In 2013, Mirsad Kandic began working with the Islamic State and helped advance its campaign of global jihad.
Over the next four years, he fought in at least one battle and operated from safe havens in Syria, Turkey and Bosnia, federal prosecutors said, spreading propaganda and controlling a network of IS-affiliated Twitter accounts. He is also said to have given the group’s fighters money, weapons, equipment and false IDs.
And, prosecutors say, he played a role in recruiting or trafficking many of those fighters, including an Australian teenager named Jake Bilardi, who eventually died as a suicide bomber in Iraq.
Last year a jury in Brooklyn found Mr. Kandic, who had lived there and in the Bronx prior to his overseas trip, guilty of conspiracy and providing material support to IS. On Friday, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the federal district court in Brooklyn sentenced him to life in prison.
A prosecutor, J. Matthew Haggans, told Judge Garaufis before sentencing that Mr. Kandic had eagerly embraced Islamic State’s deadly theology, which has affected millions of people.
“He was a dealer in death and destruction,” Mr Haggans said. “He was a global terrorist for a global terrorist organization at its peak.”
A defense attorney, David Stern, pleaded for leniency, urging the judge to send a message that “we have a spark of grace for every human being and we believe in change.”
Shortly before his sentencing, Mr Kandic told the judge that he was not a violent person and had not harmed anyone, but added: “I beg your forgiveness.”
Moments later, Judge Garaufis described Mr Kandic’s behavior as “extreme” and “unfathomable” and said he had turned beliefs “into hate and murder” on a “large scale”.
“Jake Bilardi didn’t deserve to die,” Judge Garaufis said. “And he didn’t deserve to kill anyone.”
Mr. Kandic, a citizen of Kosovo and lawful permanent resident of the United States, was one of thousands of radicalized figures from dozens of countries who traveled to the Middle East to join the Islamic State, a brutal group known for using women to kill women forcing sex slavery and for the drowning, burning and beheading of prisoners.
Despite being placed on a no-fly list and twice blocked from boarding flights to Europe, Mr. Kandic was able to leave the United States for Istanbul in 2013, taking a complicated route that included stops in Texas, Mexico, Panama, Brazil, Portugal and Germany .
Upon his arrival in IS territory, according to prosecutors, Mr Kandic joined a brigade of mostly foreign fighters called Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, which was then led by a Georgian national, Omar al-Shishani, who was serving as Islamic State minister of the war.
He also forged ties with ISIS leaders such as Abu Luqman, the group’s governor in Raqqa province, and Bajro Ikanovic, a Bosnian national who ran a training camp for recruits in northern Syria, prosecutors said. Evidence presented by prosecutors at the hearing showed that Mr. Kandic had passed “intelligence from the battlefield” to Mr. Ikanovic and once alerted him to the presence of a “spy” in Mosul, Iraq.
According to the public prosecutor’s office, Mr. Kandic has been based in Istanbul since 2014. He worked in what prosecutors called ISIS’s “media branch,” and ran dozens of Twitter accounts that disseminated the group’s propaganda, including a video titled “Flames of War,” depicting the executions of enemies of the Islamic State.
Mr Kandic also used social media to recruit people to join the group, according to prosecutors. He housed these would-be fighters in a “safe house” he maintained in Istanbul, helped them obtain fake Turkish and Syrian ID cards, and sent them to Syria. Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Egypt.
One of those whom Mr Kandic is believed to have cared for was Mr Bilardi, who prosecutors say had searched for the term “Turkey-Syria border smuggler” in the summer of 2014 when he was 17 and on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia. lived .
Within about two days, Mr Bilardi had found his way online to Mr Kandic, who prosecutors say accompanied him for weeks and gave him advice on items to bring from Australia and specific instructions on where to go in Istanbul after arrival by plane.
Mr Bilardi joined ISIS in Syria in late 2014 and later joined Mr Kandic’s support, prosecutors said, adding that the two stayed in touch for months while Mr Bilardi fought in skirmishes and prepared for a suicide squad.
That attack happened in the spring of 2015, one of several that took place in Anbar province that day, prosecutors wrote. The attacks involved at least 11 suicide bombers, killed more than 30 people and two months later ISIS took over the region.
Communications intercepted by the Iraqi military showed that other ISIS fighters “congratulated” Mr. Bilardi on the “success” of his attack and that the group offered “condolences” over his death, prosecutors wrote.
Prosecutors added that Mr Kandic had commented on Mr Bilardi’s “martyrdom”, calling him on Twitter a “lion” who had killed and wounded many “kufar”, a derogatory term for infidels.