Hadzic had joined the Mujahideen unit in 1994. For years after the war he worked as a driver and mechanic before deciding he needed to join the fight against "the Assad Shia regime" in Syria [...]
Back in the 1990s something happened in central Bosnia-Herzegovina that inspired people to this day and helps explain why that country now has more men fighting in Syria and Iraq (over 300), as a proportion of its population, than most in Europe.
The formation of a “Mujahideen Battalion” in 1992, composed mainly of Arab volunteers in central Bosnia, was a landmark. Today the dynamic of jihad has been reversed and it is Bosnians who are travelling to Arab lands.
“There is a war between the West and Islam,” says Aimen Dean, who, as a young Saudi Arabian volunteer, travelled to fight in central Bosnia in 1994. “Bosnia gave the modern jihadist movement that narrative. It is the cradle.”
Conventional wisdom holds that it was the fight against the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s that created the modern notion of jihad or “holy war”. Aimen Dean’s point is that the West and the Salafists (or adherents to a strict form of Islam going back to observance in the Middle Ages) were on the same side in Afghanistan, but became enemies in Bosnia.
At first, in 1992, it was just a few dozen militants who went to defend their co-religionists in Bosnia, as Serbian paramilitaries drove them from their homes in the west and east of the country. But it was in early 1993, when it became a three-way fight against Catholic Croatians as well as the Serbs, that the Mujahideen Battalion swelled to the hundreds and started to hunt non-believers more actively.
After Croatian militias massacred around 120 Bosnians in Ahmici in April 1993, the Mujahideen were involved in numerous reprisals. At Guca Gora monastery two months later, they drove out nearly 200 Croatians, who were evacuated by British United Nations troops. They then entered the chapel, desecrating its religious art, and filmed themselves doing.
British troops fought the Mujahideen Battalion at Guca Gora and elsewhere in the summer of 1993 – the opening shots of that army’s fight against jihadism. Vaughan Kent-Payne, then a major commanding a company of British troops involved in those battles, says the foreign fighters were “way more aggressive” than local Bosnian troops, frequently opening fire on the UN’s white-painted vehicles.
In the nearby town of Travnik, that had been almost equally Muslim, Croatian and Serb before the war, the foreigners helped drive out thousands, and tried to impose Sharia law on those who remained. They were also involved in kidnapping local Christians, and beheaded one, Dragan Popovic, forcing other captives to kiss his severed head.
‘They did Bosnia a disservice’
The Popovic case eventually went to court, so the facts have been well established. But the Mujahideen Battalion was also suspected in many others including the kidnap and murder of aid workers as well as the execution of 20 Croatian prisoners.
The foreigners never amounted to more than one per cent of the fighting force at the disposal of the Sarajevo government, despite the frequent claims of the Serb and Croatian media to have spotted Islamic fanatics from abroad just about everywhere. From an early stage the Mujahideen also started recruiting Bosnians and, by 1995, in the final months of the war, the incorporation of several hundred local men allowed the outfit to be expanded into the Mujahideen Brigade, around 1,500 strong.
By the summer of 1993, the Sarajevo government was starting to wake up to the potentially toxic effect of these jihadists on their image as a multi-ethnic, secular republic. So, in an attempt to control it, the battalion was placed under the command of III Corps, the Bosnian Army formation headquartered in the central city of Zenica.
Its commander at the time, Brigadier General Enver Hadzihasanovic, ended up facing a war crimes trial in the Hague on charges of overall responsibility for some of the Mujahideen’s behaviour, including the Travnik kidnappings. In the end, the prosecution dropped those charges, but the general served two years, having been found guilty of having (Bosnian) troops under him who had abused prisoners.
From the outset, the general had felt the Mujahideen were a dubious military asset, and wrote a secret message to army chiefs in 1993, saying: “My opinion is that behind [the Mujahideen] there are some high-ranking politicians and religious leaders.” Reflecting now on the jihadists’ participation in the war he adds, “they didn’t help Bosnia at all, on the contrary, I think they did Bosnia a disservice.”
However, as the general’s 1993 memo implied, there were some leaders, including Alija Izetbegovic, Bosnia’s President at the time, who were happy to welcome the foreign fighters, partly as a way of keeping wealthy Arab donors sweet.
Recruiting ban
When the war ended, under the Dayton Peace Accord, all foreign fighters had to leave, and they were duly ordered out in 1996. Remembering that day, Aimen Dean says there were high emotions, shouting and tears at the Mujahideen base: “And the reason is because everyone was there hoping to die as a martyr. Now that chance was taken from them.”
Hundreds of Mujahideen went from Bosnia to Chechnya, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Among their alumni were two of the 9/11 hijackers, the murderer of American hostage Daniel Pearl and numerous other al-Qaeda cadres.
More than 300 of the foreigners remained in Bosnia, buried in its soil, a testimony to the heavy casualties taken by the unit. A few dozen Arabs who had met local women or were fearful of going home also managed to stay, by taking Bosnian citizenship.
Today also there are suggestions in Sarajevo that the SDA – the late President Izetbegovic’s party – is not taking a tough enough line against foreign fighters. Only this time they are the hundreds of Bosnians who are choosing to fight in Iraq and Syria. There is “a recalcitrance from more radical elements of the SDA” about condemning those who go to the Middle East to fight, says one Sarajevo diplomat.
In fairness, the Sarajevo government has taken action to ban recruiting for foreign wars (in the name of any religion or cause) and has mounted numerous raids to disrupt extremist networks and arrest those who have returned from fighting in the Middle East.
However, its critics note that for years it turned a blind eye to those Arab Mujahideen who remained in Bosnia but continued to agitate, and has allowed several communities of home-grown Bosnian Salafists to emerge in recent years.
Among those who link what is happening now with the 1990s is Fikret Hadzic, who has been charged with fighting for the so-called Islamic State in Syria. He met our BBC team but said that legal restrictions prevented him giving an on-camera interview, however he was happy to be quoted in print.
With IS now trying to start a “new front for the Caliphate” in the Balkans, there are many who worry that Bosnia is vulnerable because it remains so weak and fragmented, even two decades after its war ended.
Originally published on 2016-07-02
About the author: Mark UrbanDiplomatic and defence editor, Newsnight.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!
Donate to Support Us
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.
Milo Djukanovic’s thirty-year-old authoritarian kleptocracy is killing Podgorica's Democratic efforts.Largely unnoticed in the wake of events in the Middle-East and the impeachment drama, another crisis is brewing in the Balkans. In Montenegro, thousands of people have been protesting a new law passed by the Montenegrin parliament and signed into effect by the country’s longtime strongman, Milo Djukanovic, which gives the government authority over properties that religious organizations in the country have been using for at least a century. Evidence of the problems the controversial new law creates can be seen in the widespread condemnation it has received from individuals such ...
Just three years after a citizens’ referendum returned Crimea to Russia, from which it had been separated for sixty years, the people of Catalonia, Spain’s largest province, will vote to leave that country.And just as the international community has decreed that the Crimean referendum was a fake, Spain’s Prime Minister felt compelled to declare that the vote could’t possibly take place, that it would be illegal, that independence, in his words, could only be ‘a pipe dream’ for the country’s richest province.Clearly, national governments don’t like losing land and people, however when it suits the international community, some communities are ...
War Crimes and War CriminalsAfter WWII, there was a growing number of significant non-state actors in international relations (IR), like the United Nations (UN) or various specialist agencies connected to it. Nevertheless, two key developments stimulated the growth of such organizations after 1945:The realization that building cooperation and collective security was a much wider task than merely deterring aggressors in traditional attacks on the fixed international order. It, therefore, involved finding ways of agreeing on international policy in a variety of practice areas.The coverage of international law is increasing to include new foci, including human rights, social justice, the natural ...
QASEM SULEJMANI FOUGHT IN BIH AGAINST SERBS?! A Croatian journalist discovers who was killed by the Iranian general! It was important for James Bond the Middle East, turning the WAR on in SYRIA!Hasan Haidar Diab (56) is a prominent Croatian journalist and war reporter. However, his link to the Balkans is in the Eighties of the last century, when from native Beirut to study in the then SFR Yugoslavia, and that is due thanks to the character and part of Josip Broz Tito, or his role in the Non-Aligned MovementOver the years of the war, primarily because of the knowledge ...
Preface At the beginning of the 20th century the Great European Powers,[i] divided into two totally antagonistic political-military alliances, were preparing themselves for the final settling of accounts among each other concerning the new division of political-economic spheres of influence and the redistributing the colonies around the world. Their different interests overlapped upon the territory of South-East Europe, much more look down at the other parts of the globe, for the reason of the exploitation of the regional natural wealth and to take advantage of the military-strategic importance of South-East Europe as the strategic hinterland of East Mediterranean and the most ...
Author’s note: a draft version of the article was originally written at the end of December 2015 and published in March 2016. This is the extended article’s version.On April 24th, 2016 Serbia faced three-level elections: for the national parliament, local municipalities and Vojvodina’s autonomous provincial administration. The elections did not cover Kosovo province as current Serbia’s pro-NATO/EU’s government already two years ago de facto recognized in its negotiations with the EU and Pristina’s government that this province is not any more an integral part of the legal and administrative system of the Republic of Serbia. Nevertheless, these elections were in ...
A NATO defense ministers meeting that took place in Brussels on November, 8-9 resulted in the new and very important decisions for the future of Europe.Speaking at a meeting, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said it is vital that European roads, ports, bridges and rail networks are able to carry tanks and heavy military equipment. Stoltenberg also added that NATO countries have agreed to cooperate to improve civil infrastructure objects to make them usable for military needs. What does it mean in practice for Europe in general and for the Baltic States in particular?Lithuanian authorities, for example, will for sure try ...
By the time you read this piece, it will already be out of date. The reason’s simple enough. No matter what mayhem I describe, with so much all-American weaponry in this world of ours, there’s no way to keep up. Often, despite the headlines that go with mass killings here, there’s almost no way even to know.On this planet of ours, America is the emperor of weaponry, even if in ways we normally tend not to put together. There’s really no question about it. The all-American powers-that-be and the arms makers that go with them dream up, produce, and sell ...
,Gavrilo Princip was first buried in secret in an unmarked grave at the Theresienstadt or Terezin prison following his death on April 28, 1918. His remains were exhumed and transferred to Sarajevo on July 7, 1920. This was Gavrilo Princip’s grave until 1939 when a Chapel was built to replace the grave.The other conspirators were also interred in this grave. Bogdan Zerajic’s remains were also reburied here.The assassination occurred on the Orthodox holiday, Vidovdan or St. Vitus’ Day, Sunday, on June 28, 1914. For this reason the conspirators were called the “Vidovdan Heroes” and the Chapel memorial was named “The ...
On the 30th September 2016, formal negotiations related to the creation of free trade zone between Serbia and Eurasian Economic Union started. Lasting throughout the entire 2017, indications of progress were given by Marko Čadež, president of the Serbian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, during his participation in the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). This new free trade agreement is supposed to replace older bilateral FTAs which Serbia has with Russian Federation, Belarus, and Kazakhstan and expand the market for its products to Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.Vietnam is an illustrative example of benefits which free trade agreement with EAEU can ...
Trump the Anti-Globalist Champion of the People?Many Americans who’ve been supporting President-elect Trump see him as the populist leader who will save America from ruin. Trump supporters have been unfairly marginalized and pigeonholed by the MSM broad stroke as white supremacy extremists bent on plunging America back into a new Jim Crowism era and a second Civil War along with a growing number of angry, uneducated, disenfranchised blue collar, mostly white male redneck loser types. Despite a spike in racist graffiti and vandalism since the election, this gross overgeneralization is the Hillary/Soros/Rothschild/MSM’s desperate attempt to discredit Trump’s victory while Soros ...
Magic, and tragic years, tend to fill the calendar of commemoration for central European patriots. There are religious intercessions; guiding symbols; omens. Then there are the calamities, the crushing battles that empty entire classes and countries.For Hungary, a country ever dreamy and mournful about such events, there are two notable disasters of rollicking value. There is Mohács 1526, where a good deal of the country’s aristocratic elite fell before the relentless Ottoman advance. The event effectively gave the Hapsburgs the ascendency to the west, assuming the role of defender against the Turkish advance into Europe.Then there is 1956, where the invaders ...
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 ...
“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted” - D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American LiteratureIndividual U.S. Presidents come and go, but the Oval Office is reserved for the Killer-in-Chief. If, as these war-mongers like to say, “the buck stops here,” then our latest incarnation of a “leader,” Donald Trump, has in a few months accumulated enough guilt to last endless lifetimes. There are no excuses. While the headlines scream distractions from the bloodbath, Trump and his “team” are slaughtering innocents in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and countless other places off the American ...
In classical mythology, the Acheron is one of the rivers of the Underworld. It marks the boundary between the living and the dead. The ferryman Charon ferries the dead across the Acheron to a place where they lose memory. Nothing of what made them human remains—happiness, suffering, love, hatred, guilt, regret, redemption, betrayal, forgiveness.From Gilgamesh to Odysseus to Aeneas, the living heroes of the epic descend into the Underworld at a point of despair in the sense of their quest. Burdened by a fate that requires momentous courage and tragic self-sacrifice for the sake of their people’s survival, they resent ...
On 23 April 1999, a NATO missile attack on Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) headquarters killed 16 employees of the state broadcaster. The forgotten war crime occurred during the Kosovo War (March 1998-June 1999), and was part of NATO’s aerial campaign alongside the US-backed Kosovo Liberation army, in opposition to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.In the aftermath of the attack there were no great public campaigns launched for the 16 murdered journalists and employees, no outpouring of emotion for those killed, no calls for solidarity and togetherness in the face of aggression. On the contrary the West justified this grievous ...
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed in 1949. According to its website, NATO was the first peacetime military alliance the United States entered into outside of the Western Hemisphere. Its original intent was to maintain a military line of defense against the USSR, which Washington considered the primary threat to its newfound dominance of Europe and much of the rest of the world, including many former colonies of European nations. Seen from another perspective, Washington wanted to expand its imperial reach. Given the physical and economic destruction suffered by most European nations during World War Two—and the relative lack ...
Unless We Learn Our History, We’re Doomed to Repeat ItPreface: I am a patriotic American who loves my country. I was born here, and lived here my entire life.So why do I frequently point out America’s warts? Because – as the Founding Fathers and Supreme Court judges have explained – we can only make America better if we honestly examine her shortcomings. After all:“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”Only when Americans can honestly look at our weaknesses can we become stronger. If we fail to do so, history will repeat …While Americans rightly condemn the Nazis as monstrous people, ...
The so called "Croatian scenario", is something that has been periodically brought up after the start of the armed conflict in Donbass. (Among other instances, yours truly noted this in articles from this past December 17 and August 24, 2015.) Promoted at Johnson's Russia List, the December 28 Euromaidan Press article "What Ukraine Can Take from the 'Croatian Scenario' of Conflict Resolution", omits some key factors for being apprehensive about the probability for success of an Operation Storm like strike against the Donbass rebels.In 1995, the Serb Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, had essentially dropped the Krajina Serbs, with the hope that he could improve his relationship with the West. At ...
Types of elections In the USA, elections are organized on a regular basis for the President, both houses of Congress (the House of Representatives and the Senate), and state and local government offices. In practice, candidates in the majority of cases run for office as members of the party (one of two main political parties – the Democrats or the Republicans) in order to get the party’s support for their candidacy. However, in principle, whoever wants to run as an independent candidate can organize a petition. In that case, if it is collected enough signatures, the person can run. According to ...
![“The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?” [Review of John Marciano’s Book]](https://global-politics.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/vietnam-war-150x150.jpg)
