A federal judge Thursday sentenced a former Chicago IT specialist to 25 years in prison for helping the Islamic State terrorist group through a media campaign that encouraged attacks, celebrated beheadings and other gruesome violence and taunted Western culture with memes like a headless Santa delivering a bomb.
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U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey issued the sentence to Ashraf al Safoo, 41, who was convicted in a bench trial in June 2025 of 11 counts, including providing material support to a terrorist organization, conspiracy to transmit threats in interstate commerce, and computer fraud, according to Joseph Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office.
Safoo was also ordered to serve 10 years of supervised release, the federal version of parole, after his release from prison, Fitzpatrick said.
Prosecutors alleged at trial that although al Safoo was not a sworn IS member, he was a leader of a group called Khattab Media Foundation, an internet-based propaganda organization that swore an oath of allegiance to the Islamic State group.
“Brothers, roll up your sleeves!” al Safoo allegedly posted in one Khattab-related forum in May 2018. “Cut video publications into small clips, take still shots, and post the hard work of your brothers in the apostate’s pages and sites. Participate in the war, and spread fear.”
Authorities said the foundation ran like a well-oiled public relations firm, with writers, editors, tech advisers and audiovisual producers all pushing a central message of fear, violence and death. To accomplish his goals, al Safoo and his co-conspirators hacked legitimate social media accounts to make it seem like the messages were coming from actual users and to make it harder for platforms such as Twitter, now known as X, to take them down, prosecutors said.
A key portion of the prosecution’s evidence focused on the videotaped testimony of convicted Islamic State member Yasir al Anzi, who was captured in 2019 by U.S. forces in Iraq and is serving a sentence there of 20 years to life. He sat for a sworn deposition several years ago in a courthouse in Bagdad, where he testified about his communications with Safoo.
Safoo’s attorney argued at trial that his actions were First Amendment-protected speech, and that much of the content his client put out was just “repackaged” material from news reports already online.
A former web developer and internet technology specialist, al Safoo has a master’s degree in computer sciences and had been living in the U.S. for about 10 years before his 2018 arrest in the Budlong Woods neighborhood of Chicago.