Sugar Land man, a former teacher, is given 10 years in prison for aiding Islamic State

A Sugar Land man and former substitute teacher who in 2019 was captured by Kurdish rebels in Syria and accused of trying to help the Islamic State group, a terrorist organization, has been sentenced to 10 years in federal prison, prosecutors said.

Warren Christopher Clark, 40, was convicted of providing material support to a designated terrorist organization, according to court records.

Clark is also known as Abu Muhammad AlAmeriki.

After he is released from prison, Clark will spend the rest of his life under supervised release, according to the Justice Department.

“In the interests of national security, our laws prohibit Americans from receiving military training from designated foreign terrorist organizations,” Alamdar S. Hamdani, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, said in a news release. “Warren Clark ran afoul of those laws when he illegally crossed the border into Syria and underwent military training from ISIS, a brutal terrorist organization.”

Clark was raised in Sugar Land and is the child of two former Houston Independent School District high school teachers. He graduated from the University of Houston in 2007 with a major in political science and a minor in global business. After college, he worked as a substitute teacher in the Fort Bend ISD. He also taught in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Clark entered Syria through Turkey in 2015 and received military training and religious instruction from ISIS, according to the FBI. In messages sent to his family, Clark said he was living happily abroad and would not return to the United States unless “the Islamic State conquers the US,” according to the Justice Department.

In 2018, it was revealed that Clark applied for an English teaching position with ISIS, according to records obtained by scholars at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

When he was captured Jan. 6, 2019, Syrian media outlets wrote that Clark had been found with other men — including another American and an Irish citizen — who had been “preparing to attack the civilians who were trying to get out of the war zone.”

Clark was returned to the U.S. and charged with attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist group between 2011 and October 2015. He pleaded not guilty to the charge in 2019 but changed his plea last year. Clark later said he never engaged in combat on behalf of ISIS.

In an interview with NBC News, Clark said he didn’t regret joining the terrorist group and that he was originally drawn to it out of curiosity.

Researchers at George

Washington University, who tracked Americans who joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq, were told that Clark had at one point been imprisoned by ISIS because he tried to defect.

During his sentencing hearing Thursday, Clark read a lengthy statement in which he accused the U.S. of war crimes and refused to apologize, according to the Courthouse News Service.

“The United States government and prosecutors have borne false witness against me and slandered my name,” he said, according to the news service. “They have assassinated my character and portrayed me as an unhinged savage, an uncivilized barbarian who must be kept locked away to keep society safe, and perpetuated stereotypes about Black Muslim men.”

Judge George Hanks told Clark he had betrayed his country, his parents and his friends.

“You deserve every second you will spend behind bars,” Hanks said.