A Spanish court has handed down prison sentences to 11 members of a recruitment network linked to the Takfiri Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group that has sent bombers to violence-scarred Syria.

Spain’s National Court in Madrid said in a statement on Friday that the gang members, who were all of Moroccan background, were sentenced to between 10 and 12 years imprisonment after they were found guilty of sending “numerous” terrorists to Syria.

The gang leaders, Ismail Abdelaftif and Karim Abdesalam Mohamed, got 12 years in prison while the rest received 10-year sentences each.

According to the court statement, the group, which was based in Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta, sent at least 28 people to Syria between April 2012 and June 2013.

At least eight of the network’s recruits were killed in “terrorist acts... in which hundreds of people died,” the statement added.

The court defended the sentences given to the 11 men, citing the “danger posed by them all and the seriousness of the actions carried out by the cell that they voluntarily joined.”

In recent years, Spanish police have reportedly arrested scores of suspected recruiters for terrorist groups, including those operating online.

Daesh terrorists currently control parts of Syria and Iraq. The extremist militant group has also carried out a number of terror attacks in other countries in recent months.

This is while Western governments have contributed to the rise of Daesh by sponsoring the militants fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over the past four years.

Late last month, The New York Times reported that some 30,000 militants from over 100 countries have traveled to Syria and Iraq since 2011 to join the ranks of Takfiri terrorist groups operating in the two Arab countries.