Details Emerging About American Jihadist Killed in Syria - Douglas McAuthor McCain

WASHINGTON—
Details are emerging about Douglas McAuthor McCain, who last weekend became the first known American to be killed while fighting alongside Islamic militants in Syria.  
The otherwise undistinguished 33-year-old was raised in Minnesota and most recently worked as a caregiver in California. Still murky is what compelled him to leave this spring for the Middle East and to take up arms on behalf of religious extremists.
NBC News broke the story Tuesday, reporting that McCain had left for the Middle East sometime in the spring and made his way from Turkey into territory controlled by the Islamic State group. He took part in an attack over the weekend on a Syrian opposition checkpoint near Aleppo.
The anti-Assad rebels known as the Free Syrian Army retaliated, killing McCain. They beheaded six other Islamic State fighters, but not McCain, and posted photos on Facebook, NBC reported, attributing the information to the Free Syrian Army. The rebels reportedly found McCain with his U.S. passport and $800 in his pocket.
The White House National Security Council on Tuesday evening confirmed McCain's death, and the State Department said U.S. officials had been in contact with McCain's family. The FBI is investigating his death.

Douglas McCain is shown with an unidentified woman in an undated photo retrieved from his Facebook account.

On a watch list
U.S. officials said the content of McCain's social media posts put him on a watch list for international flights.
And, said Caitlin Hayden, a spokesman for the National Security Council, "We continue to use every tool we possess to disrupt and dissuade individuals from traveling abroad for violent jihad and to track and engage those who return."
McCain was among an unknown number of Americans who've joined the Islamic State. The Pentagon estimates anywhere from dozens to 100 could be involved, "but it's difficult to get your arms around," said its spokesman, Rear Admiral John Kirby, on CNN Wednesday morning.
U.S. intelligence agencies estimate around 7,000 of the 23,000 violent extremists operating in Syria’s civil war are foreign fighters, mostly from Europe. Australian intelligence chief David Irvine said Wednesday that 15 Australians are believed to have died fighting in Syria and Iraq, and that about 60 Australians are fighting with jihadist groups like IS.
Kirby said the U.S. government's "largest concern is the regional and even global aspirations" of the Islamic State group.
"Obviously, we’re concerned about Americans that become attracted," Kirby said, noting that if they join forces with a terrorist group, they become enemies of the state. ". … They take on those actions at their own peril."
Lost identity
Douglas McCain was born in Illinois and raised in New Hope, Minnesota, a Minneapolis suburb, where he attended Robbinsdale Cooper High School. He ran into some trouble with the law, with convictions for theft, drug possession, disorderly conduct and driving after his license had been revoked, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.  
In recent years, he moved to San Diego, California, as did his mother and a sister. McCain worked for a Somali-operated African Market, now closed, and attended a local community college.  He also had a daughter, almost 1 year old, family members told the Star Tribune.
According to McCain's social media accounts, which were taken down Tuesday, he converted from Christianity to the Muslim faith in 2004. "I will never look back the best thing that ever happened to me," he tweeted in May. He identified himself on Facebook as "Duale ThaslaveofAllah" and on Twitter as  Duale Khalid, "iamthetooth."
A selection of Twitter posts, accessed and shared by the San Diego Union-Tribune, reflect McCain's changing attitudes and circumstances.
In December 2012, he tweeted that the film "The Help" was "starting to make me hate white people." Along with racist and sexist views, the posts show McCain's enthusiasm for basketball, rap and, especially, his faith.
"To all my Muslim out there stand strong we will soon be 1... In sha Allah," he tweeted in May.
McCain’s cousin, Kenyata McCain, described him as a "humble, caring man" who "lost his identity" after becoming involved with Somali Muslims -- Minnesota has the country's largest community of Somalis, with an estimated 32,000 people of that ancestry.

"I know that he had strong Muslim beliefs," the cousin told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, "but I didn't know that he was in support of ISIS [an earlier acronym for the Islamic State]. I didn't think he would be."
Minnesota Public Radio also reported that, from McCain's Facebook page, it appears he knew Abdirahman Muhumed, "a Minneapolis man who went to Syria and joined the Islamic State." Muhumed had posted a photo of himself holding a rifle and a Qur'an, eliciting negative responses from Facebook "friends," MPR said. But McCain, in a Feb. 19 post, encouraged Muhumed to "continue protecting our brothers and sisters."
Kenyata McCain said she was in regular contact with her cousin and exchanged messages with him as recently as last Friday. "He was telling all of us he was in Turkey," she told the Star Tribune.
Government responses
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, at a Tuesday news briefing, was asked how Turkey is monitoring its border and stopping foreign fighters from crossing into Syria.
"Turkey is an important ally of ours and we work closely with them. I’m not going to be assessing anyone’s capabilities from the podium. But, the issue of foreign fighters and the concern of individuals with Western passports or passports that would enable them to travel into countries where they can do harm is certainly at the top of our agenda and the top of the agenda of many countries," she said.
Psaki noted that Obama will preside over a United Nations General Assembly meeting in September that will focus on the threat posed by foreign terrorist fighters. It will take place the week of September 22 in New York.

FILE - U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder

Last month, Attorney General Eric Holder said he was concerned fighters from Europe and the United States were supporting violent insurgents in Syria and joining forces with Yemeni bomb makers.
In July, FBI Director James B. Comey addressed an Inerpol international law enforcement symposium in Miami, saying he was "especially concerned about Syria."
"Syria serves as a breeding ground, a training ground, and a networking ground for thousands of jihadis all over the world," he said. "They have gone there in huge numbers to join the fight with groups like al Nusra or ISIL. The going is very worrisome. It is the coming out that worries me even more."
To deal with the threat of homegrown and foreign jihadists, Comey said the agency is "trying to think well about what we know and what we don’t know. We’re trying to build effective relationships with the private sector and our government partners. We are trying to train so we learn to play well. We are engaged in simulations that as best we can are intended to duplicate what we face in real life."
Serious threat

Jonathan Adelman, associate professor at the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Relations, said these foreign fighters, with the training they receive, pose a serious threat to Western nations, including the United States.
"The fact that there are these estimated 100 Americans, there’s an estimated 400 to 500 Brits, there’s several hundred French. There’s about 2,000 Westerners in this [IS] group, plus some non-Westerners who could easily come into the United States and I think this is something that really we have to take very seriously," Adelman said. The threat "isn’t as remote as we thought it was after Osama bin Laden was killed."
Adelman said many of these foreign fighters are being recruited through social media.
"I think for a lot of these kids – and he wasn’t just a kid, he was 33 years old – there's a level of excitement about this," Adelman said. " 'We’re going to have foreign adventure. We are going to stand up against all the evils of this world.' But, it’s frightening. We’re a country of 315 million people. All it’s going to take is a dozen of these people, with the fighting experience they’re getting in Syria and Iraq, and all the training they’re getting, to be able to come in here quite legally, and we’re fairly vulnerable."
Psaki on Tuesday acknowledged that threat and said "we’re tracking" that closely "because we think it could pose a threat to us."
Journalist released

The renewed concern over foreign fighters came as American journalist Peter Theo Curtis returned to the United States from Israel late Tuesday, just two days after being freed from nearly two years captivity at the hands of the Islamist Jabhat al-Nusrah group in Syria.
In a statement, Curtis said he has been moved by the people who welcomed him home. He also thanks U.S. officials and the Qatari government for intervening on his behalf.
VOA's Carol Guensburg and Mike Eckel contributed to this report.