An unlikely FBI counter-terrorism case accomplished in Ohio sheds a brilliant and gleaming light on a gaping national security gap on the Southwest border as the best mass migration crisis in American history overwhelms its defenses.
Last 12 months, an FBI field office in Ohio caught a neighborhood Iraqi asylum seeker, former al-Qaeda fighter Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab, in the midst of orchestrating a reputable international plot to assassinate President George W. Bush in Texas using unusual tactics.
An Ohio federal judge has just accepted Shihab’s guilty plea on charges that he intends to smuggle no less than 4 Iraqi nationals across the southern border to assassinate Bush, court records show.
(The plea bargain documents, which list all charges except one dropped, indicate that Shihab is cooperating with U.S. intelligence on foreign matters related to his conspiracy.)
Lost within the media’s general lack of interest in terrorism matters that don’t involve white supremacists, this FBI investigation has revealed – in rare, multicolored detail – that serious foreign Islamic terrorists see the overwhelmed southern border with Mexico as a possible path to cross into America.
In fact. It has surpassed a record 4.8 million illegal immigrants since President Biden took office, in keeping with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and other sources. At the least 1.5 million of them are believed to have entered the country undetected as “refugees”.
![Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/US-Assassination-Plot-President-Bush.jpg?w=600)
A former al-Qaeda fighter who killed many US soldiers within the early stages of the Iraq War, Shihab himself one way or the other managed to fly to a US airport on a tourist visa under the intelligence radar in September 2020 before the mass migration crisis began.
He prolonged his tourist visa, applied for asylum before being deported, and started to contemplate border crossings, in keeping with an arrest warrant statement.
As border defenses collapsed, Shihab clearly realized that crossing borders with terrorist agents among the many tens of millions became less dangerous than the tourist visa crossing method he was using.
He claimed that he acted under the guise of FBI informants, that he successfully smuggled two Hezbollah agents for this purpose, in keeping with records, without detailed explanation, after which turned to repeat this success within the Bush assassination.
Shihab contacted his former terrorist comrades with whom he had killed Americans in Iraq, a unit once known in Arabic as “Thunder”, and started working with the unit’s latest commander in Qatar.
![A border guard agent talks to a group of migrants](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009533413.jpg?w=1024)
Fortunately, the FBI brought informants into the Shihab circle.
The plans called for no less than 4 of the eight Thunder terrorists to pay $40,000 each to travel to Brazil on fraudulent visas after which travel through the notorious smuggling jungle of the Darien Gap crossing between Colombia and Panama.
A record 250,000 immigrants from 150 countries crossed the gap in 2022, in comparison with lower than 10,000 most years in normal times, for perspective.
From Central America, the Shihab terrorists would have mingled undetected with the multinational masses moving north towards the U.S.-Mexico border, then crossed perhaps wearing fake Border Patrol uniforms, insiders reported.
Because the plot progressed, Shihab actually flew to Texas and conducted a surveillance of Bush’s Dallas homes and Central Texas ranch. He wondered find out how to provide weapons for the arrival agents when they might stalk and kill Bush.
Sound alarm
His arrest in May 2022 actually thwarted the plot, but it surely sounded a crucial alarm that should be heard because the historic multinational mass migration is now in its third 12 months at ionospheric heights.
This case shows, other than the incontrovertible fact that these particular villains saw the border as more vulnerable than before, that the remaining of the jihadist universe must also see it that way.
They might be right.
![Migrants crossing the border](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009501491.jpg?w=1024)
Since Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, a record 169 undocumented immigrants on the FBI’s terrorism watch list have been caught crossing the border, in keeping with Customs and Border Protection statistics. The important thing query is what number of others made it out of the 1.5 million “refugees” who made it inside and disappeared.
Shihab little question hoped his fellow terrorists can be amongst those defectors.
So many immigrants are actually arriving from terrorism-threatened countries within the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa that the nonprofit has seen enough demand for services to open a shelter in Tijuana, just two blocks from the border wall that caters only to Muslims.
It is all the time filled to the brim with Muslim migrants of unknown and uncontrolled origin, who all plan to make their technique to America in a technique or one other.
After I was exploring this facility last fall, I met Russian Chechens, Tajiks, Syrians, Uzbeks and Somalis.
The director of the shelter admitted in November that since its grand opening, nobody from American intelligence has ever tried to ask her anything, nor have the Mexicans.
American indifference is just one among many evidences pointing to a breakdown in security.
![A border guard agent talks to a group of migrants](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009533412.jpg?w=1024)
As recently reported, a migrant from Lebanon and Venezuela who crossed the Rio Grande from Matamoros to Brownsville, Texas in early December 2021 was on the FBI’s terrorist watch list.
FBI agents who were in a position to interview him during this month’s record crush of humanity found “substantial derogatory intelligence” concerning the Venezuelan and deemed him “high risk” and “risk of absconding”, recommending that he remain in custody, documents, which I actually have.
Often such individuals are deported. But as an alternative, Immigration and Customs headquarters ordered the person released for fear that he might catch COVID as a result of his weight.
Left free last time I checked, applying for asylum in Detroit.
One other rigged case took place on the Mexican side, where the FBI is anticipated to work closely together.
In line with documents leaked to me, Mexican immigration officials in April 2021 caught a Yemenite on a watchlist, Ahmed Mohammed Ahmed, as he was about to enter Del Rio, Texas.
Mexico tried to deport him. But in July 2021, with the border flooded from either side, the Yemenis returned. As a substitute of deporting Ahmed as reported, the Mexicans simply let him go to clear the detention facility. The Be-On-the-Lookout I actually have ended up in law enforcement along the US border.
It is unclear if US law enforcement ever found him.
worst case scenario
It is worse.
In late May, Fox News reported that the Border Patrol one way or the other ignored Colombian citizen Isnardo Garcia-Amado, who was on the FBI’s terrorist watch list after being caught crossing the border near Yuma, Arizona in April.
Within the chaos this month, the Border Patrol released a suspected terrorist and gave him a GPS tracking device as an alternative choice to detention, which is now the common way the agency processes a whole lot of hundreds of migrants in detention centres.
Garcia-Amado was free in the US for two weeks before being arrested by Immigration and Customs in Pinellas County, Florida, on May 6.
Before the feds end the Shihab case with a final bow and move on, America should pause and understand what it means as Biden’s historic border crisis rages for no less than the following two years.
Todd Bensman is the writer of Overrun, How Joe Biden Unleashed the Best Border Crisisin US History.