ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A man from Northern Virginia has been found guilty of terrorism-related offenses for gathering funds intended for the Islamic State group.
Mohammed Chhipa, 35, hailing from Springfield, was convicted on Friday afternoon on all five counts he faced, including providing material support to a terrorist organization, following a weeklong trial at the U.S. District Court in Alexandria. The jury spent approximately three hours deliberating.

According to prosecutors, Chhipa had multiple meetings with an undercover FBI operative who provided him with hundreds of dollars at various times during 2021 and 2022. This money was purportedly designated for a Syrian woman and an Islamic State group affiliate referred to as Umm Dujanah.
Evidence submitted by the prosecution indicated that Chhipa transferred in excess of $74,000 to the Islamic State in a comparable manner—collecting donations from supporters, converting the cash into bitcoin, and then sending it to bank accounts in Turkey for the organization’s usage.

Chhipa expressed a specific interest in financing efforts to assist women linked to the Islamic State to escape from prison camps where they were held, following the group’s loss of both territory in Iraq and Syria, as outlined in the prosecution’s opening remarks.

Defense attorneys contended that their client had been subjected to an extended probe by the FBI, leveraging his sincere wish to find a partner by employing undercover agents who assumed roles such as marriage brokers or potential brides.
“The FBI investigated Mohammed Chhipa for 10 years and came up with nothing. Nothing. So, after a decade of bearing no fruit, the FBI decided to create the crime themselves,” defense attorney Jessica Carmichael asserted during the closing arguments on Friday.

Chhipa has claimed in legal documents that he is now married to Allison Fluke-Ekren, an American from Kansas currently serving a 20-year sentence. Fluke-Ekren had previously admitted to orchestrating and leading the Khatiba Nusaybah, a battalion within the Islamic State in which about 100 women and girls were trained in the use of automatic weapons and the detonation of grenades and suicide devices.

Prosecutors argued, however, that this marriage took place online and lacks any legal recognition in the United States. They also mentioned that Chhipa, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from India, has expressed intentions to adopt Fluke-Ekren’s children.
Chhipa is scheduled for sentencing in May.