An Iraqi man said to be ISIS’s de facto leader in Germany was sentenced to 10 years and six months in prison by a German court on Wednesday.
Ahmad Abdulaziz Abdullah Abdullah, better known as Abu Walaa, was accused of directing a militant network which radicalized young people in Europe and helped them travel to Iraq and Syria.
The 37-year-old was found guilty of membership of a foreign terrorist organization, aiding the preparation of subversive violent acts and financing terrorism, AFP reported.
Abu Walaa arrived in Germany as an asylum seeker in 2001, and was arrested in November 2016 after a long investigation by Germany's security services.
He is alleged to have recruited at least eight extremists -- most of them "very young" -- to ISIS, including a pair of German twin brothers who committed a bloody suicide attack in Iraq in 2015.
Among those who Abu Walaa allegedly helped radicalize was at least one of the three teenagers who were convicted of a 2016 bomb attack on a Sikh temple in Essen, western Germany.
Another notorious terrorist with possible links to Abu Walaa was Anis Amri, the Tunisian who killed 12 people when he drove a truck into a Berlin Christmas market in 2016.
Amri was allegedly in contact with Abu Walaa's co-defendant Boban Simeonovic, who is believed to have put the Tunisian asylum seeker up in his flat in Dortmund.
A direct link between Amri and Abu Walaa remains unproven.
