Sentencing set for St. Louis Park man who left family to fight for ISIS in 2015

More than five years after his capture by Syrian forces, a St. Louis Park man who left his family to fight for the ISIS terror group has a sentencing date in Minnesota.

Abdelhamid Al-Madioum will be sentenced May 1 in Minneapolis on charges of providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization. He faces up to 20 years in federal prison and a lifetime of supervised release.

On Tuesday, Senior U.S. District Judge Ann Montgomery set the sentencing date for al-Madioum, now 27, who pleaded guilty to the charges in January 2021. According to jail records, Al-Madioum has been held in Sherburne County jail since March 2023.

The sentencing will be the latest chapter in a long-winding odyssey for the former Normandale Community College student. He admitted to Montgomery that he researched and planned to join the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) as early as 2014, when he was 18. Once in ISIS territory, Al-Madioum quickly began training and fighting with one of the group’s battalions and later incurred serious injuries while doing so.

Al-Madioum has since admitted to leaving his family to join ISIS while on a summer 2015 family trip to visit relatives in Morocco. Al-Madioum said he purchased a visa and a plane ticket to enter Turkey without his family’s knowledge.

During his January 2021 plea hearing, where Al-Madioum appeared via video as his parents watched, he admitted to flying from Casablanca to Istanbul in July 2015, meeting with ISIS members who helped him cross into Syria and later travel to Mosul, Iraq. There, he was administratively enrolled into ISIS and received military training before being assigned to the Tariq Bin-Ziyad battalion, which is part of the Abu Mutaz al-Qurashi division of ISIS.

According to court records, that battalion’s duties included “preparing foreign fighters to conduct suicide attacks in European countries.” In interviews with CBS News and National Public Radio reporters after his 2019 arrest in Syria, Al-Madioum initially claimed that he never fought for ISIS and was only in its territory to study medicine.

But al-Madioum later told Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Winter during his plea hearing that he lied to those journalists.

“I came here today to admit to that crime and, you know, face my destiny that that’s true: that I was a soldier of ISIS,” Al-Madioum said.

Al-Madioum lost most of his right arm from an apparent air assault in Iraq. According to court documents, he also suffered severe injuries to both legs and his left foot along with nerve damage.

Though unable to continue fighting for ISIS, Al-Madioum said he continued to receive a stipend from ISIS until late 2018. He remained a member of ISIS until surrendering in March 2019 to the Syrian Democratic Fores near Baghouz, Syria. The SDF then turned him over to the FBI around 2020 and he was indicted by Minnesota federal prosecutors soon after.

The Star Tribune first reported the FBI’s investigation into Al-Madioum in 2017 based on then-newly unsealed court filings. It was the first new disclosure of a Minnesotan attempting to join ISIS since the high-profile prosecution of nine Twin Cities men a year earlier.

Al-Madioum’s May sentencing date will be nearly two years after he was initially scheduled to be sentenced. The reason for the delay has not been publicly declared, and messages have been left seeking comment from his attorney and the government.