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According to the White House, Royer has studied religious sciences with traditional Islamic scholars and spent over a decade working at non-profit Islamic organisations.
Trump Administration Names Former Jihadist Ismail Royer In Key Advisory Board
The Donald Trump administration on Saturday named, Ismail Royer, a former jihadist who spent 13 years in prison on terror-related charges, as a member of the White House’s Religious Freedom Commission advisory board.
An Islamic jihadist, Royer Royer was indicted on terrorism-related charges, including conspiracy to levy war against the United States and providing material support to al-Qaeda and LeT in 2003. He had pleaded guilty in 2004 to aiding and abetting the use of firearms and explosives, receiving a 20-year sentence and serving 13 years, Washington Post reported.
According to the White House, Royer has studied religious sciences with traditional Islamic scholars and spent over a decade working at non-profit Islamic organisations.
Since converting to Islam in 1992, he has studied religious sciences with traditional Islamic scholars and spent over a decade working at non-profit Islamic organisations. Royer has worked with nonprofits to promote peace between faiths,” the White House said.
It further said that his writing has appeared in multiple publications and he co-authored an article on Islam on Religious Violence Today: Faith and Conflict in the Modern World.
In a conversation with Middle East Forum in 2023, Royer had recalled his journey of how he became a jihadist. “I liked the folks in LeT. I had been very opposed to Bin Laden. I thought Al Qaeda was a group of deviants. I had been recommended to go to LET and told it was not an extremist group, that they leaned toward the imam of Saudi Arabia,” he had said on his relationship with LeT.
“I encouraged Muslims in the mosque to join Lashkar and train with them (in Kashmir). The training was not really that serious, it was more like tourism. It was like, “Here, we will let you shoot guns and roam the mountains and then go back home.” It was almost a kind of promotion,” he had added.
Who Is Ismail Royer?
A son of a photographer and a teacher, Royer grew up in comfortable suburban St. Louis, where even at a young age he was drawn to extremism.
After converting to Islam in 1992, Royer began working with Bosnian refugees in his native St. Louis. After a brief stint with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Washington, DC, he went to Bosnia to fight in the country’s civil war. Royer came back home after the war ended in Bosnia.
According to the prosecutors as reported by Washington Post, he went overseas again in 2000, this time to Pakistan, where he met with Lashkar-e-Taiba. When he came back to Virginia, he started playing paintball in the woods with fellow Muslims, whom he encouraged to join the terror outfit.
After the 9/11 attack in 2001, Royer was a key figure in the “Virginia Jihad Network,” organizing paintball training and facilitating travel to Lashkar camps for weapons training, with some members aiming to support the Taliban against US forces.
Royer was released from prison in 2017.
- Location :
Washington D.C., United States of America (USA)
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