FBI Headquarters in Washington DC.BBC/Getty.
The FBI has arrested an Afghan man for an election day terror plot. BBC. The suspect is a 27 year old man from Afghanistan named Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi. He was an ISIS supporter and had sent money to an ISIS front charity and had also evacuated his family in preparation for his attack. Tawhedi was seeking to purchase multiple AK-style rifles but ended up trying to purchase them from the FBI and was arrested. His plan was to attack a large group of people on election day and was researching targets in Washington DC. Tawhedi was on a special immigrant visa after the fall of Kabul.
My Comment:
Once again, a stupid terrorist got caught. I think this guy would have been able to purchase firearms legally since he was a legal resident and living in Oklahoma. Instead of purchasing weapons from a gun dealer which he probably would have been able to do, he tried to get AK's from someone he should have obviously suspected was an FBI agent.
Still, this was a serious threat. Had this man gotten rifles he would have been able to carry out this plot. It looked like he just wanted to do a mass shooting in the name of ISIS and that isn't particularly hard to pull off. Getting in the country was the hardest part and he was already here. If he had gotten those weapons and found a crowded place in DC he could have killed a lot of people. And given the long lines on election day...
Indeed, this could have actually affected the course of the election. A lot of people vote on election day itself and if someone shot up a polling place it could scare a lot of people away from the polls, which could lead to unpredictable results. It's something that hasn't actually happened yet but it is something I have thought about a lot.
It is also concerning that this guy was plotting in favor of ISIS. Far from being destroyed, ISIS is having a bit of a comeback. They no longer control much in the way of territory but they still exist and are still pulling off terror attacks. Indeed, the most powerful ISIS group left is in Afghanistan. Though they are a shadow of what they once were, they are still inspiring people to commit terror attacks.
This also seems like an obvious consequence to letting thousands of Afghans into the country in the wake of the fall of Kabul. Some of those folks we owed it to because they worked for us and would have been killed by the Taliban. But there wasn't much in the way of vetting when these people were brought in and I would not be surprised if this was the only terrorist that managed to get into the country. I know that Haitians and Venezuelans have gotten most of the bad press, it's not like the Afghans we have brought in aren't causing problems of their own, and this is a good example of that.
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