It’s the story of two all-American kids — New York neighbors — whose adolescent rebellion led them straight to jihad.
Betim Kaziu and Sulejmah Hadzovic, born in the USA and living across a Brooklyn street from each other, grew up in immigrant families from the former Yugoslavia.
The boys forged a friendship in seventh-grade, talked about video games and TV shows, but lost interest in high school and dropped out.
That’s when the friends began gravitating towards radical Islam — not the moderate faith of their former Balkan lands of Macedonia and Montenegro and Macedonia — but the vitriolic rhetoric of jihadist groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Somalia, officials say.
A jury in Brooklyn federal court heard their saga today, as Assistant U.S. Attorney Seth DuCharme argued that Kaziu traveled to Cairo, tried to join terrorist groups, and hoped to die a martyr for “the cause of Islam” by fighting US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Hadzovic, his former neighbor, had a change of heart, renounced jihadism, and is now a government witness who testified that Kaziu is a committed radical.
Henry Steinglass, Kaziu’s defense attorney, suggested the entire misadventure was a youthful lark.
The al-Qaeda videos and anti-Semitic screeds found on Kaziu’s computer were admittedly offensive, but the Internet is filled with such noxious material these days, he argued.
The case continues today.