In the transcript, Mateen identified himself as a follower of Daesh and declared that the US government should not have killed Abu Wahid, one of the terror group’s leaders who had appeared in their execution videos. Wahid, a former member of Al-Qaeda, was killed on May 6, along with three other extremists.
“Yo, the airstrike that killed Abu Wahid a few weeks ago… that’s what triggered it, okay?” Mateen told the negotiator.
“They should have not bombed and killed Abu Wahid,” he declared. “Do your f-----g homework and figure out who Abu Wahid is, okay?”
Mateen also praised the men who detonated a bomb in Boston during the city’s annual marathon in 2013, and another domestic terrorist, though his name is written as “unintelligible” in the transcript, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
“My homeboy Tamerlan Tsarnaev did his thing on the Boston Marathon, my homeboy (unidentified name) did his thing, okay, so now it's my turn, okay?” Mateen said.
Mateen, a former security guard, also demanded multiple times that bombing in Iraq and Syria end.
“My name is I pledge of allegiance to (unidentifiable name) of the Islamic State,” Mateen told the negotiator. The unidentifiable name is widely reported to have been Daesh leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.
Despite that the FBI dismissed claims that Mateen was a closeted gay man and had committed the attack out of self-loathing, the media continued to push that narrative for weeks following the incident.
“Justifying the attack as a response to our targeting of Abu Wahib, the ISIS head of the Al Anbar Lions, reemphasizes the reality that this is a borderless war in which the individual neutralization of high value targets will not bring us ultimate victory,” Sebastian Gorka, a counterterrorism expert, told the Free Beacon. “Only the delegitimization of the ideology that men like Mateen adhere to can do that.”
