Mohammed Chhipa led a double life, by his own attorney’s telling, spreading online propaganda for the Islamic State with “bravado and bluster” while he was brooding in Northern Virginia as “a lonely, sad and deflated man” secretly being monitored by the U.S. government for a decade.

Federal prosecutors said he then took a darker turn, fleeing the country after agents searched his Fairfax County home in 2019 and sending funds over the next three years to an Islamic State operative who had broken out of a refugee camp run by the Syrian Defense Forces and was working to free other women.

After a week-long trial, a jury in U.S. District Court in Alexandria agreed Friday, convicting Chhipa on all charges, including conspiracy and providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization. Islamic State forces came to dominate parts of Iraq and Syria for several years beginning around 2014 and ending by 2018. Prosecutors said Chhipa went from online booster to bankroller after the extremist group had lost much of its ground and was seeking to rebuild.

“He said he would continue to support ISIS as long as he had money to spare,” Justice Department prosecutor A.J. Dixon said in his opening statement Monday. Prosecutors said Chhipa, 35, would convert cash to bitcoin or other digital currencies and wire it overseas, with nearly $74,000 sent to addresses in Turkey, which the operative, Umm Dujanah, told him would be smuggled over the border to Syria to help women seeking to escape the al-Hol refugee camp.

“It is never sent directly to me,” she told Chhipa through social media, according to court records. “I know how it works,” Chhipa responded.

Many of the women held in al-Hol were married to Islamic State fighters who were killed or captured on the battlefield as the terrorist organization fought U.S.-backed forces for control of Syrian territory, and the FBI, in a 2023 affidavit, assessed the camp to be “a stronghold of ISIS ideology.”

Defense attorneys for Chhipa said the FBI hounded him for 10 years based on his online activity professing support for the Islamic State, “placing pole cameras outside his house, sending an army of roughly one-hundred agents to watch his movements or otherwise surveil him” and tracking his expenses, according to a court filing.

When that failed to turn up incriminating evidence, the U.S. government co-opted a confidential human source who was working for a foreign government to dupe Chhipa into a prospective marriage, defense attorneys Zachary Deubler and Jessica Carmichael said. She went by the name Tasneem Mac on Facebook, according to the trial evidence. Chhipa’s legal team said the court denied a request to get her testimony at a deposition.

“The FBI decided to ensnare Mr. Chhipa,” Deubler said in his opening statement. Four of the five indictment counts concerned about $800 transferred to the Islamic State, and all of that money had come from an undercover FBI agent, Deubler said.

“The FBI investigated Mohammed Chhipa for 10 years and came up with nothing. Nothing,” Carmichael said during closing arguments Friday.

“The FBI invented and placed Mr. Chhipa in their fictional online universe. They introduced him to character after character, buttering him up to lead him to the golden opportunity,” she said.

Prosecutors responded in a court filing that U.S. officials “cannot have entrapped the defendant” because it was undisputed that Mac was “operating under the control of a foreign government.” Dixon told the jury that the British-born Umm Dujanah also used some funds she received to fund male Islamic State fighters, known for their brutal torture and killings of hostages.

“They behead them. They burn them alive. They advertise these atrocities around the world. … That’s the organization this defendant was working with Umm Dujanah to support,” Dixon said.

While searching Chhipa’s home in 2019, the FBI found “thousands of videos, pictures, essays, books, notes, and search histories about extremist ideology, jihad, ISIS, and violent propaganda on multiple devices,” including instructions on how to build explosive devices and “images depicting what appears to be a beheading of an ISIS prisoner,” according to an affidavit filed in the case.

Chhipa fled to Latin America after the court-authorized search, with plans to head to Egypt, but he had been placed on an Interpol list and was deported to Virginia, according to U.S. officials. He was questioned by federal agents upon his arrival at Dulles International Airport and released, prosecutors said. Authorities arrested him on the charges of sending money to Islamic State women in May 2023.

Carmichael and Deubler were appointed by the court to represent Chhipa after he complained about the federal public defenders who were initially assigned to his case. Mid-trial, Chhipa told U.S. District Judge David J. Novak he wanted to represent himself, then backed off, according to court records.

Chhipa also complained that he was being “railroaded” by Novak and the prosecution team, in part because he could not review some of the classified evidence in the case. He sent a handwritten letter to another federal judge, Leonie M. Brinkema, asking her to “examine everything on my case to avoid unjust persecution of Muslims and Islam.” Brinkema filed a court order denying the “completely inappropriate” request.

Chhipa was born in India and is a naturalized U.S. citizen who says he was married online to Allison Fluke-Ekren, a former Kansas teacher who became the leader of a female Islamic State battalion. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to a terrorism charge in 2022. Islamic State defendants who are transported to face charges in the United States in many cases are tried in Virginia, where they first land on arrival.

“It has been almost 2 years since I spoke to my wife (March, 2023) and while she is also imprisoned, I don’t understand why I’m being prevented from speaking with her if all of the communications will be monitored,” Chhipa wrote in the letter to Brinkema.

The sentence, to be decided at a hearing scheduled for May 5, could be up to decades in prison.