A New American Leader Rises in ISIS
Zulfi Hoxha
The clues are out there  if you know where to look. Scattered across far-flung corners of the internet  there is evidence that  Zulfi Hoxha  the son of an Albanian-American pizza-shop owner from New Jersey   had sinister plans. First there’s the defunct Twitter profile  which at one point engaged in a conversation with a State Department counter-propaganda account about the Islamic State. Then there’s the fact that  he  used the social-networking site Paltalk  a communications platform reportedly popular among Western jihadis. But none of it compares to the ISIS propaganda video that  according to multiple law-enforcement officials  shows  Hoxha  beheading captured Kurdish soldiers. If they are right about his identity   Hoxha  is the first American Islamic State member known to be beheading individuals in such a video.  Hoxha  is now known to have become a senior commander of Islamic State and one of the faces of the group’s recruitment efforts  according to federal court records.  Hoxha  left the United States on April 6  2015. Four days later   he  was in an Islamic State training camp. Within just six months  according to multiple law-enforcement officials   he  was featured in that gruesome video. Related Story The American Climbing the Ranks of ISIS As cases of Islamic State supporters continue to trickle through the American justice system  details are slowly emerging of both the extent of American involvement in the upper echelons of the group and the role of recruitment and mobilization networks in the country. Investigations have already uncovered the stories of Americans like John Georgelas and Abdullah Ramo Pazara  both of whom were part of wider jihadi networks in America and eventually reached relatively high-ranking and influential positions within the Islamic State hierarchy. While the ISIS presence in America is often characterized by so-called “lone wolves ” attackers who claim allegiance to the Islamic State but show little formal connections either to its operatives overseas or other likeminded Americans  stories like that of Zulfi Hoxha are a reminder of the existence and importance of jihadist recruitment networks in the United States. The extent of these networks does not compare to those in Europe  but they nonetheless play a crucial role in recruiting and mobilizing American foreign fighters for ISIS  who number in the dozens. Indeed  the majority of American foreign fighters we have identified had close connections to other American supporters of ISIS prior to their departure. Some  like Hoxha  made these connections through the internet and  via their new contacts  were able to liaise with ISIS facilitators who helped them travel to Syria.
As the physical caliphate quickly disappears  media reports speak of foreign fighters  including Americans  attempting to lay low in Turkey before deciding their next move. Others have returned to their home countries  much to the concern of law-enforcement officials who sometimes lack the personnel and legal tools to address the issue. However  for the time being  the once-feared “wave” of returning Western foreign fighters has only amounted to a trickle. Yet even from afar  Western ISIS recruits wield influence on their sympathizers back home. * * * In May 2017  the Islamic State media office in Iraq’s Nineveh province released a 45-minute video entitled “We Will Surely Guide Them To Our Ways.” Like many Islamic State media productions  the video includes cameos of foreign fighters from several countries. One of the masked men depicted in the video is an American going by the name of “Abu Hamza al-Amriki.” Speaking in an inflected American accent  he criticizes the United States-led efforts against Islamic State and exhorts the “muwahiddin [believers]” in America to carry out domestic attacks: “Are you incapable of stabbing a kaffir [non-Muslim] with a knife  throwing him off of a building  or running him over with a car? Liberate yourself from hellfire by killing a kaffir.” Later  he shows off American-made rocket launchers  reportedly taken from Shia and Kurdish militias after Islamic State defeated them on the battlefield. During a two-year investigation on the cadre of Americans who successfully travelled to Syria and Iraq to join the group  federal records revealed that Abu Hamza al-Amriki is Zulfi Hoxha.
By the time of the video’s release  the U.S. Department of Justice was already knee-deep in the prosecution of several domestic Islamic State supporters who allegedly assisted Hoxha in his travel to join the group. One of these individuals  David “Daoud” Wright  was sentenced in December 2017 to 28 years in federal prison  after being convicted of providing material support to Islamic State and conspiring to murder U.S. citizens. As a result of evidence introduced at Wright’s trial  a number of details about  Hoxha    his  connections to Wright and  his  co-conspirators  and  his  role in Islamic State quietly became available. At the time of the video’s filming   Hoxha  was around 25 years old. Records of  his  travel from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection  filed as court exhibits  show  Hoxha  departing the United States for Istanbul  Turkey on April 6  2015.  He  arrived in Islamic State-held territory in Syria shortly thereafter. According to its sentencing memorandum in the Wright case  U.S. law enforcement now assesses that  Hoxha  “has become an ISIS senior commander ” but the filing provides no further details as to his role or current whereabouts. However  the May 2017 video puts him in northwestern Iraq. This is so far the only instance in which the U.S. government has confirmed the name (and American citizenship) of an Islamic State member who appears in one of the group’s media products. While a number of Americans have appeared in terrorist propaganda videos over the years  law enforcement rarely comments on their identity. Moreover  the government does not often publicly release its assessments of American Islamic State members’ role or rank.  Hoxha ’s apparent status in the group places  him  in an elite category of the group’s American members who have risen to some level of leadership. Most American Islamic State supporters never made it to Syria. In the last three years  more than 50 were arrested attempting to the make the journey. Still others were charged for activities ranging from raising money for the group to planning attacks.
Following the Wright trial  we made repeated attempts to gain more information on  Hoxha  from official channels. A representative from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Massachusetts declined to comment  as did the FBI’s national office. Matthew Reilly  spokesman for the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office stated  “no defendant by that name has been charged in the District of New Jersey.” Unofficially  intelligence sources confirmed a rumor we had quietly chased for months. In October 2015  a video was released by the Islamic State of a purported American brutally beheading a Kurdish peshmerga soldier. The 15-minute video  shot from multiple camera angles  features four individuals dressed in black and standing behind captured Kurdish soldiers. Its subject speaks with the same accent and inflection as  Hoxha  in the May 2017 release. Multiple law-enforcement officials told us that the individual who says he is “delivering a message to Obama” and then commits the first execution is  Hoxha . If officially confirmed  it would be the first case of an American Islamic State member beheading someone in a propaganda video. * * * Little is known about  Hoxha ’s personal background. A search for  his  online activity finds a defunct Twitter account bearing  his  name  which interacted with other Islamic State supporters  as well as detractors. In October 2014  for example  the account engaged in conversation with the State Department’s “Think Again Turn Away” account  which at the time was trying to counter Islamic State messaging on the platform. He was actually not the first American jihadi to do so. Around the same time  a 17-year-old  Ali Amin  was also trolling the State Department Twitter account. A short time later  he was arrested and ultimately sentenced to 11 years for encouraging his high school friend to join the Islamic State.
 Hoxha ’s presence elsewhere online also reveals links to how  he  connected with  his  future co-conspirators. An account on the gaming website Steam bearing the username “Hohxa77” lists  his  favorite titles  including Splinter Cell  Mortal Kombat  and Left 4 Dead. Indeed  this shared interest in video games may have been one of the first things that brought  Hoxha  together with David Wright  who was listed as a friend on  his  Steam account under the name “d.sharifwright.” During Wright’s trial  prosecutors argued that he used several video games  including Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and other titles to “virtually prepare” for jihad. His defense attorneys  however  painted Wright  who weighed over 400 pounds at the time of the conspiracy  as a “fat  failed loser” who used video games as a substitute for real-life violent activity  according to the trial transcript. Unfortunately  one can be both a gamer who veers towards violence and weigh in at 400 pounds of loneliness and isolation. Islamic State’s 2015 instructional manual for its Western supporters  “How to Survive in the West ” includes references to video games as a method of training to join the group. More importantly  it may have brought together Wright and Hoxha  who unlike Wright successfully followed through on his intentions to support the Islamic State using violence. At the trial  investigators claimed that Wright and  Hoxha ’s conspiracy began in November 2014  although the two may have virtually met one another as early as 2010. The two most revealing elements of Wright and  Hoxha ’s online interactions are their use of Skype and the social-networking site Paltalk. According to court records  at the time  Wright (under the alias Umar Mukhtar Abdul-Qadir) and  Hoxha  were both members of chatrooms on Paltalk called “The Solution for Humanity” and “Road to Jannah.”
During Wright’s interrogation  which was recounted at trial in testimony by a local police officer  he claimed that  Hoxha  reached out to him via Paltalk and asked him if he was interested in Islamic State. Wright told the officer that he responded three weeks later after conducting research  telling  Hoxha  that  he  believed that Islamic State’s’ mission was legitimate and necessary. From this point on  Hoxha and Wright were in frequent contact via Paltalk and Skype’s instant messenger service  sharing videos  issues of Islamic State’s official magazine Dabiq  and news articles about the group and its activities. These conversations between Wright and  Hoxha  continued until April 2015  when  Hoxha  left the U.S. to join Islamic State. Among the subjects of most interest were the best options for joining and what would ensure the maximum religious reward. Some early Western travelers believed that they could migrate to Islamic State-held territory (an act that the group refers to as hijrah)  but only participate in the societal aspects of the self-declared Caliphate while avoiding combat and violence. Neither Wright nor  Hoxha  appear to have held that naïve delusion. According to trial exhibits of their conversations  Wright cautioned  Hoxha  that “if you want to travel and live under a dawla [Islamic state] there is no harm in that  but you won’t receive the reward from Allah like those who are assembled in the ranks unless you assemble in the ranks.”
 Hoxha  and Wright’s respective commitments to violence are demonstrated elsewhere in their conversations  which were introduced into the trial exhibits. The two men sent each other links to Islamic State propaganda material  including the February 2015 video that depicted the burning of Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh. They also exchanged information about how to buy guns online. As with most known cases of Americans travelling to join Islamic State  the internet proved a useful tool for  Hoxha . While it is often tempting to assume that individuals are “radicalized online” through their consumption of propaganda  this is rarely the case. More commonly  the internet allows people to make contacts with and plug themselves into pre-existing  real-world recruitment and radicalization networks. In  Hoxha ’s case  the network  he  found would encourage and eventually facilitate  his  travel to Islamic State territory. The court records show that prior to  Hoxha ’s departure  David Wright put  him  in touch with another American Islamic State supporter  his uncle Usaamah Rahim  and together they began helping  Hoxha  as  he  prepared to travel in the spring of 2015. The two men raised money for  Hoxha ’s plane ticket to Istanbul by selling Rahim’s laptop on Craigslist.  Hoxha  departed for Istanbul on April 6. A day earlier  Rahim contacted Wright on Skype with instructions from  Hoxha . “AsSalaamu A'laikum Zulfi asked me if you could delete his name off Skype ” Rahim writes. “But before you do it  if you have any saved messages to him go to ‘tools ’ go to ‘options ’ then click on ‘privacy ’ and click ‘clear history.’” These steps removed the interactions between  Hoxha  and Wright on Skype  but did not clear the metadata that would later be used in Wright’s trial.
Throughout his journey  trial exhibits show   Hoxha  remained in contact with Rahim via various encrypted messengers  confirming his arrival at a safe house and then dropping out of contact after saying he was leaving for training. Thereafter  Rahim kept tabs on  Hoxha ’s activity via another Islamic State member who he contacted on encrypted messengers: the influential British Islamic State facilitator and virtual attack planner Junaid Hussain. In later conversations between Hussain and Rahim  Hussain comments on  Hoxha ’s location and whereabouts  saying that  he  was “in training” at an Islamic State camp. This indicates that Hussain may have helped  Hoxha  cross into the group’s territory. Wright  Rahim and a third member of the group  Nicholas Rovinski  eventually decided on a different path than that taken by  Hoxha . They were in the early stages of a plot to kidnap and behead the anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller when  on June 2  2015  Rahim was stopped by police outside of CVS in Roslindale  Massachusetts. They wanted to question him after wiretapping a conversation between Rahim and Wright that morning during which they discussed attack plans. Refusing to co-operate  Rahim pulled a hunting knife on the officers and was shot dead. Wright and Rovinski were arrested shortly afterward and charged with a range of offences; in 2016 Rovinski pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges related to the plot . He testified against Wright  who was convicted in 2017 and is now serving a 28-year sentence.
The clues are out there  if you know where to look. Scattered across far-flung corners of the internet  there is evidence that  Zulfi Hoxha  the son of an Albanian-American pizza-shop owner from New Jersey   had sinister plans. First there’s the defunct Twitter profile  which at one point engaged in a conversation with a State Department counter-propaganda account about the Islamic State. Then there’s the fact that  he  used the social-networking site Paltalk  a communications platform reportedly popular among Western jihadis. But none of it compares to the ISIS propaganda video that  according to multiple law-enforcement officials  shows  Hoxha  beheading captured Kurdish soldiers. If they are right about his identity   Hoxha  is the first American Islamic State member known to be beheading individuals in such a video.  Hoxha  is now known to have become a senior commander of Islamic State and one of the faces of the group’s recruitment efforts  according to federal court records.  Hoxha  left the United States on April 6  2015. Four days later   he  was in an Islamic State training camp. Within just six months  according to multiple law-enforcement officials   he  was featured in that gruesome video. Related Story The American Climbing the Ranks of ISIS As cases of Islamic State supporters continue to trickle through the American justice system  details are slowly emerging of both the extent of American involvement in the upper echelons of the group and the role of recruitment and mobilization networks in the country. Investigations have already uncovered the stories of Americans like John Georgelas and Abdullah Ramo Pazara  both of whom were part of wider jihadi networks in America and eventually reached relatively high-ranking and influential positions within the Islamic State hierarchy. While the ISIS presence in America is often characterized by so-called “lone wolves ” attackers who claim allegiance to the Islamic State but show little formal connections either to its operatives overseas or other likeminded Americans  stories like that of Zulfi Hoxha are a reminder of the existence and importance of jihadist recruitment networks in the United States. The extent of these networks does not compare to those in Europe  but they nonetheless play a crucial role in recruiting and mobilizing American foreign fighters for ISIS  who number in the dozens. Indeed  the majority of American foreign fighters we have identified had close connections to other American supporters of ISIS prior to their departure. Some  like Hoxha  made these connections through the internet and  via their new contacts  were able to liaise with ISIS facilitators who helped them travel to Syria.
As the physical caliphate quickly disappears  media reports speak of foreign fighters  including Americans  attempting to lay low in Turkey before deciding their next move. Others have returned to their home countries  much to the concern of law-enforcement officials who sometimes lack the personnel and legal tools to address the issue. However  for the time being  the once-feared “wave” of returning Western foreign fighters has only amounted to a trickle. Yet even from afar  Western ISIS recruits wield influence on their sympathizers back home. * * * In May 2017  the Islamic State media office in Iraq’s Nineveh province released a 45-minute video entitled “We Will Surely Guide Them To Our Ways.” Like many Islamic State media productions  the video includes cameos of foreign fighters from several countries. One of the masked men depicted in the video is an American going by the name of “Abu Hamza al-Amriki.” Speaking in an inflected American accent  he criticizes the United States-led efforts against Islamic State and exhorts the “muwahiddin [believers]” in America to carry out domestic attacks: “Are you incapable of stabbing a kaffir [non-Muslim] with a knife  throwing him off of a building  or running him over with a car? Liberate yourself from hellfire by killing a kaffir.” Later  he shows off American-made rocket launchers  reportedly taken from Shia and Kurdish militias after Islamic State defeated them on the battlefield. During a two-year investigation on the cadre of Americans who successfully travelled to Syria and Iraq to join the group  federal records revealed that Abu Hamza al-Amriki is Zulfi Hoxha.
By the time of the video’s release  the U.S. Department of Justice was already knee-deep in the prosecution of several domestic Islamic State supporters who allegedly assisted Hoxha in his travel to join the group. One of these individuals  David “Daoud” Wright  was sentenced in December 2017 to 28 years in federal prison  after being convicted of providing material support to Islamic State and conspiring to murder U.S. citizens. As a result of evidence introduced at Wright’s trial  a number of details about  Hoxha    his  connections to Wright and  his  co-conspirators  and  his  role in Islamic State quietly became available. At the time of the video’s filming   Hoxha  was around 25 years old. Records of  his  travel from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection  filed as court exhibits  show  Hoxha  departing the United States for Istanbul  Turkey on April 6  2015.  He  arrived in Islamic State-held territory in Syria shortly thereafter. According to its sentencing memorandum in the Wright case  U.S. law enforcement now assesses that  Hoxha  “has become an ISIS senior commander ” but the filing provides no further details as to his role or current whereabouts. However  the May 2017 video puts him in northwestern Iraq. This is so far the only instance in which the U.S. government has confirmed the name (and American citizenship) of an Islamic State member who appears in one of the group’s media products. While a number of Americans have appeared in terrorist propaganda videos over the years  law enforcement rarely comments on their identity. Moreover  the government does not often publicly release its assessments of American Islamic State members’ role or rank.  [TGT] ’s apparent status in the group places  [TGT]  in an elite category of the group’s American members who have risen to some level of leadership. Most American Islamic State supporters never made it to Syria. In the last three years  more than 50 were arrested attempting to the make the journey. Still others were charged for activities ranging from raising money for the group to planning attacks.
Following the Wright trial  we made repeated attempts to gain more information on  Hoxha  from official channels. A representative from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Massachusetts declined to comment  as did the FBI’s national office. Matthew Reilly  spokesman for the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office stated  “no defendant by that name has been charged in the District of New Jersey.” Unofficially  intelligence sources confirmed a rumor we had quietly chased for months. In October 2015  a video was released by the Islamic State of a purported American brutally beheading a Kurdish peshmerga soldier. The 15-minute video  shot from multiple camera angles  features four individuals dressed in black and standing behind captured Kurdish soldiers. Its subject speaks with the same accent and inflection as  Hoxha  in the May 2017 release. Multiple law-enforcement officials told us that the individual who says he is “delivering a message to Obama” and then commits the first execution is  Hoxha . If officially confirmed  it would be the first case of an American Islamic State member beheading someone in a propaganda video. * * * Little is known about  Hoxha ’s personal background. A search for  his  online activity finds a defunct Twitter account bearing  his  name  which interacted with other Islamic State supporters  as well as detractors. In October 2014  for example  the account engaged in conversation with the State Department’s “Think Again Turn Away” account  which at the time was trying to counter Islamic State messaging on the platform. He was actually not the first American jihadi to do so. Around the same time  a 17-year-old  Ali Amin  was also trolling the State Department Twitter account. A short time later  he was arrested and ultimately sentenced to 11 years for encouraging his high school friend to join the Islamic State.
 Hoxha ’s presence elsewhere online also reveals links to how  he  connected with  his  future co-conspirators. An account on the gaming website Steam bearing the username “Hohxa77” lists  his  favorite titles  including Splinter Cell  Mortal Kombat  and Left 4 Dead. Indeed  this shared interest in video games may have been one of the first things that brought  Hoxha  together with David Wright  who was listed as a friend on  his  Steam account under the name “d.sharifwright.” During Wright’s trial  prosecutors argued that he used several video games  including Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and other titles to “virtually prepare” for jihad. His defense attorneys  however  painted Wright  who weighed over 400 pounds at the time of the conspiracy  as a “fat  failed loser” who used video games as a substitute for real-life violent activity  according to the trial transcript. Unfortunately  one can be both a gamer who veers towards violence and weigh in at 400 pounds of loneliness and isolation. Islamic State’s 2015 instructional manual for its Western supporters  “How to Survive in the West ” includes references to video games as a method of training to join the group. More importantly  it may have brought together Wright and Hoxha  who unlike Wright successfully followed through on his intentions to support the Islamic State using violence. At the trial  investigators claimed that Wright and  Hoxha ’s conspiracy began in November 2014  although the two may have virtually met one another as early as 2010. The two most revealing elements of Wright and  Hoxha ’s online interactions are their use of Skype and the social-networking site Paltalk. According to court records  at the time  Wright (under the alias Umar Mukhtar Abdul-Qadir) and  Hoxha  were both members of chatrooms on Paltalk called “The Solution for Humanity” and “Road to Jannah.”
During Wright’s interrogation  which was recounted at trial in testimony by a local police officer  he claimed that  Hoxha  reached out to him via Paltalk and asked him if he was interested in Islamic State. Wright told the officer that he responded three weeks later after conducting research  telling  Hoxha  that  he  believed that Islamic State’s’ mission was legitimate and necessary. From this point on  Hoxha and Wright were in frequent contact via Paltalk and Skype’s instant messenger service  sharing videos  issues of Islamic State’s official magazine Dabiq  and news articles about the group and its activities. These conversations between Wright and  Hoxha  continued until April 2015  when  Hoxha  left the U.S. to join Islamic State. Among the subjects of most interest were the best options for joining and what would ensure the maximum religious reward. Some early Western travelers believed that they could migrate to Islamic State-held territory (an act that the group refers to as hijrah)  but only participate in the societal aspects of the self-declared Caliphate while avoiding combat and violence. Neither Wright nor  Hoxha  appear to have held that naïve delusion. According to trial exhibits of their conversations  Wright cautioned  Hoxha  that “if you want to travel and live under a dawla [Islamic state] there is no harm in that  but you won’t receive the reward from Allah like those who are assembled in the ranks unless you assemble in the ranks.”
 Hoxha  and Wright’s respective commitments to violence are demonstrated elsewhere in their conversations  which were introduced into the trial exhibits. The two men sent each other links to Islamic State propaganda material  including the February 2015 video that depicted the burning of Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh. They also exchanged information about how to buy guns online. As with most known cases of Americans travelling to join Islamic State  the internet proved a useful tool for  Hoxha . While it is often tempting to assume that individuals are “radicalized online” through their consumption of propaganda  this is rarely the case. More commonly  the internet allows people to make contacts with and plug themselves into pre-existing  real-world recruitment and radicalization networks. In  Hoxha ’s case  the network  he  found would encourage and eventually facilitate  his  travel to Islamic State territory. The court records show that prior to  Hoxha ’s departure  David Wright put  him  in touch with another American Islamic State supporter  his uncle Usaamah Rahim  and together they began helping  Hoxha  as  he  prepared to travel in the spring of 2015. The two men raised money for  Hoxha ’s plane ticket to Istanbul by selling Rahim’s laptop on Craigslist.  Hoxha  departed for Istanbul on April 6. A day earlier  Rahim contacted Wright on Skype with instructions from  Hoxha . “AsSalaamu A'laikum Zulfi asked me if you could delete his name off Skype ” Rahim writes. “But before you do it  if you have any saved messages to him go to ‘tools ’ go to ‘options ’ then click on ‘privacy ’ and click ‘clear history.’” These steps removed the interactions between  Hoxha  and Wright on Skype  but did not clear the metadata that would later be used in Wright’s trial.
Throughout his journey  trial exhibits show   Hoxha  remained in contact with Rahim via various encrypted messengers  confirming his arrival at a safe house and then dropping out of contact after saying he was leaving for training. Thereafter  Rahim kept tabs on  Hoxha ’s activity via another Islamic State member who he contacted on encrypted messengers: the influential British Islamic State facilitator and virtual attack planner Junaid Hussain. In later conversations between Hussain and Rahim  Hussain comments on  Hoxha ’s location and whereabouts  saying that  he  was “in training” at an Islamic State camp. This indicates that Hussain may have helped  Hoxha  cross into the group’s territory. Wright  Rahim and a third member of the group  Nicholas Rovinski  eventually decided on a different path than that taken by  Hoxha . They were in the early stages of a plot to kidnap and behead the anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller when  on June 2  2015  Rahim was stopped by police outside of CVS in Roslindale  Massachusetts. They wanted to question him after wiretapping a conversation between Rahim and Wright that morning during which they discussed attack plans. Refusing to co-operate  Rahim pulled a hunting knife on the officers and was shot dead. Wright and Rovinski were arrested shortly afterward and charged with a range of offences; in 2016 Rovinski pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges related to the plot . He testified against Wright  who was convicted in 2017 and is now serving a 28-year sentence.