The Balkan Caliphate: Saudi Power in Kosovo

Greater Albania has been debating deployment in Syria. A Muslim state, a Balkan Caliphate in the heart of Europe, was supported by Internationalists when they created independent Kosovo and Bosnia. Kosovo registered its first Islamist political party in 2013. 

UPDATE: An article on NYT on the inroads of Wahabism into Europe from the Saudi foothold in Kosovo is oozing criminal naiveté on the part of postmodern globalist thinkers. Bill Clinton’s nexus with the lobby for Greater Albania created a Islamic state in the heart of Europe. To those with basic knowledge of Islam and its 1400 year old history — not least in the region itself —  this development is no surprise. But the NYT is shocked, shocked by “a stunning turnabout for a land of 1.8 million people that not long ago was among the most pro-American Muslim societies in the world.”

Kosovo now finds itself, like the rest of Europe, fending off the threat of radical Islam. Over the last two years, the police have identified 314 Kosovars — including two suicide bombers, 44 women and 28 children — who have gone abroad to join the Islamic State, the highest number per capita in Europe. They were radicalized and recruited, Kosovo investigators say, by a corps of extremist clerics and secretive associations funded by Saudi Arabia and other conservative Arab gulf states using an obscure, labyrinthine network of donations from charities, private individuals and government ministries. “They promoted political Islam,” said Fatos Makolli, the director of Kosovo’s counterterrorism police. “They spent a lot of money to promote it through different programs mainly with young, vulnerable people, and they brought in a lot of Wahhabi and Salafi literature. They brought these people closer to radical political Islam, which resulted in their radicalization.” After two years of investigations, the police have charged 67 people, arrested 14 imams and shut down 19 Muslim organizations for acting against the Constitution, inciting hatred and recruiting for terrorism. The most recent sentences, which included a 10-year prison term, were handed down on Friday. (More)

Obama’s Faulty Doctrine Fuels Bosnian Jihad

Kyle Orton writes that Obama’s “race to release the Guantanamo detainees is a political decision based on a calculation—that the danger from releasing hardened terrorists is offset by “narrative” gains against the jihadists’ recruitment propaganda—which is simply wrong. Guantanamo is not a key driver of radicalization and never has been, but the danger of releasing men with specialist skills back into the ranks of the jihadists during an ongoing war is pressing and immediate.”

[International Islamic Relief Organization] IIRO is an ostensible charity but was in fact tied into a web of groups—called “Allah’s NGOs” by some—that supported jihadism in Bosnia in the early 1990s. With the siege of Sarajevo in place and this being early in the war, entry routes into Bosnia were not easy, writes John Schindler in Unholy Terror. “Zagreb quickly became the ‘main Muslim supply center’ where within a year twenty Islamic organizations, including MAK, established offices to support the jihad by getting men and munitions into Bosnia through Croatia.” MAK is Makhtab al-Khidamat (The Services Bureau), the organization founded by Abdullah Azzam to supply foreign holy warriors against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan that evolved into the core of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda after Azzam was killed in 1989. IIRO and its parent organization, the Muslim World League (MWL), which also operated in Bosnia, were both created and funded by the Saudi government as dawa (missionary) organizations, spreading Wahhabism, and were both entangled in “The Golden Chain,” the network of al-Qaeda’s chief donors in the late 1980s. Testifying in court in 1999, the head of IIRO in Canada noted: “The Muslim World League, which is the mother of IIRO, is a fully government funded organization. In other words, I work for the government of Saudi Arabia.” MWL was also the overseer of al-Haramayn Foundation, another Saudi-backed enterprise, and its specifically Bosnian branch, al-Haramayn al-Masjid al-Aqsa, both entities later added to the terrorism list.

The Muwafaq (Blessed Relief) Foundation was also active in Bosnia and was listed by Bin Laden as a group he supported. Muwafaq did draw on Saudi State support, but its principal financier was the Jeddah-based businessman Yasin al-Qadi; both Muwafaq and al-Qadi were designated as terrorists by the U.S. in October 2001. In September 2015, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) reported that of 653 detainees who had been transferred, 196 were either confirmed (117) or suspected (79) of rejoining the jihad. That nearly a third of released Guantanamo detainees have rejoined Islamist terrorism undersells what has happened since many of the rest have remained committed ideologues who spread jihadist propaganda or otherwise facilitate the cause for which they were imprisoned in the first place.

The Balkan Caliphate Stretches into the EU

According Theodore Karasik, a Gulf-based analyst of regional geo-political affairs, Turkey is now in ISIS’ crosshairs. This information about the Balkans is truly alarming!

Last year [2014], ISIS members threatened to “liberate” Istanbul, while accusing Turkey of cutting off the flow of the Euphrates River, drying up northern Syria, including Raqqa, “the capital of the Islamic State.” ISIS promised to seize the Atatürk Dam. One should take such threats seriously, since Islamic State strategists target river systems and dams as a means of controlling water ways for political and economic gain for their fledgling state. Perhaps Ankara is cognizant that ISIS can fill important ungovernable gaps in southeastern Turkey.

Unrecognized by analysts, however, is the ISIS campaign to Turkey’s northwest, primarily in the Balkans. From the Turkish point of view, and based on Ottoman history, the Balkans represent the Turkish backyard. Without going into the long history of the tragedies in the Balkans, it is clear that ISIS supporters are gaining a foothold. ISIS is now roosting in key areas of the Balkans— Kumanovo, Macedonia; Gornya Maocha in Bosnia; the Serbian region Sandjak bordering Eastern Bosnia; and the Serbian Northern Kosovo border area of Presevo, Bujanovac, Medvedja.

There are also reports of ISIS cells operating in Belgrade suburbs. In order to drive the point home, ISIS released a video this month named “Put Hilafa,” which in Bosniak means “Way of caliphate,” that calls for the establishment of a caliphate in the Balkans, especially in Serbia. But the ISIS campaign to surround Turkey is not limited to the Balkans themselves. ISIS is also building a node from Milan, Italy where its illicit networks are egged on by Albanian criminal networks.

The Albanians connected with ISIS are former members of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The “back office” if you will, for surrounding Turkey stretches all the way to Austrian cities such as Graz and Vienna. To be sure, we need to be cognizant that some Balkan analysts see Turkey’s hand behind ISIS in the Balkans. If that is true, it is the same purported model Ankara used in Syria. Consequently, this purported Turkish policy approach will backfire in the future just as it did in the Levant this month.

Overall, Turkey is to be surrounded by the terrorist army which is creating nodes and networks within the country and building transit zones that go up into the Balkans. By surrounding Turkey, and its historical Ottoman core, ISIS plans are becoming clearer. This fact explains why Turkey is acting now to its south. The real question is whether Ankara will do anything about ISIS to the northwest. Or if that view is blinded by policy failure too. (Source)

The Bosnian War and Advocacy Journalism

John Schindler is using Rolling Stone’s latest ‘advocacy journalism’ debacle as background for a story on the way the Bosnian war was covered by the Western media. By now, the trick is well known, but back then to many this was a first and the fabricated narrative went unopposed.

I first encountered advocacy journalism back in the 1990’s in the Balkans. The Bosnian War of 1992-95, in particular, was a proving ground of this dangerous nonsense, as I recounted in my book Unholy Terror. While that conflict got a vast amount of Western media coverage — hundreds of times more than, say, Algeria’s civil war, which happened at the same time and killed many more innocent people — the truth is that almost all the Western journalists who signed up for what locals derisively termed the “Sarajevo safari” knew nothing about the country and did not speak the language. Worse, most of these journalists quickly signed on for a simple, good-versus-evil narrative of Bosnia’s complex and messy war that portrayed Muslims as innocent victims and Serbs (and, later, Croats) as genocidal barbarians with whom there could be no parley. This perspective was so overly simple as to be cartoonish. Accepting it required a suspension of any journalistic norms such as confirming sources and stories, but many Western journalists in Bosnia were perfectly happy to do that. They became advocates, some unapologetically so.

Actually looking at the Bosnian war with a critical eye would have revealed uncomfortable and inconvenient facts that did not fit The Narrative. Such as the fact that the Muslim-led government in Sarajevo committed war crimes too. That it even perpetrated war crimes against fellow Muslims when Western journalists were watching, to gain political points. Most consequentially, the Sarajevo government was in bed with Iranian intelligence and Salafi jihadists like Osama Bin Laden (who, like thousands of his fellow foreign mujahidin who fought in the Balkans, received a Bosnian passport for his service to Sarajevo). All these were things that Western journalists could have covered, since the facts were available, but they averted eyes from issues that might upset The Narrative they had created and sought to continue. Some of this was careerism, since the Bosnian war made good copy, but many of the journalists who covered the conflict were true believers, some of them openly so. Ed Vulliamy, who won numerous awards for his coverage of Bosnia, admitted his role in trying to get NATO intervention, even at the expense of accurate reporting, describing journalistic neutrality as “ridiculous,” asserting, “We have to take sides,” memorably adding, “If the professional ethics say I can’t take sides, screw the ethics.” CNN’s ubiquitous Christian Amanpour admitted that she in no way covered Bosnia objectively, serving instead as a mouthpiece of the Sarajevo government, because doing anything else would have made her “an accomplice to genocide.” What made the The Narrative plausible is that, like any good disinformation, it was partially true. Tens of thousands of Muslim civilians died in the Bosnian war, and some were murdered barbarically.

Although Western journalists vastly inflated those deaths, some did happen. Yet keeping The Narrative intact meant presenting Bosnia’s Muslims as virtuous “designer victims” in whom there was no guile or fault, and that was something nobody who understood Bosnia the actual country accepted. The result was Western media coverage that was deeply unbalanced and at times simply untrue, and this inspired Western policies towards that tragic country that unsurprisingly led to long-term poverty and failure. To cite one example among many there, in the late fall of 1992 The New York Times reported a sensational story filled with horror. A twenty-one year old Bosnian Serb soldier, Borislav Herak, recounted to John Burns, a seasoned correspondent, how he had been involved in the rape and murder of Muslim civilians on a grand scale. The story he told was lurid and detailed and makes the Rolling Stone account of “Jackie” seem like a holiday. Overnight, it became a global sensation, putting flesh and first-hand detail for the first time on horrific, if murky, accounts of “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia that the Western media had been reporting for months. It won Burns a Pulitzer Prize and the Herak saga became iconic among Western journalists, the kind of scoop that platoons of them sought to get for themselves in the bloody hills of Bosnia. Unfortunately, there were clear signs from the outset that Herak was not telling the truth. In the first place, the young man told his story from Muslim captivity, and there was evidence he had been tortured. A few years later, once the war was over, Herak finally told the truth, that he had been coerced to tell Burns what Western journalists wanted to hear. “I was forced to speak against myself and my comrades,” he explained in 1996, but by then it was old news; Western minds had been made up long before.

More troubling is the fact that Herak’s initial account included things that it’s hard to believe any Western journalist could have accepted with a straight face. In particular, Herak claimed to have witnessed Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie, the UN peacekeeping commander in Bosnia at the time, participate in rapes of Muslim women on multiple occasions. This assertion, for which there was never any evidence, was muted by the Western media since it made Herak look like the unreliable witness he was, and possibly insane to boot. Why, then, any other of Herak’s lurid claims ought to have been accepted at face value seems not to have occurred to reporters. Western media misrepresentations in Bosnia — this went well beyond bias and amounted to a sort of nihilism — had a pernicious effect on Western responses to that awful conflict, and they have lasting impacts today, over two decades later. Advocacy journalism infected foreign reporting in the 1990’s, and more recently this cancer has spread to all forms of American journalism, which is a development that ought to concern all of us. (Source)

Kosovo, the Rising Caliphate in the Heart of Europe

The latter made no secret of his goal to change Kosovo’s secular constitution in order to “defend the Islamic identity of Kosovo’s Albanians”, who make up 95% of the population. It has long been debated if that young Albanians are fighting in the Free Syrian Army, among the ranks of Islamist groups (Jabhat al-Nusra and others).

Originally published on 2016-05-23

Source: Pomo News

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