Brooklyn man who left family to become ISIS sniper gets life plus 70 years in prison

NEW YORK — An unrepentant Brooklyn terrorist who abandoned his wife and daughter to train snipers for ISIS in Syria was sentenced to life plus 70 years in prison, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

Ruslan Asainov, 47, acted as a “force multiplier” for the jihadi organization, fighting for ISIS in several key battles, and training other members to become snipers and kill more efficiently, federal prosecutors said.

After a two-week trial in Brooklyn Federal Court, a jury found him guilty on Feb. 7 of providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy and obstructing justice.

Asainov nodded as Assistant U.S. Attorney J. Matthew Haggans described his continued devotion to the Islamic State cause, and smiled and flashed a thumbs up at his mother, who sat in the courtroom gallery.

“If released he will act in the service of ISIS again. There is no doubt,” Haggans said. “The defendant chooses violence. Do not give him the opportunity to inflict his choices on the world ever again.”

Asainov made no statements to Judge Nicholas Garuafis, and directed his defense lawyers to put nothing on the record requesting a lighter sentence.

“It’s rare that I start my remarks at sentencing saying that I agree with the government,” said defense lawyer Susan Kellman. “This is who he is. This is what he believes fervently.”

Garaufis pointed out that Asainov, a native of Kazakhstan, chose to become a naturalized U.S. citizen before his turn to extremism.

“At some point, he saw the benefit of him to embracing this country,” the judge said. “He wanted that at some point, and then something happened…. Everything went in the opposite direction.

“It’s hard for the court to have any understanding and sympathy for what we have seen in this trial,” the judge said. “There is a misplaced sense of what religion is and how it works, and how religion embraces love, not hate and destruction.”

Asainov lived in Brooklyn from 1998 to 2013. He married in the U.S., had a daughter and converted to Islam in 2009, prosecutors said.

He became radicalized through online content, and by 2013 he booked a one-way ticket to Turkey via Switzerland and then made his way to Syria.

“When asked by law enforcement how many confirmed kills he had, the defendant said he could not recall,” federal prosecutors wrote in an Oct. 6 sentencing memo. “The number of deaths attributable to his students cannot be calculated. … As the trial record made clear, the defendant was responsible — as both a shooter and a trainer — for far more than one death.”

Asainov’s ex-wife testified at his trial, describing how he sent her a series of messages after his departure, angry that his daughter was dressed in a Halloween costume. “We are dying here to get rid of these holidays, and my daughter is participating in them,” he told her.

Asainov proved to be so adept with a rifle that he became a sniper instructor, training dozens of other ISIS members. He also tried to get money and equipment, including night vision scopes, to bolster ISIS.

“The defendant fought for years to promote ISIS’s goals until the bitter end during ISIS’s last stand in Baghouz, Syria,” prosecutors wrote. “Even at the war’s end, as his final act in support of ISIS, the defendant set his cell phone on fire before surrendering.”

Asainov was captured in Syria and brought back to the U.S. in 2019 to face federal charges. He admitted to teaching his deadly craft when interviewed by FBI agents, telling them about how he would give a three-hour lesson just on how to properly pull a trigger.

In one video shown to the jury, he explained to an agent. “My job? I was a sniper.”

In 2020, he was caught with a makeshift ISIS flag in his cell at the now-shuttered Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, according to feds.

“The defendant committed his life to that terrorist organization and became a lethal sniper for ISIS in Syria, training many other ISIS members to shoot to kill as ISIS waged its brutal, barbaric campaign,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement Tuesday. “To this day, the defendant maintains his unrepentant allegiance to that hateful cause.”

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