Brooklyn Stockbroker-Turned-ISIS Sniper Convicted of Aiding Terror Group

A man from Brooklyn who became a sniper and weapons instructor for the Islamic State was found guilty Tuesday of providing material support to a terror group, as well as four other charges, the U.S. Justice Department said. Ruslan Maratovich Asainov, an American citizen and onetime Bay Ridge resident, now faces up to life in prison. “There is no place in a civilized world for the defendant’s bloody campaign of death and destruction,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in a press release. Prosecutors said Asainov, 46, converted to Islam in 2009, eventually quitting his job as a stockbroker to spend hours consuming radical sermons online. In December 2013, he abandoned his “young family” in New York and traveled to Syria, the department said, where he fought for ISIS, rising through the organization’s ranks over the next five years. Captured in 2019, Asainov continued to pledge his allegiance to ISIS’ “murderous path,” Peace said. “I will never change this path, even if they give me freedom a thousand times,” Asainov told his mother in a recorded phone call from jail, according to the Associated Press. “Do you understand?”