Sarah Adams, Daily Wire
Mohamed Bailor Jalloh went to prison for working with ISIS. His college put him back on campus, without knowing why he’d been in federal prison.
Sarah Adams was a targeting officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. It’s as cool as it sounds. She was in charge of disrupting terrorist attacks by identifying the people and organizations that pose a threat to the United States, a job that put her on the ground in the Middle East.
She helped lead the investigation into the deadly terror attack on our diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, and then wrote the book on it. Now, she’s warning the world that global terror threats are rising and we may not be prepared for it. The next 9/11 is being planned right now.
We asked Sarah to work with us to make sure our readers know what’s happening. Her first examination for The Daily Wire is on a loophole that allowed a terrorist to execute his deadly mission, even after we caught him. – Brent Scher, Editor-in-Chief
Four months after an ISIS supporter walked into a classroom and opened fire at Old Dominion University, an independent investigation revealed another disturbing part of the story: the university had no idea it had readmitted a convicted terrorist to its school.
Mohamed Bailor Jalloh’s terror ties were well known to the federal government. In 2016, the former Virginia Army National Guard soldier pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to ISIS. His case involved weapons he believed would be used in an attack against U.S. military personnel. He was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison, followed by five years of supervised release. He was released early, in December 2024.
Before he was even out of prison, Jalloh had applied to return to Old Dominion University. He was readmitted in January 2025 and approved for on-campus status. Old Dominion was left in the dark about why he had spent the previous years in federal prison.
Just over a year later, on March 12, 2026, Jalloh entered a classroom for the ROTC program, which trains college students to become commissioned officers in the armed forces when they graduate. After confirming that it was, he shouted “Allahu Akbar” and opened fire.
Lt. Col. Brandon Shah was killed, and two cadets were wounded before students stopped the attack.
Last month, an independent review released by Old Dominion concluded that Jalloh had carried out a targeted terrorist attack against ROTC students and their instructor. It also documented the information gap that preceded it. No federal or state law-enforcement agency had notified Old Dominion about Jalloh’s terrorism conviction. His probation officer had not notified the university either.
That leaves a much larger question than what happened on one campus: who owned Jalloh’s risk?
Terrorists After Prison
For more than two decades, the United States built an enormous counterterrorism system around finding people before they could attack. Intelligence agencies mapped networks. Investigators tracked communications and money. Joint Terrorism Task Forces developed cases. Prosecutors charged hundreds of defendants with terrorism-related offenses, and courts sent them to federal prison.
Most of those sentences end. The ISIS cases of the last decade are now moving into that next phase. Defendants arrested during the height of the group’s western recruitment campaign have completed sentences and returned to American communities. More will follow.
Jalloh had not disappeared from government oversight. He was serving a five-year term of supervised release. His conditions allowed his probation officer, when appropriate, to require notification of third parties about risks associated with his criminal history or to make those notifications directly. Old Dominion was never notified.
This was not a simple case of a university failing to run a background check. Virginia law restricts public universities from asking applicants about criminal history on their admissions applications. Universities can only inquire after admission and before enrollment, allowing them to assess whether a student’s history presents a threat to the university community.
Old Dominion already had a process for doing that. Since 2022, the university has sent a voluntary criminal-history questionnaire to newly admitted freshmen, transfer students, and graduate students. The gap was readmitted students. Jalloh was a readmitted student, so he was never asked.
The federal government knew Jalloh had been convicted in an ISIS case involving a planned attack against American military personnel. It knew he had been released from prison, and he remained under federal supervision. Old Dominion knew none of that. That becomes harder to dismiss as an administrative oversight when considering where Jalloh eventually went. He did not randomly enter a classroom. He went to ROTC.
The independent investigators later concluded that if Old Dominion’s threat-assessment personnel had known about Jalloh’s terrorism conviction, it was highly likely the university would have tried to remove him from campus because of the potential threat he presented, particularly to military-affiliated members of the university community. The people responsible for protecting that community never received what they would have needed to make that assessment.
There is another unanswered part of the story. During its investigation, the law firm conducting Old Dominion’s independent review sought information from the FBI and the U.S. Probation Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. Both declined to meet with the investigators. As a result, the review could not fully determine what happened during Jalloh’s federal supervision or why his terrorism history was never passed to the university.
We know where the system broke. We still do not fully know why.
This Was Already Coming
The larger problem did not begin at Old Dominion. Researchers had already warned that the United States was entering a new stage of the ISIS-era terrorism problem. A 2024 analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, using data from George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, found that 72 of 209 Americans arrested on ISIS-related charges had already been released. At least 73 more were expected to reach their scheduled release dates during the following decade.
The overwhelming majority had not been publicly linked to new terrorism activity. That matters. A terrorism conviction should not create a lifetime presumption that someone will attack again. People can disengage from extremist movements and rebuild their lives, and education and employment can be an important part of that process.
Researchers, however, also identified a smaller group who had been rearrested or reincarcerated after violating conditions of supervised release. Some returned to behavior remarkably similar to what brought them into the system in the first place.
One of those cases is particularly relevant because, by conventional measures, the individual appeared to be succeeding after prison. Ali Shukri Amin was 17 years old when he pleaded guilty in 2015 to conspiring to provide material support to ISIS. Amin had operated a prominent pro-ISIS social-media account and helped another young man travel to Syria. After cooperating with authorities and serving several years in federal prison, he was released in 2020.
His life afterward appeared to be a model of reintegration. He earned numerous technical certifications, graduated summa cum laude from Northern Virginia Community College, pursued graduate education in information technology management, and obtained professional employment.
At the same time, federal authorities determined that Amin had repeatedly violated the conditions of his supervised release. Court records examined by researchers showed that he had resumed prohibited contacts, including communication with convicted terrorist John Walker Lindh, and engaged in activity involving the dissemination of ISIS propaganda.
In 2023, Amin was returned to prison for violating supervised release. His case does not show that education failed. It shows that education, employment, and outward signs of stability do not necessarily tell us whether ideological disengagement has occurred. Those are different assessments, and confusing the two creates its own blind spot.
A Campus Is a Community
Universities make this problem particularly visible because they are designed to be open. Thousands of people move through campuses every day. Universities contain laboratories, research facilities, religious organizations, political groups, foreign students, major public events, and military programs. Many operate more like small cities than controlled facilities.
That does not mean that terrorism offenders should automatically be excluded from higher education. The problem at Old Dominion was not simply that Jalloh was allowed to pursue an education after prison. It was that nobody at the university knew enough to assess the risk.
There is a significant difference between giving someone a second chance and requiring the people responsible for security to operate blind. A terrorism conviction may involve extremist relationships, allegiance to a foreign terrorist organization, specialized knowledge, previous target selection, or a demonstrated interest in attacking a particular population. None of those factors prove someone will offend again, but they matter when assessing risk.
Old Dominion has already fixed one part of the problem. Following the attack, the university expanded its post-admission criminal-history questionnaire to include readmitted students. Someone returning through the same admissions pathway Jalloh used should now receive it.
The university has also increased resources for its Office of Threat Assessment, added staffing, and moved toward additional investigative and threat-management capabilities. Those are reasonable changes, but they still depend in part on someone disclosing their own history.
The independent review recognized that limitation. A voluntary questionnaire is only useful when the person filling it out decides to tell the truth. For someone who presents a serious threat, that is not much of a safeguard.
The review therefore pointed toward the issue at the center of the case: information sharing. Old Dominion already had a working relationship with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force before the attack. The university’s police chief regularly communicated with the task force, yet Jalloh’s terrorism history never reached the university. Investigators recommended that Old Dominion explore using that relationship to establish a notification process when terrorism defendants or people convicted of other particularly dangerous crimes seek to enroll or are already students.
That may be the most important recommendation in the report. The information existed. It never reached the people who needed it.
What Has Changed, and What Hasn’t
The Bureau of Prisons has addressed another part of Jalloh’s case. He received an early release, despite his terrorism conviction, because he completed the federal Residential Drug Abuse Program. The Bureau of Prisons has since closed that loophole for terrorism-related offenders.
That addresses how Jalloh got out early. It does not solve what happened after he got out. As of August 2026, there is no publicly announced national requirement directing federal probation offices, the FBI, or another federal agency to notify a university when a terrorism offender under federal supervision enrolls there. Virginia’s underlying admissions law also remains in place.
That does not mean that nothing has changed internally. Policies and practices can change without becoming public. But there is no publicly announced nationwide system that would guarantee a different outcome if the same circumstances occurred somewhere else tomorrow.
The concern is not that every terrorist offender leaving prison is waiting to attack again. The concern is that we already know some do not fully disengage. Some violate supervision. Some reconnect with extremist networks. Some return to the same behavior that put them in prison. A functioning system has to identify the individuals who continue to present a risk, and it cannot do that when the relevant pieces remain separated.
America spent the years after September 11, 2001, building one of the most sophisticated counterterrorism systems in the world. We became very good at finding terrorists. Now we have to get better at what happens after prison.
More terrorism offenders will complete their sentences in the coming years. They will go to work, attend universities, move into neighborhoods, and rebuild their lives. Successful reintegration should be the goal, but reintegration and threat management are not opposing ideas. Someone can deserve the opportunity to start again while their history still matters to those responsible for assessing a legitimate security risk.
Old Dominion has begun fixing what it can control. The larger gap remains. Mohamed Bailor Jalloh had been convicted of attempting to support ISIS. His case involved an intended attack against American military personnel. He remained under federal supervision and returned to a university with a significant military-affiliated population. The pieces were there, but no one connected them before he walked into an ROTC classroom.
The next terrorism offender leaving federal prison may go to work, return to school, or enroll at another American university. In most cases, that will simply be part of rebuilding a life. But when someone presents a genuine threat, the institution responsible for the people around them should not have to discover that history after an attack.
Someone needs to know, someone needs to make the assessment, and someone needs to own the risk.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 