US sentences New York man to life in Prison for joining ISIS
QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – A New York man was sentenced on Friday to life in prison for providing material support to the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria between January 2013 and June 2017.
The US Department of Justice said, in a press release, that the defendant provided material support to ISIS in the forms of personnel, including himself, as well as services, weapons, property and equipment, and false documentation and identification.
The defendant was arrested in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2017.
According to court documents, Mirsad Kandic, 41, of Brooklyn and Kosovo, was convicted by a federal jury in May 2022 following a three-week trial in Brooklyn.
Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division said that Kandic “fought on the battlefield, spread propaganda, smuggled weapons, and radicalized Western recruits.”
“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,” US Attorney Breon Peace for the Eastern District of New York said.
Kandic traveled 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, according to the source.
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.
Kandic sent thousands of radicalized ISIS volunteer fighters from Western countries into ISIS-controlled territories in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.
He also provided battlefield intelligence to top ISIS leadership. He also shaped the information environment in which ISIS operated by enforcing ISIS media and publicity discipline.
ISIS lost its final stronghold in Syria in March 2019. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), with the support of the US-led Global Coalition, defeated ISIS after fierce battles in the town of Baghouz in the eastern countryside of Deir ez-Zor, eastern Syria, bringing an end to the so-called caliphate declared by the terrorist ISIS.