The Balkans - a hub of worldwide terrorist network

who had links with Kosovo Albanian organized crime structures, were briefly detained in Kosovo by UN police; however, they were inexplicably released. In November, 2007, it was revealed that some of the 9/11 hijackers had also been trained in Turkey, which despite being a secular Islamic state had also long been a two-way conveyor belt for international mujahedin and fundraisers active in both the Bosnian and Chechen jihads.



Despite concerted efforts to break up the European Islamic charity network funding and concealing terrorists after 9/11, radical groups in the Balkans have flourished, with organizations renaming themselves, reorganizing, or even continuing to operate in plain sight, due to a failure of execution by the international community there. Since 9/11, and the energized law enforcement those terrorist attacks provoked, there has actually been a sharp increase in the number of planned terrorist attacks involving Balkan actors; while most have been thwarted, a few – such as the Madrid train bombings and several bombings in Turkey – have succeeded, to deadly effect. And, with the inculcation of radical views among a new generation of young adherents to radical doctrines, the objective of generating actual terrorists from the indigenous Balkan Muslim populations – not just foreign-born Muslims – has been realized.



Mistakes Made: Policy, Peacekeeping, the Media



To what can the failures of the West and rise in Balkan extremism be attributed? Primarily, they are due to specific interventionist and foreign policy failures and structural flaws inherent to international peacekeeping missions in general. The desire of the Clinton administration to present itself before Arab leaders as friendly to the interests of the ‘good Muslims’ of the Balkans influenced the interventionist policy on behalf of Bosnian and Albanian Muslims, as did the cunning lobbying of the latter, which warned of the alleged danger of a ‘Greater Serbia’ arising from the ashes of Yugoslavia. In Macedonia’s brief war of 2001, directly abetted by Kosovo-based Albanian paramilitaries, the West again broadly if more quietly favored the rebels, who resorted to fundraising amongst foreign Islamist institutions and whose numbers also included a small number of veteran mujahedin. And the Western powers also allowed fundraising and personnel transfer sponsored by the Islamic world to be channeled through diaspora and charity networks in Germany, the US and Britain.



However, the ultimate result of these ...