(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Idaho man Alexander Scott Mercurio was sentenced to 216 months in prison on Tuesday after pleading guilty to attempting to provide material support and resources to ISIS.
Mercurio was arrested in April 2024 when he was 18 years old, after the FBI targeted him for years in an investigation that involved at least three undercover informants and an undercover agent.
According to Mercurio’s charging papers, the FBI discovered the teenager when it was investigating a terrorism-financing network in 2021. The FBI discovered that Mercurio—who would have been 15 or 16 at the time—was talking to two individuals who were providing funds for ISIS and its Afghanistan-based affiliate, ISIS-K.
The teenage ISIS supporter whose "best friend" was an FBI informant was sentenced today to 216 months in prison. https://t.co/RoZIX4tbL1 pic.twitter.com/gyZcdo1lXv
— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) November 11, 2026
In July 2022, an FBI informant who had assumed a dead ISIS fighter’s identity began communicating with Mercurio. The two became fast friends, according to Mercurio’s lawyers.
“For nearly two years, Alexander Mercurio’s best friend was a government informant. Starting when he was just seventeen years old Mr. Mercurio spent his days holed away in his basement bedroom, talking with his best friend about increasingly radical terrorist ideologies,” defense attorneys said in their sentencing memo, filed on Wednesday.
“Together they brainstormed a plan that was as horrific as it was unlikely to succeed: a suicidal attack on local churches using his father’s firearms and an untested improvised explosive/flamethrower.”
According to the charging papers, another informant targeted Mercurio in person on Feb. 16, 2024, entering his father’s office and asking to take him out to lunch. The informant would give Mercurio an ISIS flag and take a picture of him posed in front of it.
Additionally, Mercurio messaged a third FBI informant on April 2 and 3, 2024, telling the informant that he planned on carrying out an attack the following Sunday. The FBI arrested him the day before, finding a metal pipe, handcuffs, a folding saw, two cannisters of butane fuel, an ISIS flag—which was provided to him by the second FBI informant—and other equipment in his room.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
