By Debbie Schlussel

Well, actually it wasn’t loans that were going to finance ISIS jihad. It was worse: outright federal student financial aid grants.

You’re probably aware of the six Somali Muslim immigrants from Minneapolistan who recently were charged in federal court with joining ISIS and trying to leave for Syria to join the jihad. But I’ll bet you didn’t know that at least one of them used thousands of dollars in federal student loans to finance his trip and finance ISIS’ jihad.

In late April, six Somalian Muslims–all of whom were naturalized and received U.S. citizenship and all of whom were in college–were charged in a federal criminal complaint in U.S. Federal Court in Minnesota with joining ISIS and seeking to travel to Syria to join in the non-stop beheading party. The men–Zacharia Yusuf Abdurahman, 19; Adnan Farah, 19; Hanad Mustafe Musse, 19; Guled Ali Omar,20; Abdirahman Yasin Daud, 21; and Mohamed Abdihamid Farah, 21–spent nearly a year planning and raising funds for their trip and to finance jihadist activity once they reached Syria.

According to the sworn affidavit of FBI Special Agent Nicholas L. Marshall, attached to the federal criminal complaint against the men, one of these ISIS terrorists, Guled Ali Omar, used his federal student financial aid, to the tune of thousands of dollars, to finance his Syrian trip and apparently was going to use the leftovers to further finance the jihad, once he got there. Page 19 of the affidavit states:

Agents conducting this investigation learned from a Confidential Human Source (“CHS”) that OMAR, Y.J., and the CHS had also planned to leave the United States to join ISIL in late May of 2014. According to the CHS, he, OMAR, and Y.J. planned to drive to California, then each make their separate way to Syria from there. Bank records obtained show that OMAR withdrew $5,000 in cash from his federal educational financial aid debit card in the weeks leading up to this attempted departure. These withdrawals, occurring between May 8 and May 21, 2014, emptied his federal educational financial aid account. Records also show that OMAR had emptied his personal account on May 23, 2014, by withdrawing $1,200 in cash.

By the way, despite all of this federal aid largesse that very nearly went to ISIS jihadist operations, friends of Guled Ali Omar set up a GoFundMe account for his family, which raised $600 before it was shut down. Since Omar was so deft in raising government money to fund his jihad, I’ll bet his family has already garnered plenty of entitlements itself and doesn’t need the GoFundMe zakat [Islamic charity].

The six jihadist men belong to the Dar Al-Farooq Mosque. But they met up and planned their jihad while they were shopping in the Southdale Center mall in Edina, Minnesota.

You gotta wonder what they might’ve planned for the mall if they hadn’t been caught but, for other reasons, were still unable to leave the country (as several of their parents claim they tried to hide their passports). And it’s likely that if the Syria trip didn’t happen but a domestic attack did, the federal student financial aid would have gone to finance domestic ISIS jihad.

Only in America (and Canada and France and the UK and all of the Western world).