Aug. 11--Abdella Ahmad Tounisi has always cut an odd figure for a would-be terrorist -- slender, soft-spoken and seemingly naive.
"Concerning my fighting skills, to be honest I do not have any," an 18-year-old Tounisi allegedly wrote in 2013 to someone he thought was a recruiter for an al-Qaida-sponsored group. "I'm very small (5 feet 6 inches, 120 pounds) physically but I pray to Allah that he makes me successful."
On Tuesday, Tounisi, now 21, fidgeted with his hands behind his back and spoke in a quiet voice as he pleaded guilty to one count of attempting to provide material support to Jabhat al-Nusra, a designated terrorist group that at one time had claimed responsibility for nearly 600 suicide bombings and other attacks in war-torn Syria.
Before he changed his plea, Tounisi, of Aurora, told U.S. District Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan he's been taking painkillers and antibiotics because he recently had his tonsils removed.
Numerous family members and friends packed the courtroom for the hearing. At one point, Tounisi heard a child crying and turned and smiled at his relatives in the gallery, including his baby brother who was born after Tounisi was taken into custody. He faces up to 15 years in prison when he is sentenced Dec. 9.
Tounisi had just turned 18 when he was arrested at O'Hare International Airport in April 2013 as he was about to board a flight to Turkey, where he planned to meet a handler to transport him to a training camp in Syria, prosecutors said.
Authorities said he had pledged his support for the Syrian rebel fight on a fake recruitment website that was secretly operated by the FBI, expressing a "willingness to die for the cause."
In preparation for his journey, Tounisi had applied for an expedited passport and had it sent to a post office box he'd set up at a mail station in Aurora, according to his plea agreement with prosecutors.
Tounisi's arrest came seven months after his close friend, Adel Daoud, was charged in a stunning plot to detonate what he thought was a car bomb outside a Loop bar. The bomb was a fake planted by the FBI, which had been monitoring online activity between Daoud and Tounisi and used an undercover agent to pose as a terrorist looking for recruits for an attack, authorities have said.
According to the complaint filed against Tounisi, he and Daoud had been exchanging emails, phone calls and text messages about "violent jihad" for months leading up to Daoud's arrest. Tounisi had also "recommended certain attack techniques, offered ideas about targeting, and researched those locations online to analyze their feasibility," the complaint said.
While Daoud allegedly continued his role in the plot, Tounisi backed out in August 2012 because he suspected that the person Daoud was working with was an undercover law enforcement officer, according to the complaint.
Hours after Daoud was arrested, Tounisi was interviewed by FBI agents "and admitted to assisting Daoud in target selection and acknowledged that he had contemplated traveling to Yemen to carry out jihad," according to the complaint.
Despite narrowly escaping being charged in his friend's case, Tounisi continued to research jihad and by March 2013 was talking online with the purported recruiter for al-Qaida in Iraq, according to the complaint. Shortly before he left for the airport, he emailed the undercover FBI agent a description of what he was wearing and said that if he didn't make it to the rendezvous point at a bus stop near the Syrian border, "I have either been arrested in the US or in Turkey," he wrote.
After he was detained at O'Hare, Tounisi told U.S. customs officials he was traveling to Turkey for three days of "sightseeing," the charges alleged.
jmeisner@tribpub.com
