U.S. citizen and former resident of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Ruslan Maratovich Asainov, was sentenced to life imprisonment plus 70 years for providing material support to ISIS that resulted in death. Asainov was also sentenced to concurrent terms of 20 years’ imprisonment on related convictions of conspiracy to provide material support to ISIS and obstruction of justice and 10 years’ imprisonment for receipt of military-type training from ISIS.
“Today’s sentence rightly holds Asainov responsible for the carnage he inflicted as a sworn member of ISIS and protects the world community from this avowed killer,” said Breon Peace, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “The defendant committed his life to that terrorist organization and became a lethal sniper for ISIS in Syria, training many other ISIS members to shoot to kill as ISIS waged its brutal, barbaric campaign. To this day, the defendant maintains his unrepentant allegiance to that hateful cause. Like this defendant now knows, anyone who takes up arms in service of ISIS and causes death and destruction will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law by this Office.”
Between December 2013 and March 2019, Asainov provided ISIS with personnel, including himself, training, and expert advice and assistance, to a foreign terrorist organization, namely ISIS, knowing that ISIS was a designated foreign terrorist organization that had engaged in terrorist activity and terrorism. Asainov also received military-type training from ISIS, in violation of federal law.
On December 24, 2013, Asainov abandoned his wife and daughter in Brooklyn and boarded a flight bound for Istanbul, Turkey. Along with a co-conspirator, Mirsad Kandic, by early January 2014, Asainov traveled to northern Syria in the area of Aleppo, and joined ISIS as a fighter. Kandic was arrested in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, convicted of conspiracy to provide material support to ISIS resulting in death by a federal jury in Brooklyn in May 2022, and sentenced to life in prison in July 2023.
Over the course of approximately five years fighting on behalf of ISIS, Asainov fought in numerous battles against ISIS enemies, including engagements at Kobani, Tabqa, Raqqa, Dayr Az Zawr, and ISIS’s last stand in Syria at Baghouz, in March 2019. Asainov received training in how to use automatic rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
In Tabqa, in mid-2014, he volunteered to train as a sniper. Over time, Asainov became a sniper trainer or “emir” on behalf of ISIS, estimating that he taught nearly 100 students. A former U.S. Navy SEAL scout sniper testified that the defendant’s sniper training course was consistent with what the former SEAL would expect to be taught in a sniper training program.
Asainov admitted to agents from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force that he had fought in numerous battles on behalf of ISIS as a warrior and sniper, serving in several different katibas or ISIS fighting brigades.
In recorded phone calls to his mother from facilities operated by the Bureau of Prisons the defendant told her that he was carrying out Allah’s orders when he waged jihad and killed for ISIS, that he intended to return to waging jihad if released. During his trial, the defendant reiterated his allegiance to ISIS to court personnel, stating that ISIS would rise again.
“Today’s sentence is a just and fair punishment for a naturalized U.S. citizen who forsook the country that took him in,” Edward A. Caban, Commissioner, New York City Police Department said.
“Instead of embracing all that America had to offer him and his family in New York City, he instead pledged allegiance to a foreign terrorist organization. This outcome serves as a warning to those who intend to actively promote or carry out the violent objectives of such groups: The NYPD and our law enforcement partners around the globe will never stop working to identify and bring to justice anyone who so clearly considers our nation their sworn enemy.”
