Balkan Jihadists Part of a Global Menace

By Hajrudin Somun

October 04, 2014

The spectacular anti-terrorist police operation that took place at the beginning of September in Sarajevo and 12 other towns of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as the state court's order to detain five Bosnians charged with organizing and recruiting young people to join extremist Islamist fighters in Syria and Iraq was not a surprise. It was welcomed by the public as a proper official reaction to frequent news on Bosnian and other Balkan victims of the sectarian war in those two Arab countries.

Many Bosnians were shocked to hear that a suicide attack in Baghdad on Aug. 7 was carried out by Emrah Fojnica, a 23-year-old Bosnian, together with a Saudi and a Libyan alleged to be fighters of the Islamic State (IS). Strapped in a bomb vest he walked into a crowded market, blew himself up and killed 24 people, among them 11 women and six children. An Albanian Islamist fighting in Syria posted photos on social media last July in which he beheads a young man, allegedly a spy. Austrian authorities stopped two schoolgirls last week who wanted to leave the country and join the warriors in the IS. The girls were born in Austria where their Bosnian families settled after the 1990s wars. Pictures were recently published on the Internet showing Kosovo Albanian Lavdrim Muhaxeri beheading a young soldier in Syria. And what to say about the monstrous death international aid worker David Haines met in a desert between the Tigris and the Euphrates. These are only a few of many similar stories, some announced by themselves, some by their families or confirmed by IS videos.

Before any other data or facts, what makes me especially uneasy is why young Balkan Muslims are going to Syria and Iraq, and particularly after the establishment of that phantom IS, to a cruel sectarian, self-destructive and wild environment and a life of total uncertainty. And, above all, how they reach a level of creed where anybody else who does not believe in their way deserves to be slaughtered in cold blood.   

Ilir Kulla, an Albanian expert on international security, speaking to Today's Zaman last July said there are a “combination of reasons, including propaganda, religious motivation and some monetary incentives,” that might be specific to Albania, for why countries like it have contributed a larger contingent of “foreign fighters” to the IS. “For Albanians who lived through the Albanian democratic revolution and the war in Kosovo, the Arab Spring was a just fight. For the young Islamist movements it was even better,” he said. “The young people asked themselves, ‘Why shouldn't we participate in such a jihad, in this just jihad?'” he added.

Esad Hecimovic, speaking recently about the same issue to Today's Zaman, talked about a religious motivation. "The most important factor is prolonged recruitment by the network of recruiters. It was enabled by propaganda among Balkan Muslims about Sahwa al Jihadi as a central theme for religious awakening," he said. My young colleague Hecimovic, whom I consider the leading expert on Islamist movements in the Balkans, also said, “Recruiters are mainly local activists and preachers who are recruiting people from known Salafist groups.” Talking nowadays, we discuss the difference between Sahwa al Jihadi, a “jihadist awakening,” from the Sahwa al Islami, the “Islamic awakening,” and what Iranians called “Arab springs.” Resid Hafizovic, professor at Sarajevo University's Islamic Faculty, known to be a sharp critic of Wahhabi/Salafi movements in Bosnia and the target of their serious threats, wrote in the last issue of Sarajevo magazine Dani, “These ‘overheated Muslims,' these children that some people persuade to go to the battlefields and kill ‘somebody's others,' who they see as not being good enough Muslims, are the least guilty of the crimes being committed in Syria and Iraq.” He thinks that those who led this country and the Islamic community are “much guiltier.”

I would agree with this reasoning and point to the main sources of recruitment and the sides responsible for preventing young Balkan Muslims from joining the war in Syria, and now Iraq as well. Relying on the law passed last April, giving prison terms of up to 10 years for convicted Islamist radicals and recruiters, the Bosnian state court now ordered a one-month detention for five people suspected of having “recruited, organized and financed the departure of Bosnian nationals to Syria or Iraq, or of taking part in the conflicts in Syria and Iraq alongside foreign radical terrorist organizations and groups,” as it was officially announced. In Kosovo, 45 ethnic Albanians suspected of links to the IS jihadists have been arrested as well. Albania has also started arresting suspects based on a law introducing jail terms of up to 15 years for nationals who fight abroad for foreign groups. In Macedonia the prison terms are at least five years for similar suspects. In Greece so far three jihadists’ extremists of French nationality have been arrested. Serbia was also planning to amend its penal code and introduce jail terms for similar acts, because its province Sandzak was considered one of the regional Wahhabi/Salafi strongholds.

Thus, the Balkan states with a majority or large Muslim population are more or less taking legal proceedings against their citizens joining foreign armies or paramilitary troops. However, the same or even greater responsibility for their recruitment rests with the official Islamic bodies. Islamic communities, in their mosques and religious schools, have more powerful and influential means than the state to educate people in core principles of Islam that teaches, “There is no compulsion in the faith” and to divert them from influence of various Islamist missionaries who teach young Muslims to hate “others” and to even be ready to kill them. They did not succeed in significantly damaging the traditional image of Balkan Muslims, well known for their modesty, tolerance and features of the so-called “European Islam.”

However, mobilized and well-paid by retrograde Islamist movements, often covered by humanitarian missions from the Arabian Peninsula, those preachers of the “only right path” to paradise did give enough reason to real adversaries of Islam to see in Bosnia, in particular, a Wahhabi/Salafi “safe haven” for spreading radical Islam and terrorism to wider region. They were right in pointing to the village of Gornja Maoca in northern Bosnia, where Wahhabi/Salafi communities made their headquarters. It was the same in the 1990s when such people brought the first seed of sectarianism and hatred to Bosnia. The same in 2010, when the state police raided that village and unveiled to the public the backwardness that can be found in Europe's corner. Among those arrested in Maoca was Bilal Bosnic, the leader of the Salafi movement in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnic recently appeared in a picture shared on the Internet praising the IS and calling on young Muslims to join its ranks. Behind him was a black IS banner streaming TV news showing the latest situation in Syria and Iraq.

The new Bosnian mufti, Husein Kavazovic, and other officials from the Balkan Islamic communities appeal to local Muslims not to go to the Middle East fronts. However, there are already hundreds of people -- Ilir Kulla supposes even thousands -- mostly in their 20s, who went to fight with Al-Baghdadi's caliphate fanatics. They trained in advance and were inducted into regional centres where they learnt Al-Qaeda's spirit and methods. Previous muftis and senior Islamic officials accommodated the influence of Wahhabi/Salafi communities, naively calling their followers “new Muslims” and convincing state authorities they were not a threat to the country's security. They have all, probably, received “monetary incentives” from the same sources.

It happens similarly in the “genuine” Islamic world. The mufti of Saudi Arabia calls on Muslims to fight the IS and the mufti of Al-Azhar condemns its “horrific actions that take it far from Islam.” They now worry for their own regime's security, even for their own life. Where were they and why were they not more clamorous when their and some other Muslim countries were supplying founders of the IS, Jabhat al-Nusra and other groups to topple the infidel regime in Damascus? It is too late now for the Balkan and some other European countries that are becoming anxious about possible terrorist activity by returning foreign fighters from the Middle East. It is estimated that there are around 700 fighters from France alone. It is not clear whether the new legal measures will prevent all of them, now trained and supplied with additional radicalism, hatred and bloodthirstiness, to mobilize new followers.

Perhaps the Bosnian political analyst Professor Vlado Azinovic exaggerated by saying in Dani magazine that Bosnia and its neighbourhood were “already drawn into the map of that utopist creature [the IS].” I have, however, a broader concern -- whether all those thousands of foreign fighters in the IS, together with their horrifying hosts, are part of the increasing global national, religious and racial radicalization and exclusiveness. It is obvious that in the European West radical, extreme rightist and neo-Nazi parties are gaining more followers and seats in parliaments. Even in the European Parliament they have a strong voice. And now, in the European East there are authoritarian and dictatorial tendencies, from Budapest to Moscow. For all of them, radical Islamists or Christians, racists or nationalists, they are the collateral product of the neoconservative political and neo-liberal economic system.

What is unfortunate is that all those extremist fighters who battle against decadence, injustice, economic empowerment, unemployment and corruption from the wrong, radical side are pushing young generations closer to further radicalization and joining such phantom creatures as the IS. Thus, Al-Baghdadi jihadists, including those joining them from the Balkans, are not doing irremediable damage to Islam alone. They are also a global menace. They endanger all of us “others,” including those criticizing them. It has already happened in Bosnia, with critics such as professor of Islamic studies Resid Hafizovic and journalist Esad Hecimovic being seriously threatened by fighters of the “only right path” to Islam. It was done by people like Emrah Fojnica, who blew himself up in the suicide attack in Baghdad. It is possible that these lines I am writing for Today's Zaman might result in similar threats to me as well. 

Hajrudin Somun is the former ambassador of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Turkey.

Source: http://www.todayszaman.com/op-ed_balkan-jihadists-part-of-a-global-menace_360616.html

URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-terrorism-jihad/balkan-jihadists-part-global-menace/d/99428