The Balkans - a hub of worldwide terrorist network

and the ongoing disagreement between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia over the latter’s constitutional name and NATO aspirations. Lost amidst all these more bombastic disputes is any media perception of the reality of an Islamic threat in the Balkans- despite the increasing, if quiet attention of Western intelligence services to the problem.



In the following exposition of this issue, the author refers to a number of facts and arguments contained within his new book, The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West (Praeger Security International, 2007). Several citations that are not otherwise made clear in the text below refer ultimately to content disclosed in that work.



Context: Recent History



The end of the Cold War created an unprecedented opportunity for Islamist ideological movements seeking to expand into the Balkans. Muslim-inhabited areas in the rapidly disintegrating Yugoslavia, as well as Albania and portions of Bulgaria were the focus of massive funding, mosque-building and proselytization campaigns by fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Iran, Pakistan, North Africa and elsewhere. Turkey, despite its staunchly secular government, also had a strong interest in retaining the Ottoman characteristic of Islam in the region its forebears had ruled for five centuries. While the particulars diverged, the goal of all these actors in general was to strengthen the social and political role of Islam in the post-Communist Balkans.



Among these new arrivals, however, were members of notorious terrorist organizations and seasoned mujahedin fresh from the Afghan jihad against the Soviets. Their arrival was aided by sympathetic elements within local governments and, incredibly, by Western governments intent on swaying the outcome of the Yugoslav civil wars. Seeking investment, impoverished Albania developed close relations with wealthy Arab benefactors; yet with investment came foreign jihadis and hundreds of new mosques. Albania’s first post-Communist secret service was originally oriented towards the Islamist cause, and allowed members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, organized by the brother of senior al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri, to establish a cell in Tirana through the clandestine cover of a large network of charities. The cell would present a continual challenge for the CIA, which was concerned with apprehending such foreign Islamists while at the same time training the Kosovo Liberation Army – an ethnic Albanian paramilitary force fighting the ...