The prosecution of a Bowling Green man who traveled to Syria in 2014 and joined the terror group ISIS ended Monday with a judge sentencing him to 101 months in prison.

Mirsad Ramic, 35, was convicted last year by a jury on charges of providing material support and resources to ISIS, conspiring to provide material support to ISIS and receiving military-type training from a designated terrorist organization.

In addition to the 101-month prison sentence, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Greg Stivers imposed a $25,000 fine on Ramic.

Jurors at Ramic’s trial heard from former ISIS members who testified about Ramic’s participation in guard duties as part of a Bosnian-speaking ISIS battalion, firing weapons at a range and taking part in an offensive against Kurdish militants during the siege of the Syrian city of Kobani in 2014.

FBI agents and employees also testified about their efforts to learn Ramic’s intentions prior to his departure for Syria.

Federal prosecutors presented evidence that Ramic, a Bosnian national with dual U.S. citizenship, conspired with two Saudi nationals who attended Western Kentucky University to make their way to Syria in 2014 to join ISIS, designated by the U.S. Department of State as a foreign terrorist organization and previously known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Given an opportunity to speak Monday at his sentencing hearing in U.S. District Court in Bowling Green, Ramic struck a defiant tone, speaking critically of American actions on several geopolitical matters and complaining of being singled out for “selective prosecution” due to his faith.

“I know why I’m here — I’m here to suffer in the name of Allah,” Ramic said near the start of his remarks. “I believe that this was a sham prosecution and trial from the start. I believe this is a weaponized system of justice … at the end of the day I believe any sentence imposed on me will be a continuation of injustice.”

Federal prosecutors asked for Ramic to receive a 50-year prison sentence, which is the maximum penalty allowed under the law for the crimes for which Ramic was convicted.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Joshua Judd said evidence that was presented at trial showed that Ramic had been radicalized while living in the U.S. as a resettled refugee, that a trip Ramic took to Yemen in 2010 was an early attempt to join terror groups there, prompting the FBI to investigate.

Social media posts and e-mails from accounts belonging to Ramic expressing support of ISIS’s aims of claiming territory and imposing strict Islamic sharia law showed Ramic’s ability as a propagandist for the terror group, Judd argued.

“There is no indication of any remorse for his criminal activities,” Judd said in court Monday. “He actually was able to achieve his goal and traveled to Syria and took up arms, which I believe, based on the evidence, was a longstanding desire of his.”

Federal public defender Scott Wendelsdorf, representing Ramic, argued for his client to be sentenced to time served, arguing that a 67-month sentence he served in Turkey starting in 2015 for crimes charged there related to his ISIS membership should count toward his sentence in the American case.

Wendelsdorf maintained that Ramic, having found no mentors and little in the way of a support system in the U.S. after growing up in war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina and witnessing family members killed there, went to Syria with the hopes of living in a society in line with his Muslim beliefs, but was disenchanted by his time in ISIS and left in 2015, leading to his arrest in Turkey.

“He saw the hypocrisy and lies of ISIS and repudiated them,” Wendelsdorf said.

Wendelsdorf unsuccessfully argued against a terrorism-related sentencing enhancement for Ramic, which put him in a higher criminal history category and increased the potential term of his punishment under federal sentencing guidelines.

That argument was based on Wendelsdorf’s position that a presentence report that stated Ramic’s actions were calculated to influence by intimidation or coercion the Syrian government of then-president Bashar al-Assad, whose regime was not recognized by the U.S., and thus Ramic did not commit terror against a government body.

Stivers added the terror enhancement, but said that he believed Ramic’s imprisonment in Turkey should count toward the time he received in this case.

In fashioning the 101-month sentence plus the fine, Stivers said he considered the punishments that other defendants convicted of similar offenses received, and sought to avoid an unwarranted disparity between Ramic’s sentence and that of other defendants similarly convicted.

“There’s no evidence that Mr. Ramic undertook to engage in any acts of terrorism in terms of random acts of violence against innocent civilians to sow terror in the population,” Stivers said. “I think the evidence is clear he wanted to fight for a caliphate … he went to join an army intent on capturing a piece of territory for the creation of their own state.”