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Federal District Court in Brooklyn: Life sentence for IS recruiter Mirsad Kandic
Photo: DON EMMERT/ AFP
A U.S. citizen from Kosovo was sentenced to life imprisonment on Friday for recruiting "thousands" of volunteers for the Islamic State (IS). According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Mirsad Kandic was a high-ranking member of the jihadist militia between 2013 and 2017. As a recruiter, he sent "thousands of radicalized volunteers from Western countries to ISIS-controlled areas in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East."
In addition, the 40-year-old worked for the IS media and spread the propaganda and recruitment messages of the jihadists online, including via more than 120 accounts on Twitter.
Kandic had gone from New York to Syria in 2013, where he joined ISIS. Later, he helped smuggle fighters and weapons for IS into Syria from Turkey, the US Department of Justice said.
Among the volunteers recruited by Kandic was the Australian Jake Bilardi: the teenager from Melbourne had converted to Islam and then joined the jihad. In March 2015, he blew himself up in the Iraqi city of Ramadi, killing at least 17 people.
Arrested in Sarajevo and extradited to the U.S.
At the beginning of 2017, Kandic went into hiding in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In July of the same year, he was arrested in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo and extradited to the United States three months later. In May 2022, he was convicted by a jury of five counts of conspiracy and support for ISIS.
In 2014, in the midst of the civil war in Syria, IS took control of large parts of Syria and Iraq, but gradually lost these areas under military pressure from a US-led coalition. The militia has also claimed responsibility for a number of deadly attacks in Europe in recent years.
oka/AFP