A woman arrested at Denver International Airport as she was about to embark on a potentially deadly quest to Syria pleaded guilty on Wednesday to a terror charge in federal court.

Shannon Maureen Conley, 19, appeared in Denver’s U.S. District Court on a charge of providing material support to al-Qaeda and affiliates, including ISIS.

The soft-spoken woman, wearing a green-patterned hijab over a striped gray and white Jefferson County jail jumpsuit, gave mostly one-word answers in court, making it clear that she understood she was giving up her right to appeal her guilty verdict.

“Halima is fully aware that the fact that she was arrested may very well have saved her,” said her public defender, Robert Pepin, referring to her by her Muslim name.

As part of a plea agreement, prosecutors agreed not to file additional charges, and she promised to divulge information about co-conspirators and possibly testify in court.

Agents searching Conley’s Arvada home discovered videos of lectures by Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Islamic militant, and videos by other jihadists, said Jeffrey Dorschner, spokesman for U.S. Attorney John Walsh.

They also found shooting targets labeled with the number of rounds fired and the distance they were fired on, Dorschner said in a news release.

U.S. District Judge Raymond Moore ordered a psychological and personality examination of Conley.

Pepin said Conley, a Muslim convert, regrets her involvement.

“Unfortunately, as she pursued the study of that faith she was led terribly astray. That in turn led to her making some very poor choices. She is now paying the price of those choices,” Pepin said.

Since her arrest in April the news out of Iraq and Syria has “been just awful,” he added.

“Like all of us, Halima has been horrified to learn of the slaughter and oppression at the hands of those controlling ISIS. It was never her vision to have any role in such horror,” said Pepin, who added that she prays for families of the victims of ISIS.

Conley is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 23. She faces up to five years in a federal prison and a $250,000 fine, Dorschner said.

Conley’s clumsy stalking of the Faith Bible Chapel of Arvada in the fall of 2013 was so transparent a pastor called the FBI. Despite face-to-face warnings by FBI agents that her plans were illegal, Conley continued plotting to join a Middle East jihad. Her arrest came on April 8 as she tried to board a plane en route to Turkey.

Faith Bible’s Senior Pastor George Morrison has said although he believed Conley was a “terrorist wannabe” he had to take her sketching of interior rooms of the church seriously, especially because a 2007 murder spree had directly affected the church.

In early December that year, a shooter gunned down two people at Youth With a Mission, a missionary training center on the Faith Bible campus. The same man later killed two teenage sisters during a shootout at New Life Churchin Colorado Springs.

Conley had seemed little interested in religion and her timing couldn’t have been worse. She began attending meetings as the congregation prepared to welcome more than 1,000 area Jews into their chapel for an annual homage to the Holy Land.

“It was very obvious. Her acts were just continually suspicious,” Morrison had said.

On Sundays, Conley would wander from one Sunday school class to another. She was taking notes and making drawings but seemingly not of church discussions, members have said. Many members saw her walking the halls in a section where children attended separate Sunday school classes, always taking notes.

Well aware of Conley’s peculiar activities, the church’s security officers took surveillance pictures of her. Church leaders established a new security protocol, in which backpacks were inspected. Eventually church leaders asked Conley to leave the church.

Conley, who attended Ralston Valley and Arvada West high schools, had received military training in a Texas camp run by the U.S. Army Explorers and developed a close relationship with an avowed terrorist who had invited her to join the jihad.

The certified nurse’s aide was planning to marry Yousr Mouelhi whom she met online and fight a guerilla war in the Middle East or to work as a nurse, she told an FBI agent.

Conley also told an FBI agent that she hated “those people” at Faith Bible for their support of Israel, adding that “if they think I’m a terrorist, I’ll give them something to think I am.”

Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206, denverpost.comcoldcases or twitter.com/kirkmitchell