NEW YORK (AP) – A former New York stockbroker-turned-Daesh militant has been convicted of becoming a sniper and trainer for the terrorist group during its brutal reign in Syria and Iraq.
The trial of Ruslan Maratovich Asainov, a Kazakh-born U.S. citizen, was the latest in a series of cases against people accused of leaving their homelands around the world to join the militants in combat.
A onetime broker who doted on his toddler daughter, Asainov quit his job and started watching radical ideologies online, his ex-wife testified. He abruptly left his family in Brooklyn in December 2013 and made his way to Syria as Daesh stormed to power.
In a case built largely on Asainov’s own words in messaging apps, emails, recorded phone calls and an FBI interview, prosecutors said he fought in numerous battles and built a notable profile in Daesh by becoming a sniper and later an instructor of nearly 100 other long-range shooters.
“The evidence has shown that people died as a result of the defendant’s conduct. It is time to hold him accountable,” prosecutor Douglas Pravda told a Brooklyn federal court jury in a closing argument.
Asainov, 46, didn’t testify, telling the court he was “not part of this process.”
His lawyers didn’t dispute that he went to Syria and affiliated with the terrorist group, but they argued that his accounts of his role were boasts that had no firsthand corroboration and didn’t prove anyone died because of his conduct.
Daesh terrorists seized chunks of Iraq and Syria in 2014, sweeping millions of people into a so-called caliphate characterized by massacres, beheadings, sexual slavery and other atrocities. The group’s bloody campaign attracted tens of thousands of foreign militants; at least scores of them were U.S. citizens, according to a 2018 academic report from George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.
Fighting left a swath of deaths, displacement and destruction in major cities and beyond. The extremists lost the last remnants of their realm in 2019.