A US soldier tried to provide information to the Islamic State (IS) group to help it attack US troops in the Middle East, the US Department of Justice said on Wednesday.
However, 22-year-old Cole Bridges was actually communicating with an FBI employee posing as a supporter of the violent extremist organization, which once held swathes of Iraq and Syria before losing the territory it seized to local forces backed by a US-led international coalition.
Bridges on Wednesday “pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization and attempting to murder US military service members,” the department said in a statement.
Photo: AP
The department said the private first class — who joined the US Army in 2019 — went from consuming online extremist propaganda to trying to provide information to aid the IS.
Bridges began communicating with the FBI employee in October 2020 and “provided training and guidance to purported [IS] fighters who were planning attacks, including advice about potential targets in New York City.”
He later told the alleged IS supporter how the extremists could best attack US forces in the Middle East, diagramming maneuvers for them to “maximize the lethality of attacks” and giving advice on how to fortify an encampment against a special-forces attack.
He then sent a video to the FBI employee of himself in body armor standing in front of a flag used by IS fighters and followed it with a second clip in which he “narrated a propaganda speech in support of the anticipated ambush by [IS] on US troops,” the department said.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS