"Even so, organizations like IS and al-Qaida are not yet at a crisis level of recruiting American soldiers to its cause.

“In a few cases, they have attracted individuals serving in the armed forces,” said Joshua Fisher Birch, a terrorism analyst at the New York-based Counter Extremism Project.

“The perpetrator of the 2009 Fort Hood Shooting, where a US army psychiatrist killed 13 people and wounded 32 others, had communicated with al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki.”

Fisher-Birch also pointed out another example from 2020, when Ethan Melzer, a US soldier and follower of the extremist and satanic group the Order of Nine Angles, passed sensitive information about his unit’s troop movements to an undercover FBI agent he believed to be a member of al-Qaida. Melzer wanted to facilitate an ambush on the unit."