8½-Year Sentence for American Who Fought for ISIS Is Too Lenient, Says Sixth Circuit

From Wednesday’s decision by Judge Amul Thapar, joined by Judges Julia Gibbons and Joan Larsen, in U.S. v. Ramic:

Over a decade ago, a new wave of terrorism spread across the Middle East. A group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) sought to establish a new regime strictly governed by Islamic law. To do so, ISIS employed brutal tactics—planting bombs, publicly decapitating its enemies, burning people alive, and enslaving women and children. It also launched vicious attacks to conquer territory in Iraq and Syria. And it recruited fighters from around the world to perform these acts of terrorism.

Mirsad Ramic was one such fighter. He traveled from the United States to Syria, where he participated in an attack that claimed over 100,000 lives….

Mirsad Ramic grew up in Bosnia during a civil war. That conflict involved genocide and war crimes targeted at minority groups, including Bosnian Muslims like Ramic and his family. In fact, Ramic’s father was killed during this conflict. So once the war concluded, the United States offered Ramic and his family a fresh start by granting them refugee status. Ramic’s family ultimately settled in Bowling Green, Kentucky, a city with a vibrant population of other Bosnian refugees. Eventually, Ramic became a naturalized U.S. citizen, but he was unhappy with his American life.

Rather than embracing the privilege of American citizenship, Ramic embraced the extremist views of terrorist groups trying to destroy the United States and its allies. During his naturalization ceremony, Ramic refused to recite the oath of allegiance to the United States. Instead, he proclaimed an Islamic oath and cursed all nonbelievers….

Abdullah el-Faisal … was a Jamaican Muslim cleric who had previously been convicted in the United Kingdom of advocating for the murder of Jews, Hindus, Christians, and Americans. When ISIS started gaining traction, Faisal began recruiting for the group and urged his supporters to launch violent jihadist attacks. He instructed his followers on how to covertly travel to Syria or Iraq to join ISIS. Ramic consumed this radical propaganda and soon ascended to Faisal’s inner circle, becoming one of the few people trusted to directly raise money on Faisal’s behalf.

Ramic then put Faisal’s instructions into action and traveled to Syria to join ISIS. Upon arriving in Syria, Ramic completed an ISIS intake form, indicating that he wished to become a fighter. To prepare for battle, Ramic went through military-style training where he learned warfare tactics and how to use combat weapons. His classmates recalled that he expressed a particular interest in automatic weapons and sniper rifles.

After completing his training, Ramic fought in the siege of Kobane, a city in northern Syria. He was on the front lines of the initial assault on the city. During this battle, ISIS primarily fought against a local militia group. But the United States also supported that local militia, launching air strikes against ISIS forces. Though the attack was ultimately unsuccessful, ISIS wreaked enormous havoc on the city and its populace, displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians and committing numerous atrocities. Roughly 100,000 people died during the campaign.

Following the siege of Kobane, Ramic continued to support ISIS’s mission. He posted on social media, praising ISIS’s public beheading of Coptic Christians in Libya, boasting about how many bodies he could fit in the back of a car, and bragging that he had “slave girls” cleaning his house….

Eventually, Ramic became disillusioned with ISIS. He was disappointed that it didn’t “apply[] Islamic principles” strictly enough and that the people he met in Syria “did not practice the Muslim faith at all.” So he decided to abandon ISIS and travel to Turkey instead.

Once Ramic entered Turkey, Turkish authorities arrested him for engaging in terrorism. After holding him in custody for five years, Turkish authorities turned Ramic over to the United States…..

Among other things, the court rejected the district court’s downward departure from the sentencing guidelines:

Throughout sentencing, the district court downplayed ISIS’s mission and Ramic’s actions. It described Ramic’s conduct as “participation in an organized army intent on capturing a piece of territory for the creation of their own state.” And it repeatedly characterized Ramic as a “soldier” and “fighter” who merely “went to join an army.”

But Ramic was no ordinary soldier. That’s because ISIS isn’t an army governed by the laws of war or a code of ethics like our armed forces. It’s a terrorist group that has engaged in countless atrocities.

And if there were any doubt about ISIS’s brutality, the government proved it at trial. First, the government established that ISIS carried out a large suicide attack at a mosque in Kuwait. Then, ISIS targeted Belgium, where a member began shooting inside a museum, murdering four people. Around the same time, ISIS executed 700 cadets at a military school in Iraq, killing one young soldier after another. And the following year, ISIS publicly beheaded 21 Coptic Christians simply because those innocent civilians dared to practice their faith.

What’s more, the government showed that Ramic embraced ISIS’s radical beliefs and atrocities. On social media, he hoped for the day when President Obama’s daughters would “be sold as [slaves] in one of the local markets.” He threatened the “rafidah/shia” Muslims that they must convert to Sunni Islam “or Die.” He posted a photo of a United States “fallen veterans” brochure alongside an ISIS flag and rifles and asked others if they were “ready for a joint mission” to “make more [U.S. soldiers] fall.” And he celebrated the beheadings of the Coptic Christians: “If [J]esus was alive today he would be with Islamic State, and behead #Copts for taking him as god besides Allah.” The district court, however, failed to address these posts in determining the seriousness of Ramic’s offense….

Ramic intended to help ISIS gain power and territory so that it could wage a global jihad. Plus, Ramic’s participation meant that ISIS needed one fewer fighter on the battlefield in Syria and could instead afford to send its members to commit terrorist attacks around the world. The district court’s failure to grapple with ISIS’s brutalities or recognize how Ramic’s efforts facilitated those atrocities caused it to understate the seriousness of his crimes.

The district court also stated that Ramic’s actions didn’t involve “any acts of senseless violence against innocent people.” But that ignores the district court’s own factual findings. The district court adopted the PSR [Pre-Sentence Report] without change. The PSR explicitly noted that the siege of Kobane—which Ramic participated in—led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the deaths of about 100,000 people. The PSR further explained that ISIS engaged in atrocities against civilians in the area.

Granted, there’s no specific evidence about what Ramic did during the siege. But we know that his participation in the siege of Kobane supported ISIS’s commission of brutalities. And we know that he abused civilians by forcing “slave girls” to clean his house. So the record—including the district court’s own factual findings—undermines the court’s assertion that Ramic’s conduct didn’t involve “senseless violence” against civilians.

Finally, the district court downplayed Ramic’s crimes by claiming that he didn’t engage “in any acts of terrorism … in a more common sense” understanding of that term. Specifically, the district court emphasized that “[t]here were no bombs” or “horrible incidents of gun violence against crowds.”

First, we don’t know whether that’s true—ISIS regularly targeted civilians with bombs and guns. Second, even though there’s no specific evidence that Ramic engaged in such conduct, the district court’s rationale still doesn’t justify such a substantial downward variance. A district court must ensure that a sentence “meshes with Congress’s own view of the crime[‘s] seriousness.” Congress adopted a broader definition of material support that extends beyond just launching bombs or shooting into a crowd. See 18 U.S.C. § 2339A(b)(1) (defining “material support” as “any property, tangible or intangible, or service, including currency or monetary instruments or financial securities, financial services, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance, safehouses, false documentation or identification, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, lethal substances, explosives, personnel …, and transportation”). By fixating on its own unduly narrow conception of terrorism, the district court ignored its obligation to craft a sentence that reflects Congress’s broader view of that crime….

The appellate court also faulted the district court for “plac[ing] too much weight on national sentencing data”:

The district court started with the median sentence for terrorism defendants with the same criminal-history category and offense level as Ramic, which was 168 months. It then subtracted 67 months for the time Ramic spent in Turkish custody and arrived at a final sentence of 101 months’ imprisonment….

[W]hile a district court may consider national statistics to evaluate potential sentencing disparities, district courts may not “elevate the Commission’s statistical data over the text of the Guidelines themselves.” That’s because it is the role of the Sentencing Commission—not district courts—to update the Guidelines in response to new empirical data.

Plus, sentencing statistics have important limitations that can prevent district courts from making meaningful comparisons between cases. For example, the data may be “so general that it often is difficult to know whether offenders grouped into the same primary offense category have indeed been found guilty of similar conduct.” …

Here, … [t]he district court started with the median sentence for similarly situated offenders, even though it admitted it didn’t “have a whole lot of texture to what these other defendants did.” Without any comparison to other defendants, it asserted that it “tend[ed] to view this more along the median of 168 months.” And in doing so, the district court ignored significant gaps in the sentencing data.

First, the relevant sample size included only nine other defendants. So it’s possible the data was skewed by one or two outlier cases.

Second, the bare sentencing data didn’t explain the severity of the other defendants’ crimes, specify whether they accepted responsibility, or indicate whether they had been rehabilitated. Despite the lack of these key details, the district court still somehow determined that Ramic’s conduct was “along the median of 168 months.” But without more information, the district court had little basis to conclude that Ramic was similarly situated to those other defendants. Did they travel to Syria and actually fight in a war? Did they boast about their activities and their hatred for America? We don’t know. Indeed, compared to other defendants who engaged in conduct like Ramic’s, his sentence is shockingly low….

And the court held that the “district court also failed to properly weigh the need to protect the public from Ramic’s potential future crimes”:

[E]mpirical research on Americans who traveled to join jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq supports these observations. Even after returning to the United States, those individuals still pose a threat because they can support local jihadist networks, share their knowledge on how to conduct terrorist attacks, and recruit new members….

[U]nder the district court’s sentence, Ramic would be released at age 39, so he would still be capable of launching future attacks. [And] Ramic received military-type training from ISIS. That means he’s “far more sophisticated than an individual convicted of an ordinary street crime” and thus “poses a heightened risk of future dangerousness.” …

Perhaps most importantly, Ramic hasn’t disavowed terrorism. He left ISIS not because he disagreed with the group’s mission or its brutal tactics, but because he believed ISIS was corrupt….

Plus, Ramic hasn’t demonstrated remorse or accepted responsibility for his crimes. At sentencing, he delivered a lengthy monologue, stretching over 11 pages of the sentencing transcript, in which he lambasted the case against him. Ramic insisted that he was “an innocent man” and that he “completely reject[ed]” the charges against him. He claimed it was a “sham prosecution from the start” that was “brought by biased, prejudiced, … rogue[,] and corrupt prosecutors … with a compromised grand jury.” Ramic’s belief that he did absolutely nothing wrong is yet another indication that he may return to terrorism upon his release. And he may now have an additional motive to attack the United States after serving a prison sentence for what he believes was a “sham prosecution.” …

These concerns about Ramic returning to terrorism upon his release aren’t merely hypothetical. Courts’ refusals to incapacitate terrorists for a long period of time have had deadly consequences. See, e.g., Katrin Bennhold, Melissa Eddy & Christopher F. Schuetze, Vienna Reels From a Rare Terrorist Attack, N.Y. Times (Oct. 9, 2021) (describing a terrorist who was sentenced to just 22 months in prison for traveling to join ISIS, was released after one year, and then launched an attack in Vienna that killed four people and wounded another 23); Sadie Gurman, Old Dominion Shooting Suspect Had ISIS Conviction, Was Subdued by Students, Wall St. J. (Mar. 12, 2026, at 19:00 ET) (describing a terrorist who provided material support to ISIS, received a sentence far below the Guidelines range, was released, and then opened fire in a university classroom, killing the instructor and wounding two others)….

When sentencing terrorists, protecting the public is of primary importance. The district court’s failure to properly weigh this factor when dealing with Ramic makes his sentence substantively unreasonable.

Amanda E. Gregory represents the federal government.