By: Romy Ronen
A 40 year-old Brooklyn resident, Zachary Clark, was arrested last week for attempting to send dangerous intel to ISIS, intel directly correlated with weapons, explosives, and other tools of mass destruction. He was supposed to appear in court before Magistrate Judge Robert W. Lehrburger last week as well.
Clark is certainly not a random arrest. He has devoted himself to ISIS, twice. The first time was in July, this year, to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the second time was in October, this year, to Abu Ibrahim al-Sashemi al-Qurayshi. “As alleged, Zachary Clark twice pledged allegiance to ISIS, and posted on encrypted pro-ISIS chat rooms numerous exhortations and instructions on bomb-making and other terrorist acts to be carried out in New York,” U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman.
The story begins in March, this year, when Clark produced ISIS propaganda in secret online chat rooms intended for specific target audiences, to many supporters of terror, ultimately fishing for potential recruits and killers. In these messages, he encouraged specific targets to murder and posted photos of the New York City subway system for the sole purpose of pointing out specific locales to place and set a given explosion.
These advertisements sought for “lone-wolf” attacks in the city, which even contained detailed instructions on how to commit these horribly violent acts. Clark posted a manual titled “Knife Attacks,” saying that “the thought of plunging a sharp object into another person’s flesh” is “never an excuse for abandoning jihad. [K]nives, though certainly not the only weapon for inflicting harm upon the kuffar (non-believers) are widely available in every land and thus readily accessible.”
A relatively recent report by the Global Terrorism Index ranked the United States as the 22nd worst impacted by terrorism in the world. According to this report, incidents involving terror increased from 49 to 57 in the year 2018. Most of these acts have been led by radical Islamists, as well as a few jihadi extremists.
NYPD Commissioner James P. O’Neill expresses that the fight against terrorism is pertinent. On Wednesday, he made the following statement: “Today’s arrest in Brooklyn is a reminder that New York City remains a top terrorism target in the United States. The NYPD and all of our law enforcement partners remain vigilant in this ongoing fight against terror and anyone who would plot to do us harm.”
In his statement, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman says: “Thanks to the Joint Terrorist Task Force, Clark now faces serious criminal charges for his alleged support of a terrorist organization bent on killing Americans.”
