Ex-ISIS soldier testifies against Ramic
Published 6:00 am Monday, June 10, 2024
- Mirsad Ramic
Jurors at the trial for a Bowling Green man accused of fighting with the terror group ISIS heard Friday from a former ISIS soldier who claimed to have trained with the man and watched him go into battle.
Mirsad Ramic, 34, is on trial in U.S. District Court in Bowling Green, where he faces charges of providing material support and resources to ISIS, conspiring to provide material support to ISIS and receiving military-training from a designated terrorist organization.
Federal prosecutors claim Ramic, a U.S. citizen with dual Bosnian citizenship, conspired with two Saudi nationals who were Western Kentucky University students and traveled from the U.S. to Istanbul, Turkey, in 2014, then paying cash for a flight to a Turkish border city before crossing into Syria and joining ISIS, short for The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.
On Friday, jurors were played a video deposition of a Bosnian man who prosecutors referred to by a pseudonym, “Ahmed Delic.”
The court has allowed certain witnesses to testify under a pseudonym at the request of prosecutors who sought to protect their personal safety or ongoing covert law enforcement investigations.
Delic, who gave his testimony in April with the aid of an interpreter, said his family was brought to Syria in 2013 at age 15, joining his father, who had arrived a few months earlier to fight for ISIS.
Delic left Syria after turning 18, and he was arrested in Bosnia and convicted in a Bosnian court for crimes related to his ISIS membership.
He is now incarcerated in Bosnia for a separate robbery conviction, saying that both his father and brother were killed in Syria.
“I’m testifying because I as a former member of ISIS have been convicted and I wouldn’t want anything to happen to someone else that happened to me,” Delic said through an interpreter. “After coming from a large family, I have nobody by my side.”
Delic said that, as a soldier, his responsibilities included working at checkpoints and guarding borders into the territory where he was stationed near the Syrian city of Sarrin, as well as guarding silos containing grain and weapons.
Military units were organized on the basis of common language spoken by soldiers, Delic said.
During his testimony, Delic identified several pictures presented to him by prosecutors, including pictures containing Ramic in military gear, holding a firearm and standing with a black ISIS flag.
Delic said Ramic told him an Arabic friend paid for Ramic’s trip to Syria and testified that Ramic took part in training with automatic weapons.
“We would go practice shooting at the range together in our free time,” Delic said.
Delic said that Ramic did not communicate much with the other soldiers in the unit, but he had an interest in sniper rifles and heavy machine guns, though Delic said he did not see Ramic fire those weapons.
Delic said he conducted reconnaissance ahead of an attack on the Syrian city of Kobani in late 2014 against Kurdish militants.
During the attack, Ramic was part of the first line of soldiers in the offensive, while Delic was a member of the support group that followed them, he said.
Delic said that during the nighttime attack he was only able to see gunfire before joining the battle.
The siege of Kobani led to ISIS capturing several villages and driving out hundreds of thousands of civilians, but airstrikes by U.S.-led coalition forces drove ISIS into retreat in early 2015.
After ISIS lost control of the city, Delic said that he lived an apartment with Ramic as one of his roommates, and testified that Ramic traveled to Mosul, Iraq during that time with an Arabic friend and was involved in a vehicle accident, but was not injured.
Delic said he tried twice to escape Syria, and was captured the first time and turned over to military police, placed in solitary confinement for a month and threatened with death if he attempted to escape again.
He successfully escaped Syria after turning 18, fleeing to Turkey where he was deported to Bosnia and arrested.
During cross-examination by Ramic’s attorney, federal public defender Scott Wendelsdorf, Delic said he did not directly engage ground forces and did not personally see Ramic’s actions in the battle for Kobani.
Delic also acknowledged that Syria was in the midst of civil war at the time, with ISIS soldiers fighting against forces under Syrian president Bashar al-Assad as well as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a Kurdish militant group designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization.
Delic was also shown a copy of plea agreement in which he agreed to cooperate with Bosnian authorities in exchange for his guilty plea to offenses related to his participation in ISIS, but later clarified when questioned by Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Tieke that he had completed that sentence and was under no further obligation to cooperate.
Agents present ISIS recordsA host of federal law enforcement agents testified Thursday afternoon, presenting records purported to belong to ISIS that American intelligence agents gathered.
FBI Supervisory Special Agent Tracy Minnich discussed a thumb drive containing thousands of records that he obtained from a Syrian source, who had received the information from a subsource who paid money to a man who reportedly found the material in a bombed-out building in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which ISIS made its capital when in 2014 after capturing it.
Cross-examined by Wendelsdorf, Minnich acknowledged that several factions were fighting in Syria during the time period covered by Ramic’s alleged crimes.
Minnich was also asked by Wendelsdorf about whether raw intelligence gathered in tracking terrorists was different from evidence that could be admissible in court, and Minnich said the FBI could treat information as future evidence.
Wendy Kerner, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who was assigned to the multi-agency Joint Terrorism Task Force, said ISIS kept meticulous records of the recruits it processed at the Syrian border, with intake forms showing an applicant’s biographical information, educational background and whether they wished to be a fighter or a martyr.
Kerner said the records were part of a campaign to legitimize ISIS as a governmental entity.
“They were great record keepers and tried to run themselves like their own government,” Kerner said.
The trial continues on Monday, with the prosecution planning to call two more witnesses before resting.