Mirsad Kandic, who was arrested in Sarajevo in 2017, was sentenced in the United States to life in prison on one count of conspiracy to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and five substantive counts of providing material support to ISIS in the forms of personnel services, weapons, property and equipment, and false documentation and identification between January 2013. and June 2017.

Kandic, 41, of Brooklyn and Kosovo, was convicted by a federal jury in May 2022 following a three-week trial in Brooklyn, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said.

“Serving ISIS’s deadly terror campaign, this defendant fought on the battlefield, spread propaganda, smuggled weapons, and radicalized Western recruits. The National Security Division was created to counter foreign terrorist organizations like ISIS and, with our partners, we remain committed to identifying and holding accountable those who provide support to such terrorist groups,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

“Kandic was a high-ranking member of ISIS who relished the death and destruction he wrought while providing every conceivable form of material support to a terrorist organization, including the recruitment of countless others to ISIS’s bloody campaigns in Syria and elsewhere,” said

U.S. Attorney Breon Peace for the Eastern District of New York described Kandic as a “high-ranking member of ISIS who relished the death and destruction he wrought while providing every conceivable form of material support to a terrorist organization, including the recruitment of countless others to ISIS’s bloody campaigns in Syria and elsewhere”.

“Today’s sentence holds the defendant accountable for his conduct and ensures that he will never again pose a threat to the United States or any of our allies”, he said.

According to the DOJ, after several failed attempts to travel from the United States to Istanbul, Turkey, Kandic took a two-day Greyhound bus ride from New York City to Monterrey, Mexico, in November 2013, and flew through Panama, Brazil, Portugal, Germany, Kosovo, and Turkey before arriving in Syria at the end of 2013. Once in Syria, the defendant joined ISIS and became a fighter for the group in Haritan, an ISIS stronghold in the outskirts of Aleppo, wielding Russian-made PK machine guns and AK-47 assault rifles.

ISIS leadership then sent the defendant to Turkey to take up the role of smuggling foreign fighters and weapons into Syria from abroad, and to serve as an emir for ISIS media. Kandic disseminated ISIS recruitment messages and gruesome propaganda using more than 120 Twitter accounts. For example, the defendant sent out an ISIS-produced “documentary” titled “Flames of War.” This video celebrated ISIS conquests and macabre executions of ISIS captives, including instances where victims were forced to dig their own graves before being summarily executed by gunshot. The defendant tweeted that this video was the “best thing ever seen on screen.”

The DOJ said that Kandic “a prolific recruiter of foreign fighters for ISIS” who sent thousands of radicalized ISIS volunteer fighters from Western countries into ISIS-controlled territories in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. This included a fellow New Yorker, Ruslan Maratovich Asainov, who became an ISIS sniper and sniper trainer, and another individual who became an emir for ISIS safehouses in the Idlib province of Syria.

One od the people Kandic recruited was Jake Bilardi of Australia. Bilardi contacted the defendant in June 2014 for assistance in traveling to Syria to join ISIS. Kandic provided Bilardi, who had just turned 18 years old and had never traveled internationally before, with instructions and guidance for reaching Istanbul, Turkey. He then arranged for Bilardi to be picked up at the airport in Istanbul and smuggled him into Syria. Kandic maintained contact with Bilardi as he became an ISIS fighter and ISIS suicide bomber.

Bilardi went on to commit a suicide truck attack with fellow ISIS members on March 11, 2015, in Ramadi Iraq, killing himself, more than 30 Iraqi soldiers and an Iraqi policeman.

According to the DOJ statement, Kandic provided battlefield intelligence to top ISIS leadership and “shaped the information environment in which ISIS operated by enforcing ISIS media and publicity discipline”.

He also managed money for ISIS fighters in Syria and smuggled weapons to the terrorist organisation. Kandic operated a private market via Telegram called “Khilafah (Caliphate) Market”, for which he was the group administrator with authority to restrict access to the group. Members posted firearms and military equipment for sale, including mortars and suicide belts (i.e., improvised explosive devices). Among the members of Kandic’s private Telegram market was Abu Luqman, who, at the time, was the ISIS governor for the Raqqa province, ISIS’s de facto capital in Syria, the statement says.

The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs, the FBI’s Legal Attachés abroad and foreign authorities in multiple countries on three continents provided critical assistance in this case.