As the terrorism prosecution against Russian national Murat Kurashev progressed from 2021 indictment through his 2024 sentencing, no government press release or media report mentioned the one fact that would resonate with an American public anxious about the historic mass migration border crisis that raged outside the Sacramento courtroom.
It was that Kurashev, a 37-year-old father of three who hailed from the Russian Federation’s terrorism-addled Kabardino-Balkaria region region next door to Chechnya, got into the United States by illegally crossing the Southwest Border from Mexico with his wife and young children.
The Kurashev terrorism case — he wired money to Syria for guns and battle motorcycles but also posed a credible attack threat himself — marks the worst fears of an open border.
Unvetted bad actors are taking advantage of the system — and who knows how many we haven’t caught?
Kurashev’s border crossing occurred on Dec. 19, 2018, under former President Donald Trump.
It happened during a surge of foreign national families that at the time just discovered a legal loophole that forces the Americans to quickly release parents with children on asylum claims, an opening Trump later closed with his “Remain in Mexico” expulsion policy.
Kurashev was already suspected as an Islamic extremist who’d fled repeated interrogations by Russian counterterrorism intelligence officers, the court records show.
Nevertheless, after Kurashev illegally crossed, US Border Patrol appears to have quickly released him into the interior.
He was soon enough sending $13,000 he earned in California to the US-designated al-Qaeda terrorist group formerly known as the al-Nusra Front, now renamed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is fighting the Russian-backed Syrian government.
HTS used the money to field equipment, an AK-47, and at least one combat motorcycle.
In fact, his HTS terrorist friends overseas were so thankful they sent a battlefield video of themselves emblazoning his online nickname, “Abu Salim,” on the motorcycle’s gas tank and reminding the audience that “donating for the purchase of a motorcycle was tantamount to participating in the frontlines of the war in Syria,” court records show.
Kurashev pleaded guilty in January 2024, and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
“The FBI assesses that, had he not been arrested, he may have become an operational participant in terrorist activities,” the investigating FBI agent told the Sacrament court at one point. “Kurashev’s behavior firmly places him on the continuum for mobilizing to violence.”
He was a true believer, eagerly consuming bloody propaganda videos and regularly expressing his commitment to violent global jihad.
“War is an expensive pleasure,” Kurashev once told a fellow online jihadist, going on to say he wished to die for the cause. “I hope we become shahids [martyrs who die defending Islam] and recollect these days with a smile on.”
But Kurashev’s prosecution raises questions about how many radical believers have crossed the border and not been flagged.
As revealed in my 2021 book “America’s Covert Border War,” US government protocols for years required detention for any immigrant from Muslim-majority or adversarial nations so that they can undergo lengthy in-person interviews and national security investigations.
Those detain-and-interview protocols were possible when the crossing numbers were low.
But tens of thousands of Russians and immigrants from Muslim-majority nations have crossed the southern border under Biden, far too many for overwhelmed border agents to conduct individual interviews and national security investigations.
The US intelligence community, FBI Director Chris Wray, and a variety of former homeland security officials have warned that these circumstances have exposed America to an unprecedented risk of Islamic terrorist infiltration and attack.
More than 360 border crosses since 2021 were on the terror watch list.
The administration’s own Department of Homeland Security 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment warns that “terrorists may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States” and that “individuals with potential terrorism connections continue to attempt to enter the Homeland illegally between ports of entry . . . via the southern border.”
It’s the nightmare hiding in Biden’s border crisis: Among the millions who have crossed in recent years, how many Kurashevs are hidden among them?
Todd Bensman is a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.
