The 27-year-old Iraq-born Palestinian Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab obtained refugee status and arrived in the U.S. in October 2012 with his family, who at the time had been living in Syria amid the civil war. The U.S. government granted his refugee status and entry into the United States.
But the vetting by USCIS that year somehow missed his decade-long stint as a “knowing and active” fighter, since the age of 16, for the U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization Ansar Al-Islam and other al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist groups in Iraq and Syria. The vetting also did not discover that he had continuously conducted executions and fought in large-scale battles with terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq right up to his departure to the United States as an ostensible refugee from those very groups.
According to court records from an FBI investigation and Department of Justice prosecution, Al-Jayab hailed from a tribe that was broadly enmeshed in terrorist group causes and operations inside Iraq. He was later recorded in potentially discoverable communications with his own father, a brother, other relatives, friends, and terrorist associates describing battles, favored weapons used, his personal involvement in the execution of victims by firearms, and participation in a high-profile bombing of the national security headquarters in Syria in the immediate years before receiving U.S. refugee status.
None of the court records from his prosecution or that of another Iraqi refugee who had resettled in Texas, Omar Al Hardan, also prosecuted for his support of Al Qaeda and ISIS, address how the USCIS vetting process missed Al-Jayab’s long, active involvement in regional terrorism groups, his wide associations with terrorist operatives, immediate relatives who were aware of his experience, and his social media postings.
But almost immediately upon his October 2012 arrival in the United States and while living in Wisconsin, Arizona, and California, Al-Jayab began plotting his return to fight with terrorist groups, communicating widely with operatives in the theater, posting his beliefs and intentions on social media, and telling his father, also granted refugee status and living in the United States, of his plans.
“Defendant’s intention was to return to Syria to fight, as indicated by what he told his father on November 17, 2012: ‘I will roam all over the world. I, the jihad is in my blood. ... I will attack the whole world including America and all that is in it. When I was in Syria, I told you, no one can stop me from my path,’” a government sentencing memorandum recounts,”The hell with money, and the hell with women, and the hell with America, and the hell with Obama. May God burn America! And the greatest tyrant, America, and I do not care about anything whatever it may be. The commandment of God is greater! ... I swear, I will bring out all of my anger on America.”
Thirteen months after receiving refugee status, in November 2013, he used temporary travel papers granted to refugees to fly back to the region on money sent to him by a network of his former terrorist comrades. For another year, he fought with the groups in the Aleppo region of Syria. He returned to the United States in January 2014. Not long after his return, Al-Jayab applied for an adjustment of status from refugee to lawful permanent resident, but security vetting for that turned out to be unnecessary.
By then, in about February 2014, an FBI counterterrorism investigation into his activities had begun. The bureau monitored and exploited the USCIS security vetting process that was part of the LPR application. Still, the FBI investigation took time during which Al-Jayab remained free inside the country.
Not until June 2015 -- nearly 18 months after his return from Syria and nearly four years after an initial USCIS refugee vetting failure allowed Al-Jayab into the country, did FBI agents finally interview him, a sentencing memorandum stated. He would not be arrested until January 2016, when a grand jury indicted him for lying on his 2014 LPR application about his travel to Syria and material support of foreign terrorist groups.
Because of initial failures to discover Al-Jayab’s terrorist group crimes during vetting for his 2012 refugee application, he remained free to attack inside the United States during all of these years and to illegally travel abroad to fight with terrorist groups despite a reasonable presumption that vetting agents could have learned that he was a combat-hardened and unrepentant terrorist who harbored a strong animus against the United States. In October 2019 a judge sentenced him to 60 months in prison.