The terrorist attack in Belgrade, the attempted murder of a police officer engaged in the security of the Israeli embassy, and the death of the Wahhabi “Salahuddin” have brought the issue of European security into the focus of global public attention. One detail that the concerned European community has not detected is that the level of its threat is directly related to the assessment of the operational capabilities of terrorist organizations and their activities in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Is the case of the terrorist act in Belgrade calculated as a wake-up call for the sons of jihad, and can Al-Nusra and the Islamic State, through their white brothers, strengthen their bases in Bosnia and indirectly take control of the Balkans?
FREE ZONE OF THE BALKANS
White Al-Qaeda is the name of an organization that originated in Bosnia, proclaiming as its main goal “revenge for the slain Islamic brothers in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.” The name is due to its members, mostly fair-skinned, atypical for Arabs who make up the majority of the existing “classical” Al-Qaeda membership.
The advantage of “White Al Qaeda” lies in the fact that its members, potential strikers, are less conspicuous in European countries – especially in circumstances when the goods are the embassies, squares, places of mass gathering, government building as well as critical infrastructure and strong economic Institutions. As an ideal expansion of the European terrorist network, Bosnia and Herzegovina showed itself, in which crime, prostitution and smuggling are “legitimate categories”.
By the way, the “free zone” of the Balkans meets all conditions for the operation of the terrorist underground – in one place there are weapons, dissatisfied Muslims, Wahhabism and the powerful Super Cartel Tito and Dino. This also explains the strengthening of the American and West European Secret Service in the Balkans, so for a decade in Sarajevo, there is an anti-terrorist base from which they monitor and supervise Islamic radicals in Bosnia.
FROM THE BATTLEFIELD BACK TO BOSNIA
Bloody traces of terrorist attack on the Israeli embassy in Belgrade also lead to Bosnia and Herzegovina, from whose wahhabi settlements terrorism have been successfully exported to Europe for decades. Bosnia became a banking point of Islamist radical elements at the beginning of the 1990s, when the war was conducted between Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs.
The Muslim fighters from the Arab countries were then approached to help, of which the number, after the war, remained in Muslim parts of BiH to make the missionaries and recruit new members. Links between state institutions and all forms of organized crime are unbreakable here.
Behind the recruitment of new Islamist elements and organization of terrorist actions, there is a strong network of organizations in BiH. The jihadists who fought under the command of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, Al-Nusrah Front and other terrorist organizations enjoyed the protection of Bosniaks in the political system. Upon returning to the country, these experienced warriors participated in organizing and preparations for terrorist attacks. Confrontations regarding the understanding of this process and the role of Islam in it, as well as the unarticulated national identity of the Bosniaks, have lasted for three decades. Belonging to Islam, the way of understanding the faith, and its practice have been and remain a problem in the complex relationships among the three nations.
Islam in Bosnia and Herzegovina is interpreted as an indigenous “European version” of the Ottoman model and the Hanafi madhhab, which requires modernization to offer a response to the challenges of living in a Christian environment, the necessity of Euro-Atlantic integration, and the behavior of Western societies and states as a whole. Although the need for reform is presented as an expression of the current moment, burdened by war experiences, it is, in essence, deeply Islamic (revivalist, Salafist tradition) as well as Western (a response to European colonialism). Islam possesses a rich, long tradition of renewal (tajdid) and reform (islah). In relation to the West, it implies rejection, withdrawal, secularization, Westernization, and Islamic modernism.
WAHHABI SETTLEMENTS AS TERRORIST CELLS
It would be inaccurate to say that extremism and a propensity for violence were imposed on Bosniaks solely from outside, as this would ignore internal potentials and actions aimed at promoting violence as a means of achieving political goals. Military training in isolated communities and settlements, learning religious patterns that give violence religious legitimacy, as well as the search for identity and the absence of any well-founded articulation of themselves as a specific national community with deep historical roots, have shaped the Bosniaks into a warrior community. A community that provokes conflicts and then skillfully hides behind Western states, portraying itself as a victim.
The institutions of the joint state play a role in this process – they impose dynamics, provide resources, military training grounds, and offer counterintelligence protection. The exercises of Wahhabis in the barracks of the Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as the exercises conducted daily in about a hundred Wahhabi settlements, which are classic terrorist cells, are justified by stories of a civil state and the position of “European Islam” within it.
The list of 76 citizens of BiH who died in Syria by 2019. – SOURCE: Zurnal.info
A METAPHOR FOR GLOBAL TERRORISM
It is a fact that for centuries, individuals (theologians, learned jurists, Sufis, and charismatic preachers) and organizations have pointed out the obvious gap between the Islamic ideal and the reality of Muslim life. Returning to Islam, the Quran, the life of the Prophet, and the early Islamic community would imply a model of Islamic reform that absolutely contradicts the proclaimed political goals and the way of presenting one’s own Islamic society as civil and European. Such an order did not suit those who introduced terrorism into the Islamic equation: deliberate and systematic killing, maiming, and endangering innocent people and ruling by fear for political goals.
Fanatical Mujahideen and Wahhabi groups, state agents, and the broader Islamist movement, with the support of the public, politics, and religion, sought to achieve political and military goals that, in their estimation, could not be achieved in post-Dayton peace and on political forums. When they transferred their ambitions to the entire European field, they became a well-known metaphor for global terrorism.
WAR ON MULTIPLE LEVELS
There are many organizations behind which, in various forms and from various places of activity and influence, stand the Bosniak political elites in Sarajevo. Their political actions and false loyalty to European values and interests are just a cover for unconventional activities and a series of coordinated political, psychological-propaganda, armed, economic, intelligence, and subversive actions undertaken against opponents, Christian politicians, societies, and neighboring states, primarily to achieve psychological, economic, social, and political goals. In this context, the war without end and compromise never stops and is constantly waged on tactical, operational, and strategic levels.
NEITHER A PHILOSOPHY NOR A MOVEMENT – TERRORISM IS A MEANS
In principle, terrorism is always a political act, even when it engages other motives, such as religious, economic, or social. Therefore, terrorism is neither a philosophy nor a movement: terrorism is a means. Today’s Bosniaks as a national community represent an identity shaped by many processes: the religious hierarchy of powerful dictatorial, Islamist societies and states (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran), the diplomatic machinery of the West (USA, Great Britain, and Germany), and finally the internal religious and political factor (the Izetbegović family, SDA, Islamic Community). The people’s morality is based on values that benefit the herd: the average Bosniak does not struggle much with questions of conscience. He follows the leader, by the logic of loyalty, and reacts according to a set pattern – the more a trait seems dangerous to the herd, the more fiercely the herd condemns it. Hatred towards the superior is articulated with the propagandistic weapon of condemnation such as: accusations of alleged betrayal; denial of merits, creating the thesis of danger, which is enormous; “one must fear and feel bad.”
The crisis of Bosniak national consciousness is of such a scale that it is forbidden to speak seriously and argumentatively about it so as not to question its foundation; the entire way it has defined and understood itself and determined its task in history. This applies to all forms and manifestations of the will of that identity, which today is evidently mired in defeatism, cowardice, hatred, and an extreme, irrational, and mystical form of its own religious practice.
Bare, the truth about Bosnia is scandalous. The masters of the political swamp, Islamists, and Westerners, have nullified the idea of caring for the people, even the radicalized part to whom they promised that their sacrifice would be built into the foundations of a new Bosnia and Herzegovina, one without Serbs and Croats…and without any social group capable of spoiling the harmony of creating an Islamic state. The dangerous project has failed. This is a fact that reasonable people are ready to acknowledge, but not the malicious interpreters and creators of the Bosnian situation.
