EA US citizen of Kosovo origin was sentenced to life imprisonment on Friday for recruiting “thousands” of volunteers for the Islamic State (IS). According to the US Department of Justice, Mirsad Kandic was a senior member of the jihadist militia between 2013 and 2017. As a recruiter, he sent “thousands of radicalized volunteers from Western countries to IS-controlled areas in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.”
In addition, the 40-year-old worked for the IS media and disseminated the jihadists’ propaganda and recruitment messages online, including via more than 120 accounts on the short message service Twitter.
Kandic left New York for Syria in 2013, where he joined IS. He later helped smuggle fighters and weapons for IS to Syria from Turkey, the US Department of Justice said.
Among the volunteers recruited by Kandic was Australian teenager Jake Bilardi: he joined ISIS in 2014 and a year later killed more than 30 Iraqi soldiers and himself in a suicide attack.
Delivered to the US
In early 2017, Kandic went into hiding in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In July of the same year he was arrested in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo and three months later extradited to the United States. In May 2022, he was convicted by a jury on five counts of conspiracy and support for ISIS.
In 2014, in the midst of the civil war in Syria, the IS took control of large parts of Syria and Iraq, but gradually lost these areas again under military pressure from a US-led coalition. The militia has also claimed responsibility for a series of deadly attacks in Europe in recent years.
