safoo “sat behind a computer and he wrote articles.”

“We can talk about how Mr. Safoo was a keyboard warrior all day,” Vanzant told Blakey. “It’s not the ‘warrior’ part that’s important. It’s the ‘keyboard’ part.”

Still, Blakey made clear that Al Safoo’s conduct was not protected by the First Amendment. The judge told him, “it’s not about expressing dissatisfaction with the United States — Americans do that all the time, on their own.”

Rather, the judge told Al Safoo, “you were supporting and facilitating the infrastructure of a terrorist organization that was causing harm on a global scale.”