A US citizen from Kosovo who assisted in providing “thousands” of recruits to the Islamic State group was given a life sentence for his assistance to the extremist group on Friday, according to the Justice Department.
The Justice Department claimed that between 2013 and 2017, while the terrorist organization had sway over substantial portions of Iraq and Syria, Mirsad Kandic, 40, held a senior position within ISIS.
He relocated from New York to Syria in 2013, when he joined IS and started fighting in Haritan, a town west of Aleppo.
Then he was told to go to Turkey to assist in smuggling weapons and foreign fighters for the organization into Syria, it said.
According to the department, he served as an emir for IS media, distributing the organization’s recruiting and propaganda materials online, including through more than 120 Twitter accounts.
In his capacity as a recruiter, the Justice Department said that “he sent thousands of radicalized ISIS volunteer fighters from Western countries into ISIS-controlled territories in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.”
Ruslan Asainov, a fellow New Yorker who joined the Islamic State group as a sharpshooter and was found guilty in February of giving material support to a designated terrorist organization, was one of the volunteers who was sought out.
Another was Australian adolescent Jake Bilardi, who joined the Islamic State organization in 2014 after being persuaded to do so, and who later killed more than 30 Iraqi soldiers in a suicide bombing operation in March 2015.
Early in 2017, Kandic was using a fictitious name to remain undetected in Bosnia. Three months after his arrest in Sarajevo in July 2017, he was extradited to the US.
In May 2022, he was found guilty by a jury of conspiracy and five counts of supporting IS.
