A New York pizza show opened has admitted he tried to recruit fighters to join ISIS within Syria.
Mufid Elfgeeh, aged 31, helped arrange travel and funding and put one recruit in touch with an English-speaking ISIS militant in Iraq, authorities said.
The U.S. citizen, who moved to America from Yemen in 1998, used Twitter, WhatsApp and over 23 different Facebook accounts to announce his support for violent jihad and pledge allegiance to ISIS.
Elfgeeh, who ran Mojoe’s Famous Pizza and Chicken in Rochester, New York, until his arrest in 2014, bought two handguns and silencers that he planned to use to kill returning U.S. soldiers.
He also purchased a laptop and a camera for two recruits for a planned trip in 2014, as well as paying $240 to help one of them get a birth certificate and expedited passport.
Elfgeeh, who admitted two terror offences, wired $600 via Western Union to a third person in Yemen to help pay for their travel to Syria.
Authorities said he had plotted to send three men to a ‘welcoming camp’ in Syria for jihadist education and training.
Two of the recruits were FBI informants, of which one had been encouraged by the terrorist sympathizer to join fighting overseas in 2013.
The FBI made the guns he bought inoperable before a confidential source gave them to the suspect, the Justice Department statement said following his arrest.
Elfgeeh pleaded guilty in federal court to two counts of attempting to provide material support to ISIS in a plea agreement that recommends a sentence of just under 22-and-a-half years in prison.
He will be sentenced on March 17 next year.
Read More: Pizza Shop Owner Admits Trying to Recruit for Islamic State
