Syrian Jihadists Are Using a Texas Plumber's Truck to Shoot Down Aircraft. Here's How They Got Their Hands on the Vehicle.

It's free advertising, but quite possibly the worst kind of free advertising.

Mark Oberholtzer is a plumber from Texas City, Texas, who runs his own business.

As the Daily Mail reported, Oberholtzer is not a jihadist fighting in Syria — he's never even been to the country.

But one of his trucks has been hauled into jihad.

#جبهة_أنصار_الدين#جيش_المهاجرين_والأنصار رشاش (٢٣) يحرق الأرض من تحت أقدام النصيرية والرافضة في #حندرات pic.twitter.com/3ZalpDNG8N

— جبهة أنصار الدين (@ansardeenfront) December 15, 2014

How did an American plumber's truck wind up in the hands of the Ansar al-Deen Front, an Islamist group fighting in Syria, with an anti-aircraft gun mounted in its bed?

Oberholtzer said he sold it to an AutoNation dealership in October 2013, and while he normally removes his company logo from old trucks, in this one case he didn't.

After the Islamist group tweeted a photo of the truck, Oberholtzer said his company began getting inundated with phone calls, the Galveston County Daily News reported.

“A few of the people are really ugly,” he said.

Oberholtzer told the Daily News that he thought AutoNation would remove his company logo — and that he never expected the vehicle to wind up in the Middle East.

“They were supposed to have [removed the decal] and it looks like they didn’t do it,” Oberholtzer said. “How it ended up in Syria, I’ll never know.”

AutoNation told KHOU-TV that they probably sold the truck at auction, and it passed through several sets of owners before getting to Syria.

Islamist fighters in the war-torn country use a variety of castoff vehicles in their arsenals; watch the video below to see a whole army of makeshift anti-aircraft batteries operating out of old truck beds.

"To think something we would use to pull trailers, now is being used for terror, it's crazy," Jeff Oberholtzer, Mark's son, told KHOU. "Never in my lifetime would think something like that."

The younger Oberholtzer affirmed that the plumbing business has no Islamist connections: "We have nothing to do with terror at all."

The Daily News reported that Texas City emergency managers are monitoring the situation to safeguard Oberholtzer's business; as of Tuesday, they were unaware of any violent threats.

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