Posted on 07/02/2015 6:45:42 AM PDT by ek_hornbeck
Back in the 1990s something happened in central Bosnia-Herzegovina that inspired people to this day and helps explain why that country now has more men fighting in Syria and Iraq (over 300), as a proportion of its population, than most in Europe.
The formation of a "Mujahideen Battalion" in 1992, composed mainly of Arab volunteers in central Bosnia, was a landmark. Today the dynamic of jihad has been reversed and it is Bosnians who are travelling to Arab lands.
"There is a war between the West and Islam," says Aimen Dean, who, as a young Saudi Arabian volunteer, travelled to fight in central Bosnia in 1994. "Bosnia gave the modern jihadist movement that narrative. It is the cradle."
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
More like some place(s) in Saudi Arabia.
First was Chechnya
Seems like an opportune thread on which to recall what my tag-line would read if FR gave us more characters:
And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know what this was all about. —Slobodan Milosevic
He said this when the kangaroo court in the Hague before which he had been dragged to “answer” for his defense of his people refused to allow him to show in open court pictures of Bosniak jihadis exulting over piles of severed Serb heads.
The first shots fired in the wars of the Yugoslav dissolution were the machine-gunning of an Orthodox Christian (Serb) wedding by Bosniak Muslims. Don’t believe the NATO propaganda ginned up to justify the pro-Muslim interventions in the Balkans.
If you fancy the Bosniaks were secular before the war, you might look at the writings that got Alia Izetbegovic thrown out of the Yugoslav government — they advocate the establishment of a Sharia law regime. I suppose maybe they were secular the way Iraq was secular under the Ba’athists, or Iran was secular under the Shah, but that provides no comfort to their countrymen or neighbors when the authoritarian secularizing government collapses.
I thought the cradle was Paris. Certainly that where Khomeini got his start.
That's certainly where the money for most jihadis comes from: the Saudi government pays off the imams in exchange for political legitimacy at home, and that money then bankrolls global jihad.
I'm aware of Izbegovic's Islamizing tendencies (and I never understood why the US and NATO decided to become allied with Izbegovic, other than perhaps as a gesture of good will to the Saudis), but the point is that his ideology would not have gotten the traction that it did without a civil war as a backdrop.
Of course the civil war might well not have started had it not been for at least some Bosniaks already having an animus against Serbs. (Remember among the south Slavs, religion is ethnicity.) The opening shots of the war were the machine gunning of a Serb wedding by Muslims. At that time I was a frequent poster on an Orthodox Christian discussion board on which another poster personally knew people at the wedding that was attacked.
The media also conveniently swept any and all information about jihadi fighters who came from the Middle East and elsewhere to fight alongside their co-religionists in the former Yugoslavia.
Does that statement make Milosevic a premature anti-islamofascist?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.