New York man who acted as ISIS recruiter sentenced to life in prison

An ISIS recruiter who spread the terror group’s propaganda online and fought alongside its members in an effort to wage a global jihad was sentenced Friday to life in prison, federal prosecutors said. 

Mirsad Kandic, 41, of Brooklyn, New York, was convicted by a federal jury in May 2022, after his 2017 arrest in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was charged with conspiracy and providing and attempting to provide support to the Islamic State.

“Serving ISIS’s deadly terror campaign, this defendant fought on the battlefield, spread propaganda, smuggled weapons, and radicalized Western recruits,” said U.S. Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. 

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Prosecutors said Kandic recruited people from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere to travel to Syria and Iraq and join ISIS battles. He allegedly told an associate online that he worked in Turkey in the Islamic State’s border office as part of a team that conducted background checks of foreign fighters who wanted to go to Syria.

He spread ISIS propaganda using more than 120 Twitter accounts, through which he posted videos of ISIS captives, including some in which victims were forced to dig their own graves before being executed. He sent thousands of radicalized fighters from Western countries to ISIS-controlled territories in Syria and the Middle East. 

Authorities said Kandic assisted Jake Bilardi, an 18-year-old Australian citizen who died in a suicide bomb attack west of Baghdad in March 2015. Bilardi joined ISIS in 2014 and killed more than 30 Iraqi soldiers and police officers during his suicide attack. 

The attack paved the way for ISIS’s takeover of Ramadi and the Anbar Province of Iraq several weeks later, an Iraqi Army general staffer testified to.

“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.