Amin is a high school student.
By Raif Karerat
A high school student from the affluent suburbs of Washington, DC became the youngest person in the U.S. sentenced to prison for supporting the terrorist group ISIS.
Ali Shukri Amin, 17, of Manassas, Va. was sentenced to eleven years and four months in federal prison after he pleaded guilty in June to conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State.
Amin admitted to running the Twitter account @AmreekiWitness, which had 4,000 followers. He used this account to send out over 7,000 tweets to develop financial support for the Islamic State and instructed followers on how to make anonymous donations to Islamic State using Bitcoin.
He also admitted to helping to facilitate travel for 18-year-old Reza Niknejad to get to Syria to join the Islamic State. Amin drove with Niknejad to the airport and provided him with instructions on where to go once he arrived in Turkey in order to meet other Islamic State supporters traveling to Syria, according to CBS News.
The federal government rarely prosecutes juveniles, but Amin was charged as an adult. Justice Department lawyers called for a punishment of 15 years and said that outcome would put potential terrorists on notice that they “will be met with crushing sentences,” reported NBC News.
In a letter to the judge, Amin himself denounced ISIS. The jihadists he met online, he explained, treated him with respect. “For the first time I felt that I was not only being taken seriously about very important and weighty topics, but was actually being asked for guidance.”
Now, he said, he feels ashamed for “my own arrogance and my own need to feel I was doing something historic and important.”
“I became lost and caught up in something that takes the greatest and most profound teachings of Islam and turns them into justifications for violence and death,” he wrote.
According to CBS News, Amin’s mother also wrote to the judge detailing Amin’s childhood struggles — growing up without his father and also having to cope with health problems including a hand deformity and Crohn’s disease.
She detailed how she became an over protective mother and was happy when her son wanted to study Islam.
“I never thought letting him have access to the internet by himself would put him at the risk of finding the wrong information about Islam and meeting the wrong people,” she stated.