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Home Front: WoT

Suspect killed in Texas Navy base shooting identified as Syrian-born U.S. citizen, Updated

2020-05-24

Not major news, but now we know the jihadi is an American citizen. Next we just need to discover when and why he moved to the U.S.

[MSN] The suspect killed at the scene of Thursday's "terrorism-related" shooting at a U.S. naval air base in Texas has been identified as 20-year-old Adam Aalim Alsahli,

...previously Adam Salim Alsahli, so hopefully the above is a typo...

a Syrian-born U.S. citizen, federal law enforcement officials said on Friday. In the Thursday morning attack, the gunman shot up Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, wounding one sailor, a member of the base security force, but the assailant was the only person killed, the FBI said.

Ask, and the universe delivers. Update from the Center for Immigration Studies website at 11:40 a.m. EDT:

The Syria-born attacker killed Thursday morning during an apparent jihad-inspired attack on a Texas naval air station was neither a resettled refugee nor an asylum-seeker who slipped through security vetting. Instead, CIS has learned that he fell under an immigration category unusual for foreign-born extremists who have attacked inside the United States.

Adam Alsahli, 20 at the time of his death Thursday, was already a U.S. citizen when he moved from the Middle East to Corpus Christi, Texas, in 2014 with his mother (and likely several siblings) at the height of the Syrian civil war, by virtue of his father's American citizenship, according to two sources familiar with the family's immigration status. The attacker's 75-year-old father, Salim Alsahli, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1984, the sources told CIS, and subsequently seems to have sired a family back in Syria that included Adam Alsahli's birth in 1999.

Although his children and their mother were born in and resided in the Middle East, the father's U.S. citizenship conferred U.S. citizenship on Adam Alsahli, since he properly registered a declaration at a U.S. embassy or consulate office overseas. That apparently happened with Adam Alsahli because by the age of three, in the year 2002, he was granted an American passport that was repeatedly renewed over the years, sources said.

In 2014, at the height of the civil war inside Syria, Adam and at least his mother moved to the United States. The mother is currently a legal permanent resident who has a pending application for U.S. citizenship, the sources said.

With an American citizen father anchored inside the United States, Adam Alsahli, his siblings, and their mother would not have entered any refugee resettlement pipeline, nor would they have had to apply for asylum, processes that would have required fairly extensive security vetting. Adam Alsahli, then about 15 years old, would have been moved right to the front of the line with almost no security vetting; likely the same would have been true of his mother and siblings.

Little is known at this point about Alsahli's interest in Islamic extremist theology or connections to foreign groups, as the FBI continues an investigation. Nor is it yet known where the family was living prior to entering the United States in 2014.

At about 6:15 a.m. Thursday, Alsahli drove a vehicle up to the gate of the naval air station near Corpus Christi, exited, and began firing shots at military personnel. One round hit the bullet-proof vest of a sailor guarding the gate, which drew a response from other armed sailors, who killed Alsahli.

One well-placed source told CIS that Alsahli drove up to the gate wearing an Arab head-wrap garment and blaring Arabic language music from a vehicle stereo. Arabic-language writings were found inside the vehicle. Although these details could not be independently confirmed, the FBI stated at a press conference later Thursday that Alsahli's attack was "terrorism-related". A linkedIn page for Adam Alsahi of Corpus Christ contains only one bit of biographical information, which is that he is a "student at Umm Al-Qura University" in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

A discussion of the implications of this situation continues at the link.

Posted by:trailing wife

#1 One of those things that just happens when our Top Men and our seventeen crack intelligence agencies are trying to take down POTUS. Not to worry. There will be more.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey 2020-05-24 07:56

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