ROCHESTER – In the neighborhood around Mojoe’s Famous Pizza and Chicken, Mufid Elfgeeh’s reputation is far from that of a global terrorist.

Here, in the community where he lived and worked, Elfgeeh is known as a hardworking small-business owner, a man more concerned with making ends meet than with violent jihad in Iraq and Syria.

Yet jihad is what the 30-year-old native of Yemen is accused of promoting and supporting.

“There’s no more dangerous form of support than recruiting individuals ready and willing to engage in violence,” U.S. Attorney William J. Hochul Jr. said Wednesday.

To hear Hochul talk, Elfgeeh the business owner was, in reality, Elfgeeh the terrorist recruiter.

The allegation is that he tried to recruit three others to join the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and fight overseas. His case is believed to be the first prosecution of an individual charged with recruiting for the terrorist organization.

Elfgeeh, who has been in custody since his initial arrest in May, also is charged with attempted murder for his alleged role in planning to kill former and current members of the U.S. military.

“It was anyone wearing a military uniform,” Brian P. Boetig, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Buffalo office, said of the people he was targeting.

In court papers, the FBI details a conversation that Elfgeeh allegedly had with a confidential source in which he talks about his plans to purchase a handgun and silencer – he also is charged with gun possession – and target U.S. soldiers returning from Iraq.

“We gonna try to do as much as we could before we could get captured,” he allegedly told the source.

Elfgeeh, according to the papers, went on to suggest that 15 or 20 soldiers could be targeted and that a video claiming credit for the killings should be made public afterward.

Customers, neighbors and fellow Muslims in Rochester who know Elfgeeh offered a far different portrait of the man accused of supporting ISIS and seeking to harm U.S. service members.

“He was a normal person. He never spoke about anything,” said Khalid Sulieman, a native of Sudan who is a clerk at a corner grocery store a block away from Mojoe’s. “I was surprised when I heard what he was accused of.”

Neighbors in the area of his North Clinton Avenue business say there was nothing extraordinary about Elfgeeh other than that he was hardworking. Elfgeeh’s business was damaged by a fire after his arrest in May that is still under investigation.

“He’d come in at 10 in the morning and leave at 10 at night,” said Denny Garcia, who sells candles and Christian statues across the street from Mojoe’s. “Sometimes he’d come over to my store and say, ‘Denny, do you have change?’ and I’d give him quarters or whatever he needed. To me, he was like a regular person.”

Aaron Odum, who manages properties on North Clinton, said he was acquainted with Elfgeeh but never suspected he was involved with terrorism.

“By talking to him, you wouldn’t know he was connected with ISIS, he seemed just like an average person, a businessman,” Odum said.

But Odum quickly added that, in these uncertain times, it’s difficult to tell who may be doing bad deeds.

“This doesn’t surprise me. They had the Lackawanna Six in the Buffalo area,” Odum said of the young men of Yemeni ancestry who were arrested in 2002 and convicted in 2003 of providing material support to the al-Qaida terrorist network.

One businessman who works several blocks from Elfgeeh’s shop offered a different take on the accused terrorist. He said Elfgeeh was banned from a local mosque about two years ago because he and another worshiper argued.

“My understanding is that Elfgeeh had tried to sell merchandise outside another merchant’s store. And when they saw each other at the mosque, they got into a fight and both of them were banned,” said the businessman, who spoke on the condition he not be identified. “Both of them were told not come back to the mosque. Its not a place to fight.”

At the Al Rahman Mosque on Bay Street, where the confrontation occurred, worshipers offered more insight into Elfgeeh and the altercation that got him banned from the mosque.

They said Elfgeeh got into a fistfight with three other individuals because he had failed to pay a debt. Mosque leaders were so upset by the altercation that they adopted a set of rules for conduct and posted it in the mosque’s lobby.

“He was very sternly counseled and there was not much sympathy for him,” a mosque official said of Elfgeeh.

Another mosque official suggested that Elfgeeh might have exaggerated his involvement with ISIS.

“He was fronting and when the police realized he wasn’t who they thought he was, they banged him and locked him up,” said the official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named. “He ran his mouth off too much. He didn’t know he was dealing with police and he was played for a fool.”

Law enforcement officials don’t buy it. They said any suggestion that Elfgeeh was a “normal” person flies in the face of the evidence against him. They point to the allegations that he bought two handguns and silencers, and paid $600 to a Yemeni man eager to join ISIS. “The fact that someone can fly under the radar doesn’t mean they’re not involved,” Boetig said.

Elfgeeh’s indictment brought to mind the case of the Lackawanna Six, the six men who pleaded guilty after being arrested on charges that they attended a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan run by al-Qaida.

Dr. Khalid J. Qazi, founding president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council of Western New York, a Muslim advocacy group, said it was just as upsetting to learn of the allegations against Elfgeeh.

“We condemn this type of behavior, and he will face justice and the law of the land,” Qazi said.

Federal Public Defender Mark D. Hosken, Elfgeeh’s lawyer, could not be reached to comment Wednesday.

His client is scheduled to be arraigned today. If convicted, Elfgeeh could face up to life in prison.

Elfgeeh’s indictment was the result of an investigation by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in Rochester.

email: pfairbanks@buffnews.com and lmichel@buffnews.com