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How a Texas plumber's truck wound up in ISIS' hands
Texas plumber Mark Oberholtzer has had to contend with tough clogs in his business, but probably none so formidable as to require use of a Soviet-made anti-aircraft gun.
After a jihadi in Syria tweeted a photo of a 23 mm twin-barreled autocannon mounted on a truck Oberholtzer used to own, it was his muddied reputation that needed repair.
“When that photo got tweeted and then circulated across the world, you knew pretty well that if you needed to get some plumbing done with an anti-aircraft gun in the back of ... the truck, maybe you ought to call ‘Mark-1 Plumbing,’ which is not what he intended,” said Robert Wilonsky, digital managing editor for the Dallas Morning News
It would seem Oberholtzer’s truck made the same journey many potential jihadis from the US make to get to Syria — largely through Turkey.
Oberholtzer is suing a Houston car dealership where he traded in the truck in October 2013. He's seeking more than $1 million in damages after the 2005 Ford F-250, which sold at auction the following month, was shipped to Turkey with decals still affixed. The truck eventually ended up in Syria, where it was outfitted with an anti-aircraft gun and used in the country’s civil war.
The truck, emblazoned with the name and phone number of Oberholtzer’s business, was featured in a tweet Dec. 15, 2014. It was first tweeted by the extremist group Ansar al-Deen. The next day, the photo was used in the closing segment of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.” It also happened to be the show’s final episode, pulling in almost 2.5 million viewers, the largest audience in the show’s history. https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-12-15/how-texas-plumbers-truck-wound-isis-hands
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