Life imprisonment for senior IS member in US ‘Hottest climate lie of the year’ – confusion over 48 degrees heat in Italy

A US citizen from Kosovo was sentenced to life in prison 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 spread online propaganda and recruitment messages from the jihadists, including through 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 ISIS into Syria from Turkey, the US Justice Department said.

Australian teenager recruited

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 bombing.

In early 2017, Kandic went into hiding in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In July of the same year he was arrested in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo and extradited to the United States three months later. In May 2022, he was convicted by a jury on five counts of conspiracy and support for ISIS.

IS had taken control of large parts of Syria and Iraq in 2014, in the middle of the civil war in Syria, but gradually lost these areas 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. (saw/sda/afp)