Fighting the 'good' fight
Brendan O'Neill
AL-QAIDA'S JIHAD IN EUROPE: THE AFGHAN-BOSNIAN NETWORK by Evan F. Kohlmann Berg, £15, pp. 239, ISBN 1859738079
02.99 (plus /2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 millions, perhaps even billions of words have been written about al-Qaida over the past three years. We know of the group's origins as an Office of Services in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when Osama bin Laden used CIA cash to recruit and train foreign fighters for that last gasp of the Cold War, the jihad against the Soviets. We even know, thanks to the editor of the British-Arab magazine Al-Quds, what Osama likes to have for his dinner (salty
cheese and a few fried eggs, since you ask). Yet this, as far as I can tell, is the first book to cover the Islamist venture into the Balkans in the mid-1990s, the period between the Afghan war and 9/11 when Mujahedin forces kept themselves busy by declaring holy war against the Serbs.
The Bosnian outing has been discussed in brief elsewhere — over a couple of pages in Loretta Napoleoni's Modern Jihad, and in a chapter in Cees Wiebes' excellent Intelligence and the War in Bosnia. Yet here we have 239 pages dedicated exclusively to uncovering 'the secret history of how Europe was systematically infiltrated by the ranks of the most dangerous terrorist organisation on earth'. It is so excellently researched and full of detail that you are likely to forgive the frequent lapses into bad writing.
Kohlrnann says that many of the Saudis, Egyptians, Algerians and Yemenis who flocked to jihad's call in Afghanistan found themselves at a loose end when hostilities ceased in 1992. They couldn't return home, where their illiberal governments had taken to throwing troublesome Mujahedin veterans in the clink, or worse, torturing and executing them. The Bosnian war occurred at a 'propitious' time for these stranded foreign fighters, he says, some of whom 'left South Asia destined for a new life of asylum and holy war amidst the brutal civil conflict in the Balkans'.
He tells how the Mujahideen set up training camps in central Bosnia, at an abandoned retirement home in Zenica, at the foot of a cliff in Mehurici near Travnik, and elsewhere. The camps were built 'exactly' along the lines of the Afghan model, combining 'intense, aggressive recruitment and training in both military tactics and the violent, confrontational form of Islamic fundamentalism borrowed from al-Qa'eda training camps'. Arabs and other foreigners were trained here and, instilled with the belief that they were 'magnificent, divine warriors', sent off to take on the Serbs. The first official offensive by Mujahedin forces took place in September 1992, when a 55-man unit under the lead of Abu Muhammad alFaatih al-Bahraini (a prince in the Bahraini royal family) audaciously attacked Serb front lines in Sarajevo.
Many of the Mujahedin offensives were unsuccessful, and these strange, hot-headed foreigners (the most infamous of whom, Shaykh Abu Abdel Aziz, wore traditional Arab garb and sported a thick reddishorange beard) proved unpopular with local Muslims, who were far too fond of drinking and disco-ing to buy into the Mujahedins' dreams of Sharia law. Yet Kohlmann recognises that the importance of the Bosnian venture goes beyond any tactical or strategic impact the Mujahedin may have had on the war. The movement from Asia to Europe also helped to 'globalise" the Mujahedin and allowed them to gain a foothold in Europe. Kohlmann notes that 'within a few months of the [Bosnian] war's end, homegrown terrorist sleeper cells appeared on the streets of Europe's cities'. At least two of the hijackers of 9/11 got their first taste of jihad in Bosnia.
It strikes this reviewer that there was a quite remarkable coincidence of interests between the Mujahedin and the West's own 'humanitarian interventionists' in the Nineties. Both showed scant regard for sovereignty as they darted across borders to aid Muslims, the Mujahedin trying to save them through the law of God' and the humanitarians through human rights law. In a document entitled 'The Charter of Islamic Struggle', dug up by Kohlmann, the Mujahedin claimed to have been 'given the task to realise the supremacy of the law of God on Earth and of not allowing that any group on Earth govern without the law of God'. This echoes Clinton adviser Strobe Talbott's promise of a new 'global nation' in the Nineties, where 'nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognise a single, global authority'.
Some of the Mujahedins' flyers advertising jihad in the Balkans echo the work of Western journalists who campaigned for harder Western intervention. One says:
More than 100,000 killed ... Thousands of Muslim girls and women have been kidnapped and kept in Yugoslav army camps for sex Help] the emerging jihad movement.
The Mujahedin and liberal humanitarians may seem worlds apart, but both zealously believed that they were fighting 'good wars' in Bosnia, and later in Kosovo. Where the Mujahedin were created by the Right in the Eighties, they seem, perversely, to have become the armed wing of Western liberal opinion in the Nineties.
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