11.02.2014.

Exclusive:"Our Goal is Jerusalem" - Militant Islamists in Southeast Europe

American Center for Democracy

By Dr. Gordon N. Bardos, the president of SEERECON, a strategic advisory and political risk analysis firm specializing on southeastern Europe.
Courtesy to East West Bridge by the author

Over the past several years, the Balkans has emerged as a new battleground for militant Islamism.[i]In June 2010, Islamist extremists bombed a police station in the central Bosnian town of Bugojno, killing one police officer and wounding six others. In February 2011, a Kosovo radical killed two US servicemen at Frankfurt Airport. In October 2011, a Sandzak Wahhabi attacked the US Embassy in Sarajevo. In April 2012, suspected Islamist extremists murdered five Macedonian citizens outside Skopje. In July 2012, Hezbollah operatives bombed a bus full of Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria. In March 2013, a Hezbollah operative was discovered monitoring Israeli citizens in Cyprus. [ii] In the first six months of 2012 alone, some 200 Iranian “businessmen” entered Bosnia, including an individual Israeli intelligence has tracked in Georgia, India, and Thailand—all countries in which terrorist attacks have targeted Israeli officials over the past two years.[iii]

As concerns grow that European and even American jihad volunteers in Syria could pose new security threats if and when they return to their home countries,[iv] large numbers of individuals from the Balkans have joined the Syrian jihad. According to one estimate, Bosnia has provided more Syrian jihad volunteers than any other country in Europe per capita,[v] with several hundred citizens of Bosnia & Herzegovina now reported to be fighting in Syria,[vi] along with a large number of Bosnian émigrés.[vii] It has also been reported that Bosnia and Romania are sources of weapons for the Syrian jihad, as the arrest of a Swedish imam-turned arms-procurer, Haythan Rahmeh, revealed.[viii] In addition, reports suggest up to 140 ethnic Albanians are now fighting alongside Islamist groups in Syria,[ix] as well as and some thirty individuals from the Sandzak.[x] Priština media have reported that some 30 individuals from Kosovo went to Syria in January 2014 alone, and that six Albanians have already died in the fighting there.[xi] In an interesting example of comparative rates of radicalization, one observer has noted that more individuals from the Balkans have joined the Syrian jihad than from Central Asia or the Caucasus.[xii] An indication of the degree to which the threat of violent Balkan extremists joining the Syrian jihad has become, and the danger they pose to their native states and societies upon their eventual return, is the January 2014 dispatch of a large, multiagency US government delegation (including individuals from the FBI, the NSA, the Department of State, and the Department of Justice) on a fact-finding mission to the region.[xiii]

The Balkan blowback from the Syrian jihad is already being felt. In November 2013, six suspected terrorists (two of whom are believed to have fought in Syria) were arrested in Kosovo on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks using cell-phone activated explosive devices. The group was also believed to have been involved in an attack on two American Mormon missionaries in Priština on November 3^rd.[xiv] Subsequently, a group called “Xhemati i Xhehadit” warned police of “painful attacks” if their comrades were not released. The warning noted that “without doubt, we have people who love death more than you life in this world.”[xv] The continuing threat from militant Islamist groups in the region was further on evidence in Bosnia, when at the beginning of the month the largest illegal arms cache discovered in postwar Bosnia was found near the central Bosnian town of Tešanj, in the heart of territory where foreign mujahedin and their local Bosnian allies operate. The weapons, which arrived in the area about 1999, included over five hundred 84mm grenades for rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Local authorities believed the weapons could have been used for terrorist attacks or provided for use on other jihad fronts.[xvi]

These have not been unexpected attacks and developments. Already in May 2007, a leading American observer of Islam in the Balkans had noted that “a visitor to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, Kosovo, and Macedonia encountered unmistakable evidence that extremist intruders are opening a Balkan front in the global jihad,”[xvii] and in January 2010 Israeli officials warned that the Balkan region “is global jihad’s next destination for creating an infrastructure and recruiting activists.”[xviii]

 

Bosnian jihad veteran Sulaiman abu-Ghaith with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, October 2001

Indeed, almost every major terrorist  action against the US and other western countries and interests over the past two decades has had Balkan ties or connections—including the 9/11 attacks, the August 1998 US African embassy bombings, the December 1999 Millenium Bomb Plot targeting Los Angeles’ LAX Airport, the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Aden Harbor, the November 2003 Istanbul bombings, the March 2004 Madrid Train bombings, the 7/7 London Underground bombing, the May 2007 Fort Dix bomb plot, the July 2009 Raleigh Group conspiracy, and the January 2010 conspiracy to attack the New York subway system. The late Richard Holbrooke made clear the dangerous extent to which militant Islamism has infiltrated southeastern Europe when he noted that had it not been for the Dayton Peace Accords, “al-Qaeda would probably have planned the Sept. 11 attacks from Bosnia, not Afghanistan.”[xix]

Bosnian jihad veteran Khaled al-Harbi, November 2001

  Balkan Jihadi Threat Matrix

“Without Dayton, al-Qaeda would probably have planned the Sept. 11 attacks from Bosnia, not Afghanistan.” Richard Holbrooke

Making these attacks possible is the sophisticated infrastructure Balkan Islamist militants have created over the past two decades. The infrastructure consists of four main components: 1) local allies in political, security, and religious establishments; 2) safe havens consisting of radical-controlled mosques and remote villages which provide militant Islamists places to recruit, organize, train and hide; 3) NGO’s and financial institutions providing terrorists with cover identities and the ability to clandestinely transfer operational funds; and 4) various electronic and print media promoting their extremist ideology. Such complex, multi-faceted organization allows militant Islamist groups to sustain the occasional crackdown or arrest without substantial damage to their networks or infrastructure as a whole.[xx]

Local Allies

The origins of militant Islamism’s rise in the Balkans can be traced to the life and work of Bosnia’s late Islamist president, Alija Izetbegović. In the late 1930s/early 1940s, Izetbegović and a conspiratorial group of like-minded Islamist extremists formed an organization called the Mladi Muslimani (“Young Muslims”) whose goal, in Izetbegović’s own words, was the creation of a “great Muslim state.” [xxi] Towards this goal, the Mladi Muslimani established an underground journal with the telling title Mudžahid (“Holy Warrior”) and swore an oath asking Allah to grant them perseverance in their “path of jihad” and their “uncompromisingly struggle against everything non-Islamic.”[xxii] Several decades later, Izetbegović continued to promote this view; in his seminal work, the Islamska Deklaracija (“Islamic Declaration”) Izetbegović would argue that “There is no peace or co-existence between Islamic faith and non-Islamic social and political institutions . . . the Islamic movement can and may move to take power once it is morally and numerically strong enough, not only to destroy the existing non-Islamic government, but to build a new Islamic government.[xxiii]

 

 

Jihad in Europe: Izetbegović’s “Seventh Muslim Brigade,” Zenica, 1996

Given the existence of such local Balkan allies and sympathizers, it proved easy for Al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups to extend their reach throughout Europe. After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, Bosnia, according to one study, became “[a] new refuge, close to both the heart of Europe and the Middle East . . . an excellent tactical base for espionage, fundraising, and terrorist activities . . . a major center for terrorist recruitment and fundraising. . . a place where recruits could train, coalesce into cells, and seek shelter from prosecution by foreign law enforcement.”[xxiv] The former NATO commander in Bosnia, US Army Major General Virgil Packett, has claimed that “Bosnia has moved from being a sanctuary for terrorism to a gateway for terrorism.”[xxv] Other analyses further support this view, suggesting that the existence of an extensive network of individuals sympathetic to militant Islamism makes Bosnia a command and control center for various groups of regional militants.[xxvi] Estimates of the number of non-indigenous mujahedin who moved to Bosnia in the 1990s range from several hundred to six thousand.[xxvii]

Increasing the threat and capacity of militant Islamists in the Balkans is the support and cooperation they receive from local authorities sympathetic to their cause. In February 1996, NATO forces raided an Iranian-operated terrorist training camp in Bosnia where they found plans to NATO installations, booby-trapped children’s toys, and essays on how to assassinate political opponents and critical journalists. The camp’s director was the personal intelligence advisor to Bosnia’s late Islamist president, Alija Izetbegović.[xxviii] His son, Bakir Izetbegović (currently a member of the Bosnian state presidency) has admitted to personally being in touch with leading mujahedin figures in Bosnia such as Imad al-Husin, a.k.a Abu Hamza, and offering “to help in any way.”[xxix]

Like father, like son?

 

Alija Izetbogic with Abu el Malli (second from left), aka

“the little Osama bin Laden”

Bakir Izetbegovic with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,

Cairo, 7 February 2013

Local allies also provide international jihadists with new identities allowing them to travel and conduct operations around the world. A secret report prepared for the Clinton Administration in late 2000 “shocked everyone” when the scale in which the Izetbegović regime had provided travel documents to  international extremists was revealed.[xxx] By one count the Izetbegović regime distributed some 12,000 Bosnian passports to international jihadis.[xxxi] Osama Bin Laden himself was the owner of a Bosnian passport,[xxxii] and Western reporters even saw him Izetbegović’s office during the war.[xxxiii] When Italian police discovered a plot to kill Pope John Paul II in Bologna in 1997, all fourteen men arrested were travelling on passports issued by Izetbegović’s foreign ministry.[xxxiv] (In April earlier in the year, another attempt to assassinate the Pope had been made in Sarajevo.)[xxxv] In the 1990s, Al Qaeda operative Safet Abid Catovic was given cover as a diplomat at Bosnia’s Mission to the UN in New York.[xxxvi] In 1998, just days before the bombing of the US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, the mastermind of the attacks, visited Bosnia on a “business trip” on a visa issued to him by the Bosnian consulate in Ankara.[xxxvii] In September 1999, Turkish police arrested Mahrez Auduni (at the time considered one of bin-Laden’s top aides) traveling on a Bosnian passport (Number 0801888).[xxxviii] As of January 2014, the chairman of the security committee in Izetbegović’s Islamist party is a man on the US government’s Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List, and who is otherwise widely considered to be the leading Iranian agent in Bosnia.[xxxix]

Balkan Bases

In remote, isolated villages around the Balkans militant Islamists have developed a network of extra-territorial, sharia-run enclaves that serve as recruiting stations for local converts and safe havens for jihadis from around the world. In Islamist-run villages such as the central Bosnian town of Bočinja Donja, extremists live “separate lives untroubled by local police, tax-collectors or any other authorities. Outsiders never set foot in the small community.”[xl] Bulgaria’s former chief mufti, Nedim Gendzhev, claims that extremists are trying to create a “fundamentalist triangle” formed by Bosnia, Macedonia and Bulgaria’s Western Rhodope mountains.[xli]

The above-mentioned central Bosnian village of Bočinja Donja, inhabited by some 600 people, has been associated with numerous international terrorists, including Karim Said Atmani, the document forger for the Millenium Bomb plot; Khalil Deek, arrested in December 1999 for his involvement in a plot to blow up Jordanian tourist sites; and Omar Saeed Sheikh, involved in the murder/beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.[xlii] Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman al Zawahiri, is known to have visited the village in 1997[xliii] and spent much of the 1990s in nearby Bulgaria.

Another Bosnian village, Gornja Maoča, is the headquarters of Bosnia’s main Wahhabi leader, Nusret Imamović. In 2005, Italian investigators discovered a Gornja Maoča-based plot to attack the funeral of Pope John Paul II and assassinate the assembled world leaders.[xliv] A former member of the Wahhabi movement from Gornja Maoča gave a detailed description of life in the village to a journalist, reporting that residents claims to personally know the editor of Inspire (Al Qaeda’s online publication), and that members of the community who know Arabic regularly inform members about news and information from Al Qaeda websites. The village is frequently used as a way station for extremists joining jihads in Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Yemen. The Gornja Maoča community prefers to send unattached young men to jihad so that it does not have to assume financial responsibility for their families. The Wahhabis are also known to cache weapons in local forests surrounding the village.[xlv] In October 2011, the Sandžak Wahhabi Mevlid Jašarević left the village with two other residents on the day he attacked the US Embassy in Sarajevo.[xlvi] Another Wahhabi outpost in Bosnia is Bužim (near Bihać) in northwestern Bosnia, home to a prominent anti-American Wahhabi preacher, Bilal Bosnić, known for his YouTube spots supporting suicide bombings, glorifying the Taliban, and various anti-Semitic rants.

Bosnian jihad veteran Omar Ahmed Saeed Sheik, participant in the murder/beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl

In these remote Islamist-controlled areas, under the guise of “youth camps,” former mujahedin take young people into the local hills and forests where they are given military training. The camps are intentionally non-permanent to make it more difficult for security officials to track them, but are effective in fostering the relationships needed for creating extremist networks.[xlvii] In March 2007, Serbian police raided one such camp in the mountainous Sandžak region straddling the border between Serbia and Montenegro, arresting a number of individuals and seizing weapons, explosives, and food stocks.[xlviii] The group was allegedly planning to attack western embassies in Belgrade. Similarly, in July 2013, a raid near the village of Kalošević, close to the the central Bosnian town of Tešanj, uncovered the largest stash of undeclared weaponry and explosives found since the end of the Bosnian war, including over 500 rocket propelled grenades. Local inhabitants of the village claimed the arms and ammunition were hidden there on the order of a high-ranking member of Izetbegović’s party Bosnian media cite as one of the main local liaisons with Al Qaeda operatives in the country.[xlix]

Throughout the western and southern Balkans, extremist-led mosques also provide valuable bases for militant Islamists. A focal point for Wahhabi extremists in Bosnia is the Saudi-funded King Fahd Mosque and Cultural Center in Sarajevo, “the epicenter of the spreading of radical ideas” in Bosnia,[l] which for a number of years functioned autonomously under the direct supervision of the Saudi embassy in Bosnia. The White Mosque in Sarajevo is the headquarters of Sulejman Bugari, a Kosovo Albanian-born imam whom some reports have described as a go-between and point-of-contact for Albanian and Bosnian extremists.[li] In Kosovo, the Makowitz mosque on the outskirts of Priština and the Mitrovica mosque are reportedly recruiting militants to fight alongside Islamist groups in Syria.[lii] In Macedonia, Wahhabi extremists have been trying to take control of Skopje’s Jahys Pasha, Sultan Murat, Hudaverdi and Kjosekadi mosques.[liii]

NGOs and Financial Institutions

Militant Islamists support their efforts in southeastern Europe through a network of “NGO’s,” “charities” and “humanitarian aid” organizations, funded by known Al Qaeda financial donors. The CIA has estimated that one third of the Bosnian NGO’s operating worldwide have terrorist connections or employ people with terrorist links,[liv] and various NGO’s with known ties to Al Qaeda funneled several hundreds of millions of dollars to Izetbegović’s war effort.[lv] Izetbegović himself was on the Iranian payroll, receiving on just one occasion in $500,000 (US) in cash from Iranian agents.[lvi]

al Qaeda’s donors’ list, “The Golden Chain,” discovered in Sarajevo in March 2002

In one example of how this was done, U.S.-based “charities” with close ties to Osama Bin Laden, such as Care International, Inc., received checks with memo lines such as “Bosnia mujahedin,” “for jihad only,” and “Chechen Muslim fighters.”[lvii] Of the estimated $800 million the Saudis alone gave to Bosnia after Dayton, some $100 million is untraceable, lost in a maze of Al Qaeda front organizations funding terror activities worldwide.[lviii] In the aftermath of 9/11, a raid on the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia netted “maps of Washington, material for making false State Department identity cards and anti-American manuals designed for children.”[lix] (the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit brought by 9/11 victims and families in U.S. federal court.) Also found in Sarajevo in March 2002 was Al Qaeda’s donor’s list, the so-called “Golden Chain.” Bin Laden’s organization apparently felt so comfortable in Bosnia at this time that some seventy Al Qaeda members reportedly planned to flee there from Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11.[lx] Among the Al Qaeda-linked organizations working in the Balkans have been the Benevolence International Foundation (which had offices and personnel in Chicago), the “Taibah Foundation,” the “Global Relief Foundation,” which operated in Bosnia and Kosovo, and al Haramain, which was active in Albania.[lxi] The Turkish-based IHH (the “Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief,” or Insani Yardim Vakfi in Turkish) which was involved in the Mavi Marmara incident off the Israeli coast in May 2010, began its activities in Bosnia in the 1990s. In June 2010, Turkish authorities began an investigation of the group’s founder, Bűlent Yildirim, for funding Al Qaeda.[lxii]

The lack of transparency in many Middle-Eastern-based banking institutions makes it extremely difficult to track the flow of monies to militant groups in the region.[lxiii] Monies donated for legitimate charitable purposes often get siphoned off and used to support weapons purchases or to provide support for families of imprisoned or killed jihadis. Members of the Al Qaeda cell in Albania, for instance, working under the cover of various Middle-East based charities, were required to contribute 26 percent of their salaries to support the global jihad; one such individual claimed that he diverted $800 per month (from funds intended for Albanian orphans) for such purposes. Monies provided from such sources have also financed political asylum applications in western countries, helping militants establish terrorist cells in Europe and the US.[lxiv] By 2010, the Albanian government had seized and confiscated some $7.5 million (USD) in assets from two individuals and thirteen foundations believed implicated in terrorist finance.[lxv]

The archetype for the way in which Islamist extremist organizations in the Balkans function was the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), run by Elfatih Hassanein, a Sudanese national with known ties to Bin Laden. By some accounts, TWRA alone collected $400 million (US) for Izetbegović’s war effort.[lxvi] TWRA, among other things, has been revealed to have provided some of the operational funding for the first group of World Trade Center bombers in 1993. [lxvii] Most of Izetbegović’s inner circle was involved in the organization.[lxviii] Islamist NGO’s and humanitarian groups also finance sending school-age children to study in countries such as Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Syria where they are indoctrinated in extreme forms of Islam.[lxix]

Militant Media and Propaganda

Militant Islamists in the Balkans have developed an extensive array of print periodicals, websites, and YouTube spots spreading religious intolerance, glorifications of violence, and anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-democratic messages. Websites such as the “Way of the Believer” (putvjernika.com), Way of Islam” (stazomislama.com), Ensarije Serijata (“Partisans of Sharia” http://www.geocities.ws/ensarije_seriata/index-2.html), and “News of the Community“ (vijestiummeta.com), and the Sandžak Wahhabi website kelimetul-haqq.org promote jihad, suicide bombings, and the killing of non-Muslims.[lxx] These websites also relay news from other jihadi fronts, sermons by extremist preachers from the Middle-East, and messages from Al Qaeda leaders; for instance, the Put vjernika website recently carried “A New Order from Zawahiri: Focus on Attacks on American Interests.”[lxxi] According to Fahrudin Kladicanin, the co-author of a recent study on Balkan extremists’ use of the internet and social media, “The number of those who are ‘liking,’ making comments and sharing the content of these pages, especially when it comes to religious leaders, extreme Islamists and Wahhabists, is rising on a daily basis.” The Facebook profiles of almost all such extremist leaders have over 5,000 “friends” and even more “likes.”[lxxii] The Facebook page Krenaria Islame (Albanian for “Islamic Pride”), which posts pictures and stories of Albanians fighting in Syria, has 2,500 followers. According to the Tirana-based security expert Arjan Dyrmishi, “If all the followers of this page were identified as terrorists, they would make a small army and pose a major problem. Such a large number of followers would a pose a concern, even if these people were to be identified only as supporters of political Islam.”[lxxiii]

The US State Department has reported that the Bosnia-based “Active Islamic Youth” (Bosnian acronym AIO) spreads extremist views and has links with radical groups in Western Europe and the US.[lxxiv] Former members of the AIO publish a weekly called SAFF in both print and an online electronic version which the State Department has described as anti-American and tending towards extremism. Middle Eastern funders have established some 25 madrasas (Islamic religious schools) in Bosnia through which some 2000 students have already passed.[lxxv] In Kosovo, a radical preacher, Zahir Naik, has established a 12-hour daily Albanian-language, hardline-Wahhabi TV channel ironically called “Peace TV” which “which insults, in aggressive terms, spiritual Sufis, Shia Muslims, non-fundamentalist Sunnis, Jews, Christians, and Hindus, among others.” In his sermons Naik has praised Osama bin Laden and supported terrorism.[lxxvi] Similarly, in Bulgaria, dozens of new mosques and Wahhabi “teaching centers” funded by Middle Eastern donors were opened over the past twenty years. In 2003, the Bulgarian government shut down a number of Wahhabi outposts because of their ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and other extremist groups. [lxxvii] Bulgarian security analysts have estimated that some 3000 youths have passed through these Wahhabi-funded educational centers over the past twenty years.[lxxviii]

Together with the large number of locally-born Islamic clerics who have studied in the Middle-East (including individuals such as Nedžad Balkan, Bilal Bosnić, Mustafa Cerić, Nusret Imamović), the combination of this large cadre of the indigenous population being educated in Middle-Eastern funded institutions in the Balkans themselves carries with it the potential danger of transforming what has usually been considered a “moderate Balkan Islam” into something more radical. As Esad Hećimović, a leading expert on the jihadi movement in Bosnia has noted, “There is now a new generation of Islamic preachers in Bosnia who were educated after the war at Islamic universities in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and other countries . . . Thus, it is no longer possible to distinguish between ‘imported’ and ‘local’ versions of Islam in Bosnia and Herzegovina anymore.”[lxxix]

Conclusion

Relatively small numbers of people in southeastern Europe subscribe to the extremist movements and ideologies represented by militant Islamism. A survey conducted in Bosnia in 2007 found that three percent of the population adhered to Wahhabism (perhaps some 50-60,000 people), out of an estimated Muslim population of approximately two million, and another ten percent identified with it.[lxxx] Current and former Bosnian Wahhabis, however, claim that the movement has many secret adherents. The above-mentioned Ikanović, for instance, has said that some forty percent of those adhering to the Wahhabi movement do not have the outward appearance of being Wahhabis.[lxxxi] Other former Bosnian Wahhabis have claimed that Wahhabi sympathizers have “infiltrated schools, universities, and the media.”[lxxxii] In 2010, a Bosnian security official estimated that there are 3000 potential terrorists in Bosnia,[lxxxiii] and a former Al Qaeda operative in Bosnia, the Bahraini-born Ali Hamad, has claimed there are some 800 individuals of local origin making up a “white Al Qaeda”: i.e., people who can pass through security checks avoiding racial profiling.[lxxxiv] In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, NATO officials suggested there was a “hardcore group” of some thirty individuals in Bosnia with direct links to international terrorism.[lxxxv] In Kosovo, security experts suggest about 50,000 people adhere to the more conservative, Middle-Eastern forms of Islam,[lxxxvi] and one specialist on Balkan Islam has claimed that, “Exponents of Saudi-financed Wahhabism and of the Muslim Brotherhood have penetrated the highest levels of the official Kosovo Islamic apparatus.”[lxxxvii] In Macedonia, the mufti of Skopje, Ibrahim Šabani, has estimated that there are some 500-600 Wahhabis in the country, possibly more,[lxxxviii] while other security specialists believe up to 3000 Wahhabis are active in Macedonia, mainly concentrated in areas around Skopje, Tetovo, Struga, and Kumanovo.[lxxxix] In the Sandžak, the International Crisis Group has estimated there are some 300 Wahhabis who control several mosques in the region,[xc] and some local analysts have claimed that the leader of the Islamic Community in Sandžak, Muamer Zukorlić, has close ties to the movement and receives funds from Wahhabi sources in Rome and Vienna.[xci]

Despite these relatively small numbers, however, the danger militant Islamists in the Balkans pose to US and Western interests, or to the creation of the tolerant, multiethnic, western-oriented democracies we desire in the region, is clear. The recent upsurge in extremist activity in southeastern Europe provides significant evidence to show that militant Islamism’s Balkan front requires increased attention. Remarkably, western officials prefer to deny that any problem exists; for instance, the current High Representative in Bosnia, Valentin Inzko, claims that the Wahhabis in Bosnia are not a threat to Europe.[xcii] Militant Balkan Islamists, for their part, are not hiding their long-term intentions. As a Bosnian jihadi fighting in Syria recently noted, “I left Bosnia with the intention only to return with weapons in my hand. I am a part of the revolution and this is the morning of Islam . . . [by allowing us to leave Bosnia] your intelligence agencies made a mistake thinking that they would be rid of us, however, the problem for them will be the return of individuals trained for war.”[xciii]

Moreover, it is a grave mistake to believe that it is only of tangential importance or interest that so many individuals who were involved in various terrorist actions around the world have travelled through the Balkans, because during their time spent in the region they developed numerous connections with like-minded extremists, sowing the seeds for new generations of extremists that threaten Balkan stability, and indeed US and western security interests around the globe. To again quote Esad Hećimović “Radical Islamic groups are waiting for a resurrection of the violent conflict . . . It is still conceivable that Islamic leaders and groups are waiting for a new jihad.”[xciv] With the possible return of hundreds of Balkan extremists from the Syrian jihad, the same could become true for other parts of the Balkans as well.

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