Kosovo, the tiny Muslim-majority Balkan nation of just 1.8 million, has produced more foreign fighters per capita than any other Western nation since ISIS declared its now-defunct caliphate in 2014. Some 413 Kosovo citizens, including women and children, have joined that group and other Islamist extremist factions since the war in Syria began in 2012 [...]
Building new mosques in Kosovo after the Kosovo War in 1998-1999
For all the attention paid to the emergence of homegrown Islamist terrorists in Belgium, France and other European countries, one of the continent’s biggest radicalization problems is taking place on its fringes.
Kosovo, the tiny Muslim-majority Balkan nation of just 1.8 million, has produced more foreign fighters per capita than any other Western nation since ISIS declared its now-defunct caliphate in 2014. Some 413 Kosovo citizens, including women and children, have joined that group and other Islamist extremist factions since the war in Syria began in 2012.
As it attempts to join the European Union, Kosovo has been under pressure to stamp out its radicalization problem — and authorities say they have succeeded. Since 2013, Kosovar police say they have indicted more than 120 terrorism suspects and arrested many more, including well-known conservative imams suspected of recruiting people to fight abroad.
“Now we don’t see terrorism as a threat,” said Kujtim Bytyqi, one of the government’s senior security policy analysts and the head of Kosovo’s strategy to counter violent extremism. “There is total silence. All imams, even if they want to say something, are afraid of the government.”
But many of those suspected terrorists, convicted under an older counterterrorism law in which prison sentences averaged between three and five years, are now being freed. And some say attempts to rehabilitate them have come up short.
“We are growing stronger and getting smarter,” said Fitim Lladrovci, 28, a former ISIS fighter and inmate, referring to extremists. “Terrorists will not be reintegrated, and there may be attacks here.”
Anne Speckhard, who directs the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, said that Lladrovci’s contempt for rehabilitation and strengthened radical beliefs probably are emblematic of “some other returning militant jihadis well beyond Kosovo.” The trend, she said, “bodes ill for all of us.”
It’s a potentially ominous development for deradicalization efforts across the continent. “We have to provide a deradicalization model for the whole of Europe,” said Garentina Kraja, a senior external researcher for the Kosovo Center for Security Studies. “We’re a Muslim-majority society but we’re secular Europeans. So it feels like if there’s an example to be found somewhere, this is where we can provide a response.”
Kosovo may also be an entry point into the European Union to launch attacks, said Daniel Koehler, the director of the German Institute on Radicalization and De-radicalization Studies. In early June, Kosovo authorities arrested a couple suspected of planning attacks on NATO troops in Kosovo as well as on public places in France and Belgium.
Since April, the US Justice Department has helped implement rehabilitation programs in Kosovo’s prisons for suspects facing terrorism charges. Before then, however, the country had no comprehensive program for rehabilitating returned fighters, according to the 2018 Kosovo European Commission report.
“Most European countries have much more stable programs in place. In Germany, the UK and France, there is a long history of social welfare and prison infrastructure much stronger than in Kosovo,” Koehler said. “Kosovo is still recovering from its 1998-99 war against Serbia, and suffers corruption in the public sector and problems with rule of law.”
The new US-run program sends government psychologists, sociologists, social workers and moderate imams from the Islamic Community of Kosovo to work with inmates jailed on terrorism charges.
Montenegrin Muslim Islamist Mirza Haklaj who appeared with other jihadists in an ISIS video. He is believed to have died during bombing in 2015
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
The truth about Kosovo and Metochia.This documentary film was made by the Czech Republic TV and banned in all mainstream globalist media in western countries.It will reveal to you the horrifying story of Kosovo that nobody ever wanted to tell you and debunking all hoaxes, lies, and propaganda NATO used for trigger events...In 1999 NATO bombed Serbia for 78 days and destroyed everything on its way bridges, hospitals, schools, telecommunication buildings, military bases...killing more than 2.500 and wound more than 5.000 civilians.One of the reasons why NATO bombed Serbia is to build the biggest military base in Albania, so they ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Prof. Djordje Jankovic, Ph.DFaculty of PhilosophyBelgrade UniversityMiddle Ages in Noel Malcolm’s Kosovo: A Short History and Real FactsBefore presenting the interpretations of the mediaeval past of Kosovo and Metohija in Noel Malcolm’s work, one should be aware of the tasks set by the author before writing the book. That way, the acrobatic handling of the evidence which he uses or does not use will become clearer. In the introductory text, ten pages long, he clearly presents his political and ideological position. They are as follows (p. XXXIV-XXXV): “Kosovo” is one of the cultural crossroads of Europe – which is wrong; ...
From a geopolitical perspective, the war on Yugoslavia in the 1990s was about restructuring Southeast Europe after the end of the Cold War. To this end, the US even deployed the combatants with which it had previously fought the USSR in Afghanistan and which it would later call „Al Qaeda“.The political and media propaganda regarding the war on Yugoslavia has been well researched by now. Interestingly, however, many media outlets and commentators are still trying to uphold the official narrative of the time, in contrast to the later war in Iraq, for example.There may be various reasons for this. On ...
While all eyes have been on the U.S. presidential campaign, such foreign-policy hot spots as Syria, Iran and Pakistan, and the increasingly frosty relations between the United States and China, a simmering problem in the Balkans threatens to come to a boil. The most serious clashes to date involving angry Serb inhabitants of the northern portion of Kosovo and international Kosovo Force (KFOR) peacekeeping personnel erupted on November 28. Thirty German and Austrian soldiers were injured, some by small-arms fire and Molotov cocktails, when KFOR troops tried to remove roadblocks that Serb residents had erected. Those barricades have been the most ...
In a speech delivered in the southern suburbs of Beirut on October 23, 2015, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, a resistance organization rooted in Lebanon’s Shia community, presented a description of US imperialism that largely comports with that of secular leftwing anti-imperialists in the West.Hezbollah was established in the early 1980s to end Israel’s occupation of Lebanon. With Israel’s withdrawal in 2000, and a subsequent Israeli incursion in 2006 repulsed by Hezbollah fighters, the resistance organization remains on the qui vive against future Israeli aggressions. It is now assisting the Syrian Arab Army in its death struggle against ...
The Christian population that had made up one fifth of the Ottoman Empire’s population was wiped out in waves of violence by successive Ottoman and Turkish republican governments that left Christians a tiny minority in Anatolia, two Israeli scholars have said in a new study.The controversy over the killings of the Armenian Christian minority living in Anatolia during the last days of the Ottoman Empire is already well known – while the majority of the scholarly community and many international states recognise the killings as genocide, Turkey accepts that killings took place but rejects they constituted a genocide.Israeli historians Benny ...
The following research is a review around the theme of Southeastern European organized crime, mainly in the period 1995-2007, highlighting the emergence of powerful regional “Mafias” with an actual global presence. The main focus is the Albanian criminal syndicates centered on Kosovo. The research is composed by previous material of the writer, some of which was presented in international workshops. Moreover the issue of radical Islam is being overviewed in a second part,for the same period, along with information regarding the state of affairs of the Muslim communities in the region.Narcotics and the emergence of crime syndicates in the BalkansThe ...
One of the most complicated and frustrating aspects of operating a global capitalist empire is maintaining the fiction that it doesn’t exist. Virtually every action you take has to be carefully recontextualized or otherwise spun for public consumption. Every time you want to bomb or invade some country to further your interests, you have to mount a whole PR campaign. You can’t even appoint a sadistic torture freak to run your own coup-fomenting agency, or shoot a few thousand unarmed people you’ve imprisoned in a de facto ghetto, without having to do a big song and dance about “defending democracy” ...
The world has just honored yet another Armistice Day – Remembrance Day – Veterans Day for all those who lost their lives in armed defense of their nation’s right to exist and remain a free people. Nation’s like the United States, Canada and Israel pay constant tribute to those key battles and wars that once determined their continued existence and survival. But what of nation’s like Palestine reduced to mere fragments of what they once were, their once prosperous, happy villages, towns and cities filled with happy children, families and the commerce of a viable way of life, now turned ...
President Obama is still considering arming Ukraine in case the latest ceasefire is breached and the conflict escalates; but political analyst Stephen Lendman told Sputnik in an exclusive interview that the US leader is lying, and that the US has been supplying arms to Kiev from the very start of the military operation.The ceasefire between Kiev forces and independence supporters of Donetsk and Luhansk is generally holding, shelling in Donbas has stopped as the truce came in force on midnight, a spokesperson at the Kiev special operations headquarters said Sunday. But a day earlier Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and US ...
The statehood of Ukraine like Ukrainian ethnolinguistic identity is one of the most problematic research topics. Ukraine herself has, in addition, extremely artificial state borders from very historical and political points of view. Even the name of the country and nation is very unusual and even unnatural as the Slavonic term “Ukraine” means in English “borderland” while “Ukrainians” are simply “people from borderland”. A focal question, therefore, became: How the country with such a name can be independent as the term “borderland” politically simply means the end land (like the German “mark” from the time of the Frankish Kingdom) of ...
We have to keep in mind that a term and notion of security usually implies a kind of sense of protection and safety from different possible harms coming from „outside“. Therefore, it can be generally acceptable and understandable that the states want to protect their own territories by expanding great resources in making their territorial safe. Security topics are of very different kinds, ranging from the causes of conflict between states to deterioration in the global climate or women’s rights in global politics.The Conception of a SystemThe conception of international systems of states is crucial as an explanatory mechanism of ...
With the recent failed bid by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the Arab League at the UN security council, to try and end Israelis’ occupation of Palestinian land and to create a Palestinian State within the 1967 borders, it seems an appropriate moment to review the situation for Palestinians since 1915.What is the background to the demonization and brutalization of Palestinians? Most of all, why is the international community was assisting properly and why has it not assisted the Palestinians in protecting or restoring their inalienable rights over decades? Why is their situation so brutally upside-down almost a century after ...
After Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo is a second ISIS in Europe today. From June 1999, when NATO troops occupied Kosovo and brought to power militant Muslim Albanian Jihad fighters, systematic destruction of (Serbian Orthodox) Christianity is visible on every corner.The most disappointing fact in post-war Kosovo reality is ethnic and cultural cleansing of all non-Albanians and not-Albanian cultural heritage. The proofs are evident and visible on every corner of Kosovo territory. For instance, on the arrival of KFOR (international but in fact NATO „Kosovo Forces“) and UNMIK („United Nations Mission in Kosovo“) to Kosovo in 1999, all the names of the towns ...
The amount of bombs dropped by Americans on the innocent citizens of tiny French Indochina was more than twice the amount of bombs dropped in Europe, Africa and Asia during the Second World War, and this includes bombs dropped on the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong by American hero Senator John McCain, who proudly ran for president on his military record in spite of Nuremberg Counsel for Prosecution General Telford Taylor having said he would have been proud to have prosecuted US flyers shot down while bombing in Vietnam.[3] What mastery of fake news, blacked out news, selected news and outrageously ...
Four men, accused of being partisans, are alleged to have been buried alive. The wife of a partisan is said to have been “pierced by bayonets and drowned in a garbage pit” [искололи тело штыками и утопили в помойной яме].The author (who is unnamed) states that his own elderly father was taken as a hostage by Allied forces from the town of Kharitonovka [Харитоновка]. He was returned home alive but in a bloodied condition. He is said to have died a few days later, after asking “Why did they torture me…”? [За что меня замучили]. The man is said to ...
Truth on the war in Euromaidan Ukraine in photos.The people of Donetsk sent a farewell message to ex-President of the US (POTUS) Barack Obama with proper photo evidence of the result of his policy in the region.See the truth not presented on any global Western corporate mass-media!Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on ...
In the midst of turmoil and controversy, it is useful to review the most important preceding events and analyze how did this happen. Following are some key events and historical facts leading to the current crisis in Ukraine.Fact 1. In February 2014, a coup overthrew the Ukrainian government which came to power in an election certified by the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation). The president, Viktor Yanukovich, was forced to flee for his life.This situation was presciently analyzed at the time by Seumas Milne who wrote, “The attempt to lever Kiev into the western camp by ousting an elected ...
“Fool me once, shame on you; but fool me twice, shame on me.”Ancient proverb, (sometimes attributed to an Italian, Russian or Chinese proverb) “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” Ernst F. Schumacher (1911-1977) (in ‘Small is Beautiful’, an essay, in The Radical Humanist, Aug. 1973, p. 22). “The powers-that-be understand that to create the appropriate atmosphere for war, it’s necessary to create within the general populace a hatred, fear or mistrust of others regardless of whether those others belong ...
As it attempts to join the European Union, Kosovo has been under pressure to stamp out its radicalization problem — and authorities say they have succeeded. Since 2013, Kosovar police say they have indicted more than 120 terrorism suspects and arrested many more, including well-known conservative imams suspected of recruiting people to fight abroad.
Kosovostan today: Mass building of new mosques
