Chicago: Muslim man named Abdella Ahmad Tounisi arrested for trying to join jihad in Syria

CHICAGO (AP) — An Illinois teenager who was friends with a man charged last year with trying to bomb a Chicago bar was arrested at an airport on his way to try to join a terrorist group in war-torn Syria, the FBI said Saturday.

Abdella Ahmad Tounisi was arrested Friday night as he attempted to board a flight from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport to Turkey, which borders Syria, the FBI said. He hoped to join Jabhat al-Nusrah, an al-Qaida-affiliated group fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime in a bloody civil war.

There are no links between Tounisi and the Boston Marathon bombings earlier in the week, the head of the FBI office in Chicago, Cory B. Nelson, said in a statement announcing the arrest.

Tounisi, a U.S. citizen, was snared in an Internet sting after contacting a sham website set up by the FBI that purported to hook up would-be fighters with terrorists, the federal complaint says.

The 18-year-old Aurora man was surprisingly frank about his lack of fighting experience.

"Concerning my fighting skills, to be honest, I do not have any," he allegedly wrote in one email written this year, according to the complaint. "I'm very small ... physically but I pray to Allah that he makes me successful."

No such luck.

At the top of the website were the words, "A Call for Jihad in Syria," and the site invited interested parties to "come and join your lion brothers ... who are fighting under the true banner of Islam." Elsewhere, the site advised users on how to conceal their Internet tracks, the complaint says....

"The true banner of Islam." Everywhere violent jihadists claim to be the true Muslims. But only greasy Islamophobes notice that the "moderates" never have an effective comeback to this claim.