HOUSTON (CN) — A Texan who joined the Islamic State group to teach English to its soldiers accused the United States of war crimes at his sentencing hearing Thursday, saying it reminded him of white supremacist bombings in the South when he saw people pulling their dead loved ones from a mosque in Syria after the U.S. military bombed it.
Warren Clark, 40, lashed out at the government and prosecutors in a lengthy statement he gave in a Houston federal courtroom. U.S. District Judge George Hanks then sentenced him to a decade behind bars and supervised release for life after he serves his time.
“In the city of Raqqa, Iraq, the U.S. military bombed a hydroelectric dam,” Clark said. “That is a war crime. … And years later the city was still in the dark and in rubble.”
A federal grand jury indicted Clark in January 2019 after U.S. allies captured him on a battlefield in Syria and he was brought back to the U.S. He has been in federal custody since and pleaded guilty this past October to receiving military training from a foreign terrorist organization.
Though Clark joined the Islamic State group in the summer of 2015 with no intention of engaging in armed conflict, its leaders made him undergo a month of religious and military training, according to testimony in a January 2019 hearing in which he was denied bond.
Standing before Hanks on Thursday in an olive-colored prison jumpsuit with shackles around his waist and wrists, flanked by his two defense attorneys and three federal prosecutors, Clark expressed not one shred of regret.
“The United States government and prosecutors have borne false witness against me and slandered my name,” he said.
“They have assassinated my character and portrayed me as an unhinged savage, an uncivilized barbarian who must be kept locked away to keep society safe, and perpetuated stereotypes about Black Muslim men,” he added.
“I have more love for humanity in my pinky finger than these three prosecutors have in their whole bodies.”
Clark obtained a political science degree from the University of Houston in 2007.
In his statement Thursday, he claimed he had gone to the Middle East because in addition to teaching —he also taught English in Saudia Arabia from 2012 to 2014 — he wanted to help build infrastructure in Syria and Iraq, which had been ravaged by years of fighting between U.S. forces and al-Qaeda insurgents.
He told Hanks he saw women in Syria washing disposable diapers and putting them back on their kids, and he had given the last of his food to needy Syrian youth. “I wonder if these prosecutors would have done the same,” he said.
"I prayed at several mosques in Syria," he went on, "one of them the U.S. military bombed. And as I watched people pulling their loved ones from the rubble it reminded me of white supremacist bombings in the South."
Describing himself as “peaceful and kindhearted,” Clark noted the lack of any government witnesses for his sentencing hearing.
“The government’s message is N-word, know your place. … whether it’s in prison or under a carpet bomb," he said, later adding: "I see no suffering people the government has brought to court today, so it’s futile for me to apologize to a victimless court.”
His words infuriated Hanks. The judge said, “Your crimes and irresponsible behavior have betrayed America, your parents and friends. Do you think anyone is proud of you?”
"I am," Clark’s father, Tony Clark, 74, spoke up in the gallery.
“Sir, be quiet," Hanks snapped.
He continued, “You swore an oath to people who have sworn oaths to destroy everything we stand for. You took advantage of this great country to get an education. And now you want to say you went there to help people. That’s nonsense. You deserve every second you will spend behind bars.”
After the hearing, Tony Clark said his son has been teaching his fellow prisoners how to read and sharing food and literature about Islam with them.
“I compare my son to Joseph from the Bible,” Tony Clark said. “He’s a humanitarian and when you have a right to stand up you must stand.”
His wife, waiting for him by a bank of elevators, tried to stop him from talking to a reporter. “Tony, come on,” she said.
But he continued to extol his son’s virtues. “He’s humble,” Tony said. “He gives from the heart. When people from New Orleans came to Houston after evacuating due to Hurricane Katrina, he helped them. I call him an instrument of God.”
Clark is one of more than 245 people, 90% of them men, charged in the U.S. with crimes related to the Islamic State group since 2014, according to a July 2023 report by the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.
More than 200 of those defendants have pleaded or were found guilty and their average sentence was 13.4 years.
Clark’s sentence — 10 years, plus the five he has already served — is close to that average.
Hanks wished him good luck at the end of Thursday’s 30-minute hearing.
“I truly hope that someday you will understand the error of your ways. But it sounds like you won’t,” the judge added.
Clark’s background is the subject of a documentary called “Ghosts of Sugar Land” which came out on Netflix in October 2019.
In the film, Clark’s high school friends describe how he was the sole Black person in their clique of Muslim Americans of South Asian descent.
They recall how after converting to Islam he started questioning them about passages in the Koran and calling them “coconut Muslims” because they wore shorts, drank alcohol and shaved their beards which he believed did not comport with the religion.
Clark’s former friends said before he went to the Middle East they cut ties with him as he was voicing support for the Islamic State group on social media— he caught the FBI’s attention in 2011 while hosting a YouTube channel called Jihadi Fan Club — and they started to suspect he was an FBI informant.
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