Former honor student from Mississippi pleads guilty to trying to join ISIS
A 20-year-old Mississippi woman pleaded guilty this week to conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State (ISIS) after she and her fiancé were caught allegedly trying to join the extremist group in Syria.
Jaelyn Delshaun Young, 20, was charged on Tuesday with conspiring to provide material support to ISIS, The Clarion-Ledger reported.
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Two additional counts of attempting to provide support to a foreign terrorist organization were dismissed, as part of her plea agreement.
She faces up to 20 years imprisonment and a fine of up to $250,000.
Young's fiancé, Muhammad Oda Dakhlalla, 23, pleaded guilty earlier this month, CNN reported.
The two were arrested at a Mississippi airport in August of last year on their way to Syria, via Turkey. Court documents show the couple planned to use their June wedding as a cover to travel to Syria, CNN said.
"Our story will be that we are newlyweds on our honeymoon," Young allegedly said.
They were apprehended after Young, the daughter of a police officer, told undercover FBI agents posing as ISIS recruiters online that she was skilled in math and chemistry, having worked in an analytical lab, and hoped to utilize those skills as a medic for ISIS, wrote The Clarion-Ledger. Dakhlalla allegedly wrote to one FBI agent: "I am good with computers, education and media."
Assistant U.S. Attorney Clay Joyner said Dakhlalla, the son of a local imam, hoped to become a "holy warrior."
During their arraignment last August, Joyner likened the couple to the Boston Marathon bombers, saying they, too, could commit violence with knives, vehicles or homemade weapons, The Associated Press reported.
"They don't need military training to do harm. What they need is a violent, extremist ideology, and that's exactly what they have espoused," he said.
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Christopher is Mashable's Senior Correspondent covering world news, particularly the post-Soviet space and especially Ukraine, where he lived and worked for more than five years. As an editor at Ukraine's Kyiv Post newspaper, Christopher was part of the team that won the 2014 Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism for coverage of the Euromaidan Revolution, Russia's annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine. Besides Mashable, he has published with The Telegraph, The Times, The Independent and GlobalPost from such countries as Greece, Italy, Israel, Russia and Turkey, among others, as well as from aboard a search and rescue ship off the Libyan coast. Originally from rainy Portland, Oregon, he is also a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Ukraine) currently based in New York.
