- MIDDLE EAST FORUM - Todd Bensman - The New York Post - APRIL 13, 2023 -
An unlikely FBI counterterrorism case wrapping up in Ohio casts a bright and shining light on a gaping national-security hole in the southwest border as the greatest mass migration crisis in American history overwhelms its defenses.
The Ohio FBI field office last year busted a local Iraqi asylum seeker, former al Qaeda fighter Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab, in the midst of orchestrating a credible international plot to assassinate President George W. Bush in Texas using a remarkable tactic.
An Ohio federal judge just accepted Shihab's guilty plea on charges he was going to smuggle at least four Iraqi nationals in over the southern border for the Bush assassination, court records show.
(Plea-deal papers showing all charges but one were dropped indicate Shihab is cooperating with US intelligence on overseas issues related to his plot.)
Lost in general media disinterest in terrorism cases that don't involve white supremacists is that this FBI investigation exposed — in rare, multi-colored detail — that serious Islamic terrorist operatives outside the country see the overwhelmed southern border with Mexico as a breachable route into America.
Of course they do. A record-smashing 4.8 million illegal immigrants have crossed since President Biden took office, according to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and other sources. At least 1.5 million of those are presumed to have entered the country undetected as "gotaways."
A former al Qaeda fighter who killed many US soldiers during the early phases of the Iraq War, Shihab himself somehow managed to fly into an American airport with a tourist visa under intelligence radars in September 2020, before this mass-migration crisis began.
He overstayed the tourist visa, lodged an asylum claim forestalling deportation and began contemplating the border, an arrest-warrant affidavit shows.
As border defenses collapsed, Shihab clearly realized that crossing terrorist operatives among the millions had become less risky than the tourist-visa-overstay method he'd used.
He claimed to undercover FBI informants that he'd successfully smuggled in two Hezbollah operatives over it, the records allege, without elaboration, then turned to replicating that success for the Bush assassination.
Shihab reached out to his former terrorist comrades with whom he'd killed Americans in Iraq, a unit once known as "Thunder" in Arabic, and began working with a new unit leader in Qatar.
Fortunately, the FBI introduced informants into Shihab's circle.