Ahmad Khalil Elshazly, a young Muslim in West Haven, Conn., really, really wanted to murder non-Muslims.
In 2019, when he was in his early twenties, Elshazly grew frustrated with his opportunities to wage jihad in the United States, which is odd in light of the fact that this country is for the most part a wide-open field for the aspiring jihad terrorist. Nevertheless, he determined to make his way to Syria in order to join the Islamic State (ISIS) and kill nonbelievers there, and started saving his pennies for this purpose.
In October of that year, he met with a group of like-minded people and made his intentions abundantly clear, saying: “I want to go to the caliphate and fight there. I can kill maybe … like a hundred kaffir [unbelievers]. I can kill them. A hundred kaffirs. If I do something here how many kaffirs could I kill? One, two, three and then I get shot and I die. It is more benefitting if I go there, I could kill more and will get more faithful rewards."
Where did he get the idea that he would be rewarded if he murdered as many as a hundred non-Muslims and then got shot and died? Why, from the Qur’an, of course, which says: “Indeed, Allah has bought from the believers their lives and their wealth, because the garden will be theirs, they will fight in the way of Allah and will kill and be killed.” (Qur’an 9:111) That is, a place in the Islamic paradise is guaranteed for those who “fight in the way of Allah,” killing non-Muslims and getting killed in the process.
The Qur’an also exhorts believers to “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191, 4:89, 4:91, cf. 9:5). Clearly Elshazly took those exhortations to heart, and either he kept all this to himself, or his family and the people down at the local mosque couldn’t or wouldn’t disabuse him of the notion that murdering people who didn’t accept his religious faith would get him a big reward from the creator of the universe.
In any case, Elshazly was never shy about sharing his hopes and dreams with others, and ultimately, in December 2019, he got himself caught after he talked too much to undercover agents. Then on Nov. 30, 2022, according to the Justice Department, he “pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.”
The guilty plea, however, was not in any sense an indication of repentance. In prison, he has worked on finding new ways to wage jihad. The DOJ added that “while detained, Elshazly has had numerous disciplinary infractions. In August 2025, officers searched his cell and found a handwritten plan for a coordinated uprising at the detention facility, complete with diagrams of the housing unit, instructions for breaching secured areas, and tactics for confronting the Correctional Emergency Response Team.”
The Justice Department wanted Elshazly sentenced to 15 years, so that it would be at least ten years or so before Elshazly, who by then would be pushing forty, would be able to hatch any new jihad plots, or at least ones that affected people outside the prison in which he would be housed.
His attorneys, however, said that being lenient with the poor little fellow would strike a powerful blow against “Islamophobia”: “Treating Mr. Elshazly with compassion will show those who practice the Muslim faith that the United States is not the enemy of Islam that the radical Islamists claim the US to be.” About the possibility that a light sentence would embolden jihadis in showing the U.S. to be soft and unwilling to defend itself, the attorneys were silent.
Elshazly’s attorneys also argued that Elshazly was depraved on account he’s deprived: they claimed that he had “a chaotic upbringing, an unequipped mother, educational failure, low self-esteem, extreme isolation, the stupidity of youth, never treated Autism Spectrum Disorder and bouts of depression.” All this “made him vulnerable to the toxic Syrian and ISIS propaganda he found while unsupervised and alone in his bedroom.”
Related: When Is Jihad Not Jihad?
As a result, “a disappointment to himself and others in real life, he became increasingly mired in fantasy, making cinematic promises of bold military actions and boasting of skills and abilities, such as rocket manufacturing, that were entirely nonexistent. They said that all these psychological issues could “be successfully addressed in therapy.”
U.S. District Judge Victor A. Bolden, an Obama appointee, seems to have fallen for all this. He sentenced Elshazly to 92 months in prison (that’s seven years and eight months for those of you who went through Common Core math), just over half of what the DOJ wanted. He also threw in supervised release for his entire lifetime — we have seen how well that works with all the violent jihadis in Europe whom authorities had on their “watch lists.”
Given that “compassion,” will jihadis now see what lovable lugs Americans are, and drop all their “Death to America” plans? What do you think?