Washington: A US citizen of Kosovo ancestry who assisted in providing "thousands" of recruits to the Daesh organisation was given a life sentence for aiding the extremist group on Friday, according to the Justice Department.

In the years between 2013 and 2017, when ISIS held sway over large portions of Iraq and Syria, Mirsad Kandic, 40, was a senior figure in the jihadist organisation, according to the Justice Department.

He relocated from New York to Syria in 2013 and joined Daesh there, serving as a fighter in Haritan outside of Aleppo. He was then instructed to relocate to Turkiye in order to assist the group in smuggling foreign fighters and weapons into Syria, the report claimed.

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The department claimed that he was also an emir for Daesh media, disseminating the organization's recruitment and propaganda online, including through more than 120 Twitter accounts.

In his capacity as a recruiter, "he sent thousands of radicalised Daesh volunteer fighters from Western countries into Daesh-controlled territories in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East," the Justice Department claimed.

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Ruslan Asainov, a fellow New Yorker who joined Daesh as a sniper and was found guilty in February of giving material support to a designated terrorist organisation, was one of the volunteers who was recruited.

Another was Australian teenager Jake Bilardi, who joined the Daesh organisation in 2014 and later committed suicide by detonating a bomb in March 2015, killing more than 30 Iraqi soldiers in addition to himself.

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Early in 2017, Kandic was using a false identity to elude capture in Bosnia. He was detained in Sarajevo in July 2017 and was returned to the US three months later.

In May 2022, a jury found him guilty on five counts of conspiring to support Daesh and one count of conspiracy