US woman captured in Syria charged with helping Islamic State
A US woman who was captured in Syria and was married to an Islamic State sniper has been charged with providing material support to the jihadist group, the Justice Department said on Thursday.
Samantha Marie Elhassani was accused of helping two unnamed Islamic State members procure tactical gear and obtain funding while in the United States in 2014 and after she had traveled to Syria in 2015.
She faces two counts of aiding the extremist group, according to an indictment filed late Wednesday.
She was one of two Americans who were captured in Syria and transferred back to the United States in July to stand trial.
Elhassani, nee Samantha Sally, 32, has told US media she was tricked into traveling to the Syrian war zone by her husband Moussa Elhassani, an Islamic State supporter, and then stayed with him to protect her children.
She said he changed from a loving to a tough and violent man once they arrived in Syria.
"I was like a prisoner," she told CNN in an interview in April.
Her son appeared in IS propaganda videos and her husband was killed in a drone strike, according to reports.
IS fighters swept into Iraq in the summer of 2014, taking control of nearly a third of the country. At the height of the group's power its self-proclaimed caliphate stretched from the edges of Aleppo in Syria to just north of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.
With its physical caliphate largely destroyed, the Islamic State movement is transforming from a "proto-state" to a covert "terrorist" network, "a process that is most advanced in Iraq" because it still controls pockets in Syria, according to a UN report.
The report, penned by UN experts, said the Islamic State group still may have up to 30,000 members roughly equally distributed between Syria and Iraq, and its global network poses a rising threat.
It said that despite the near-defeat of IS in Iraq and most of Syria, it is likely that a reduced "covert version" of the militant group's "core" will survive in both countries, with significant affiliated supporters in Afghanistan, Libya, Southeast Asia and West Africa.
The estimate of between 20,000 and 30,000 members includes "a significant component of the many thousands of active foreign terrorist fighters," it said.
While many IS fighters, planners and commanders have been killed in fighting, and many other fighters and supporters have left the immediate conflict zone, the experts said many still remain in the two countries — some engaged militarily "and others hiding out in sympathetic communities and urban areas.”
The experts said the discipline imposed by IS remains intact and IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi "remains in authority" despite reports that he was injured.
"It is just more delegated than before, by necessity, to the wider network outside the conflict zone," the experts said.
The flow of foreign fighters to IS in Syria and Iraq has come to a halt, they said, but "the reverse flow, although slower than expected, remains a serious challenge."
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