MOSCOW, November 18 (Sputnik) — US federal authorities have arrested a woman in Virginia who allegedly wrote Facebook posts supporting the Islamic State (IS) and offered help to those willing to contact the Islamists in Syria, the Washington Post reported.
Heather Elizabeth Coffman, 29, was charged with making a false statement regarding an offense involving international or domestic terrorism after she had offered to help an undercover FBI agent contact an IS member in Syria, the newspaper said Monday.
"As far as I know she hasn’t traveled anywhere. Her connections with the outside world would be on the Internet," Coffman's defense attorney Mark Henry Schmidt was quoted as saying by the Washington Post.
The woman was born and raised in the United States, and was living with her parents and her 7-year-old child, the newspaper reported.
An FBI agent contacted Coffman in July and told her about his associate who wanted to travel to Syria to fight alongside the IS, the newspaper reported, citing Coffman's affidavit. She offered the associate to connect the IS facilitator and claimed that she could verify the facilitator's legitimacy.
Coffman was detained and appeared in Richmond federal court on Monday. She was ordered to be held in detention until her next hearing on November 19.
The IS, a Sunni extremist group, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) or the Islamic State and the Levant (ISIL), has been fighting the Syrian government since 2012. In June 2014, the group extended its attacks to northern and western Iraq, declaring a caliphate on the territories that had fallen under its control. A US-led coalition is currently carrying out airstrikes against IS positions in Syria and Iraq.
Numerous foreign fighters from the European Union, the United States and Canada are believed to be fighting for the jihadist group.
