A former New York resident was handed a life sentence on Friday after being convicted on charges related to his involvement with ISIS, according to federal prosecutors.
Mirsad Kandic, 41, was found guilty by a federal jury in Brooklyn following a three-week trial in May 2022.
Mr. Kandic, originally from Brooklyn and Kosovo, was convicted on one count of conspiracy to provide material support to ISIS and five substantive counts of providing material support to the terrorist organization.
Prosecutors said Mr. Kandic recruited people from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere to travel to Syria and Iraq and join ISIS battles.
His charges also include offering services, weapons, property and equipment, and false documentation and identification. These actions took place between January 2013 and June 2017 when Mr. Kandic was arrested in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“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.
According to court documents, Mr. Kandic was heavily involved in ISIS’s activities. He fought as a member of the group in Haritan, an ISIS stronghold on the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria.
He allegedly told an associate online that he worked in Turkey in ISIS’s border office as part of a team that conducted background checks on foreign fighters who wanted to go to Syria.
In order to join ISIS, Mr. Kandic tried and failed several times to travel from the United States to Turkey. In November 2013, he ultimately made the journey by taking a Greyhound bus for two days from New York City to Monterrey, Mexico. From there, he took flights through Panama, Brazil, Germany, Kosovo, and Turkey before making it to Syria.
Part of his activities involved spreading gruesome ISIS propaganda and disseminating recruitment messages through more than 120 Twitter accounts. One of the videos he shared celebrated ISIS conquests and featured macabre executions of captives, including victims who 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, prosecutors say.
Among those he recruited was Jake Bilardi, an 18-year-old Australian who contacted Mr. Kandic for assistance in joining ISIS. Mr. Bilardi joined ISIS in 2014 and killed more than 30 Iraqi soldiers and police officers in a suicide bomb attack west of Baghdad in March 2015.
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.
In addition to his role as a recruiter, prosecutors say Mr. Kandic provided battlefield intelligence to ISIS leadership, enforced ISIS media discipline, managed funds for ISIS fighters, and smuggled weapons to the group. He operated a private market on Telegram, where firearms and military equipment were sold.
“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.
Mr. Peace added that Mr. Kandic’s sentence ensures he will never again pose a threat to the United States or its allies.
The investigation and prosecution involved collaboration between multiple law enforcement agencies and foreign authorities in various countries. The Bosnian and Herzegovina State Investigation and Protection Agency, Australian Federal Police, Iraqi Ministry of Defense, and FBI Legal Attaché Offices in several countries provided crucial assistance.
“This sentencing demonstrates the serious commitment of the FBI and our law enforcement partners around the world to investigating and holding accountable terrorists who threaten the safety and security of American interests, and those of our allies,” said Assistant Director Robert R. Wells of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division.
