Free Republic

Evocative of that infamous 2019 Washington Post article that described the recently-deceased ISIS killer Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as an “austere religious scholar” who displayed “canny pragmatism” during his reign of terror, candidate for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani recently posted a photo to social media showing him cheerily embracing a man by the name of Siraj Wahhaj (real name Jeffrey Kearse), a Muslim imam who has a long history of raising funds for convicted killers with terrorist ideologies, calling the experience “pleasure” and referring to Wahhaj as a “leader” and “pillar” of the community:Today at Masjid At-Taqwa, I had...

Already missing from the news cycle is the story of Muslim leader Siraj Wahhaj, who alerted authorities to the squalid conditions in New Mexico in which his son, two daughters, another man and woman, and 11 children were living.Authorities arrived at the compound to some of the most horrifying conditions they had ever seen, and prosecutors identified the makeshift home as a training ground for militant children, including in carrying out school shootings. The imam’s son had been wanted for kidnapping his own four-year-old child, who had severe disabilities. The body of a young child was recovered from the...

TAOS – The mother of a disabled boy whose disappearance led to a law enforcement raid at a remote, ramshackle compound north of Taos last week told police in Georgia that the boy’s father wanted to perform an exorcism on the child. According to an arrest warrant affidavit filed in Taos, the woman said Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, 39, one of five adults now charged after the Friday raid, believed “the child is possessed by the devil” and that he intended to deny the boy his medication. ... the whereabouts of Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj, 4, who was allegedly abducted by Siraj Ibn...