Cholo Abdi Abdullah was sentenced on December 22 to two consecutive life terms because of a plan to fly a commercial airliner into Atlanta’s Bank of America Plaza on behalf of Al-Shabaab. Why have you never heard of him? The route from Somalia terror training to Philippine flight training was years in the making. He was convicted by a jury in November of 2024.

Cholo Abdi Abdullah is from Kenya. Al-Shabaab is an Al-Qaeda affiliated terror group centered in Somalia. After he completed military training in Somalia, he went to the Philippines to train for obtaining a commercial pilot’s license. The flight training was paid for by Al-Shabaab.

Abdullah joined al-Shabaab in 2015 and spent approximately a year at a series of safehouses in Somalia where he worked with high-ranking al-Shabaab members and received military-style training that included how to fire an AK-47 assault rifle and how to make different sized explosives. During his training, he was recruited by senior al-Shabaab operatives for a “greater plan,” one that was “bigger than the fighting and the explosives.”. Specifically, he agreed to join al-Shabaab’s international scheme to execute a mass-casualty terrorist attack, which would involve Abdullah training to become an airline pilot so that he could hijack a commercial plane and crash it into a building in the U.S.

Between October 2017 and July 2019, Abdullah became a student at a flight school in the Philippines and spent hundreds of hours training to become a commercial pilot. Abdullah’s flight school tuition was financed by al-Shabaab, which raises funds through an elaborate system of extortion in Somalia that it refers to as “taxation.” …

Throughout his flight training, Abdullah also provided his al-Shabaab handler with detailed progress reports that described his research and attack planning. In these reports, he described how he had taken flights to determine which airline seats had the best views of the flight deck door. He also compiled research on post-September 11 hijacking attempts and described how the “brothers during 9/11 did something completely unexpected in a more creative way, ‘study for piloting.’”. In that same report, he concluded that “the only successful hijack after 9/11 was the one of the Ethiopian Airlines and it is so because it was hijacked by the pilot himself.”. His progress report then described a list of “My ideas” that he created and arrived at for a successful hijacking operation. His number one idea was that “for a very successful mission, we need a pilot in the cockpit (which means I should apply for the airlines).”.DOJ Press release

Philippine authorities arrested him in 2019 and turned him over to the US in 2020. The pathway through the courts lasted through November 2024.

The Bank of America plaza in Atlanta, Georgia is 55 stories high and 1.3 million square feet. When fully occupied, thousands of people could be working there at one time. A terrorist attack there would be devastating. We need an immediate immigration moratorium.

— Free the World ???? (@PatriotVerity) December 26, 2025

America has been paying for their own demise for a while now. pic.twitter.com/7ovR4N511J

— TruthUnfiltered (@Truth_Unfiltere) December 25, 2025

Cholo Abdi Abdullah is only one of thousands of terrorists in the world who desire to create another mass casualty event in the US.  We can only hope our DOJ will continue to monitor and prosecute them.

*****

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