A former soldier in the U.S. Army was sentenced Friday to 14 years in prison after pleading guilty to attempting to provide the Islamic State group with information to help plan an ambush he thought would result in the deaths of U.S. soldiers in the Middle East, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

The soldier, Pvt. Cole Bridges, 24, of Stow, Ohio, also discussed potential locations for terrorist attacks in New York City with an undercover FBI agent whom he believed to be a supporter of the Islamic State group.

Bridges enlisted in the military in 2019 and joined an infantry division in Fort Stewart, Georgia. Before enlisting, he had already been persuaded by radical ideologies, according to the Justice Department.

“Cole Bridges used his U.S. Army training to pursue a horrifying goal: the brutal murder of his fellow service members in a carefully plotted ambush,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.

Beginning in at least 2019, Bridges began researching jihadi propaganda and posted his support for the Islamic State group on social media. About a year after joining the Army, he began corresponding with an FBI agent who was posing as an Islamic State supporter in contact with the group in the Middle East.

A criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York detailed the soldier’s fervent intent on aiding the Islamic State group, describing Bridges as “a supporter of ISIS and its mission to establish a global caliphate.”

The complaint described internet searches he conducted for terms that included “U.S. soldier shooting” and “Green Beret ambush.”

Bridges and the informant began communicating on an encrypted messaging application around October 2020. Bridges provided portions of U.S. Army training manuals and advice on combat tactics, thinking that the information would be used in future attacks against U.S. soldiers, according to court records.