The Rabbit Hole: A Terrorism Prosecution Finally Ends.

Editor’s note: This week’s The Rabbit Hole is sixteen years in the making. Using a combination of U.S. and Pakistani court records, contemporaneous interviews with national security officials, and original reporting, Gigi Liman tells the story of five young men who departed the United States in 2009 bound for membership in a foreign terrorist organization. Instead, they spent more than a decade in a prison overseas and then faced U.S. criminal prosecution for the same crimes. The last of the defendants was sentenced on Tuesday in Virginia, where a Court Watch reporter was in attendance to watch the long legal saga finally conclude. - Seamus

On January 6, 2026, Waqar Hussain Khan stood before a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, and became the final member of the “D.C. Five” to have his more than decade-long terrorism case finally resolved in the United States. More than 16 years earlier, Khan and his four young friends left their middle-class lives in suburban Virginia and traveled to Pakistan, intent on joining the war on terror against the U.S. Their plans were short-lived; just six days after their arrival, Pakistani authorities arrested the five on the outskirts of Lahore.

In the years that followed, these five American citizens were prosecuted and imprisoned for terrorism overseas, purportedly tortured in foreign custody, only to be extradited a decade later and prosecuted again by the United States for the same acts. This reporting is based on hundreds of pages of U.S. legal filings, interviews with national security officials who worked on the investigation, foreign court proceedings, and sentencing hearings attended by Court Watch reporters. 

The story begins on December 1, 2009, when five families in Northern Virginia reported the young men’s disappearance to local law enforcement. The five men—Ahmed Ameer Minni, Ramy Said Zamzam, Aman Hassan Yemer, Umar Farooq Chaudhry, and Waqar Hussain Khan—were childhood friends. According to court filings, they grew up in the same neighborhood, attended the same mosque, youth group, and high school. Among the five, then in their late teens and early twenties, one was a perfect 4.0 GPA dentistry student at Howard University, another a business major at George Mason University, all seemingly on the path to successful careers and lives.

The only clue as to why the young men had vanished from their suburban bubble and where they had gone was a USB flash drive Zamzam had left with his brother. On it was an 11-minute video, titled “afinalmessage,” that flashed clips of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and photographs of civilian casualties as Zamzam’s voice played in the background: “When Muslim lands are invaded, physical jihad against the disbelievers becomes obligatory.” A former FBI official who reviewed Zamzam’s message at the time told a Court Watch reporter that it was “chilling” and “one of the most concerning videos” he had seen in his three-decade-long career in national security. 

Five months earlier, Minni and Yemer had attracted the attention of an online recruiter who called himself “Saifullah,” or Sword of Allah. According to an affidavit in the case, the two young men had commented on YouTube videos glorifying attacks against the U.S. military, and Saifullah reached out in response. Through a series of exchanges, Saifullah encouraged the men to travel to Pakistan to engage in violent jihad. Minni and Yemer got on board, told their three friends about the plan with Saifullah, and recruited them to join. 

In a surprising revelation that had been rumored by outside experts but was only recently confirmed in court filings, Saifullah was himself an American citizen: Jude Kenan Mohammad.