Accused terrorist known for ‘big ol’ smile’
Fort Bend man captured this month in Syria allegedly sought to teach English with ISIS
SUGAR LAND — The bearded face in the mugshot posted by Kurdish forces looked woefully familiar to Roxanne Bradford.
Opposition forces in Syria captured Warren Christopher Clark — also known as Abu Muhammad Al-Ameriki — earlier this month and labeled him a combatant for the Islamic State group. But Bradford recognized the clean-shaven boy with the radiant smile she’d known more than a decade ago at William P. Clements High School in Fort Bend County.
“It makes me super sad to see the road his life has traveled down,” Bradford told the Houston Chronicle last week through social media. “All I can say is he was just like the rest of us. Had friends. Did his thing. Smart. Laughed. Big ol’ smile.”
Ashley Sirman Eyer first met Clark years earlier at Colony Meadows Elementary in the pristine suburb where they grew up.
“He was really funny, very sweet and smart,” Sirman Eyer said.
Now, Clark, 34, is likely facing transfer back to the U.S. where he could face federal terrorism charges. A former Fort Bend substitute teacher, Clark apparently
applied for an English teaching position with ISIS a few years ago, according to records obtained by scholars at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.
If charged, Clark would be the fourth person in recent years accused in Houston federal court with providing support to the terrorist group. Two Houstonarea men were recently sentenced to prison in unrelated cases after pleading guilty to supporting ISIS, and the case against a third is pending.
American flag on the fence
On the stately tree-lined street where Clark grew up, the couple next door to his family’s home said they were heartbroken for Clark’s parents, both longtime secondary school teachers in Houston ISD.
A poinsettia wreath still adorned the front door, an American flag hung from the wood fence and an SUV in the driveway displayed a University of Houston sticker. But no one answered the door over several days and relatives in the Houston area and beyond have steered clear of the barrage of requests for comment.
But Clark’s father, Warren Anthony Clark, told the New York Times that his son is “a humanitarian,” and rejected the suggestion that his son could join ISIS. He said he learned from the news media about his son’s capture after it was announced early Sunday by the Syrian Democratic Forces.
“My son would not be involved in anything along those lines,” he told the Times. “My son doesn’t have an evil thought in his mind about hurting anyone.”
The accused ISIS supporter graduated from UH in 2007 and taught in Fort Bend, according to records from both institutions. His résumé showed he put his teaching experience to use a few years later in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
And then he sent out a highly unusual inquiry, according to a groundbreaking 2018 report called “The Travelers: American Jihadists in Syria and Iraq,” from GWU’s Program on Extremism. In a sunny professional tone, Clark crafted a cover letter requesting a job teaching English for ISIS.
Waiting for the bell
The Clarks raised their son and his younger sister in the Meadow at Crescent Lakes.
The elder Clark told the Sugar Land planning and zoning commission in January 2016 that his children attended local schools before going to college, and that both planned to settle in Sugar Land. The meeting minutes recapped the father’s remarks as, “Wants our city to stay as is.”
Clark’s parents Warren, 69, and Betty, 65, taught at James Madison High School in southwest Houston until recently. His mother retired in 2017 after more than 30 years and worked with special needs students, according to neighbors who asked to remain anonymous. Clark’s father had 35 years of experience as an associate social studies teacher and worked with Houston ISD through at least 2013, according to state records. Neighbors said they believed both of Clark’s parents had been in the military and they claimed a disabled-veteran exemption for their elegant twostory brick home..
As a teenager, the younger Warren was a practicing Muslim. He belonged to the high school’s Muslim Students Association, according to classmate Haseeb Jan, who rode the bus to school with him. Puja Patel, another 2003 graduate, remembered sitting and joking with Clark and her then-boyfriend while waiting for the morning school bell to ring. Clark focused on his schoolwork at Clements High, a top-ranked suburban school where many students go on to become doctors, educators, lawyers and captains of industry.
It was the kind of place where students policed their own cheating, broke up fights in the hall and did a lackluster job of cutting on senior skip day, according to Leonard Chan, who was on the student council and remembered seeing Clark in the cafeteria.
He was polite and reserved, other Clements alumni recalled.
Former classmate Curtis R. Waldo said Clark never showed an affinity to radical ideas. He didn’t seem especially devout or have fiery political convictions. But Waldo thought Clark may have easily swayed.
“I don’t know if naïve is the right word, but it’s not shocking to me that this happened to him,” Waldo said. “Knowing what I know now, I can see other people influencing him and getting him riled up.”
‘People are brainwashed’
On the résumé recovered from a house in Mosul, Iraq, Clark noted that he majored in political science and minored in global business at UH, details that were confirmed by a university spokesperson.
Dr. Emran El-Badawi, program director and associate professor of Middle Eastern Studies at UH, did not know Clark and has not found anyone in his circles who knew Clark back then. El-Badawi said young people who become radicalized tend to break away from the mainstream and many learn about ISIS online.
“People are brainwashed,” he said. “They’re totally in a bubble and they believe things that are fundamentally different and disconnected from this reality.”
After college, Clark worked as a substitute teacher at Fort Bend ISD from August 2008 to November 2010, according to the district. He later moved to teaching stints in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and Konya, Turkey, according to the résumé, which ends in June 2015.
Clark appears to have posted on Facebook about his experiences in Syria after his arrival there in the summer of 2014, following the official declaration of a Caliphate by ISIS leadership in June 2014, according to Seamus Hughes, deputy director of GWU’s extremism program and a co-author of the report.
A Twitter account that matched Clark’s email handle began in August 2014 and ended six months later on Feb. 7, 2015. The owner of the Twitter page tried to debunk a number of myths about ISIS and noted the irony of the U.S. criticizing ISIS for setting people on fire after Americans had dropped napalm on civilians during the Vietnam War.
Hughes, who has meticulously tracked the cases of alleged ISIS recruits in the U.S., said court documents and testimony in other cases indicate there is a standard procedure for joining ISIS in Syria, including filling out a form that asks what weapons one is capable of using, whether one has any slaves, and one’s “specialty before jihad.” Recruits usually undergo three weeks of sharia or religious training and then three more weeks of military training before being given an assignment, Hughes said.
His program has identified 73 people who have made the trip to Syria to join ISIS. The FBI estimates that nearly 300 U.S. residents have traveled or attempted to travel to Syria to join ISIS.
Support for the Caliphate
David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University, said his research shows that the vast majority of ISIS recruits don’t last there for long.
“Even if the number was correct, a pretty high percentage have probably died or escaped, blurred into the civilian population, slipped back into Turkey (or) are in a refugee camp in Jordan – leaving very few U.S. fighters actually on the battlefield,” Schanzer said. “These guys are picked up in a battle or raid, and they don’t have much on them in terms of documentation.”
Clark was captured along with four other foreign nationals by the Syrian opposition, according to the SDF announcement.
Hughes said he was contacted by someone who claimed to have met Clark three years earlier at a prison run by ISIS in Raqqa, Syria. The man said Clark was incarcerated by ISIS police because he was trying to defect, and described him as “a bit crazy.” The man then left the prison without knowing what became of Clark.
Hughes said Clark appeared more interested in helping support the caliphate than joining the fight.
“In that time frame, many of the American recruits were going to the Islamic State to build what they saw as an Islamic utopia,” Hughes said, “and were less drawn to the overly violent aspects of it that we see on the nightly news.”