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The young man wore a long beard and pants that stopped above his ankles. He sprayed the U.S. embassy in Bosnia with machine gun fire. The recent rise of militant Wahhabis and other Islamic radicals across the Balkans, including in Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro and even European Union member Bulgaria, has triggered concerns that the region could become a breeding ground for terrorists with easy access to Western Europe or the U.S. The shooter in Friday’s incident, 23-year-old Mevlid Jasarevic, came from Serbia — the southern region of Sandzak, a Wahhabi stronghold — but also had strong links...

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — A man opened fire with an automatic weapon outside the U.S. Embassy in Bosnia on Friday, and authorities said he was targeting the building in a terrorist attack. The man injured at least one police officer guarding the embassy before police surrounded him. After a 30-minute standoff, the sound of a single shot echoed and AP Video showed the shooter — brandishing a Kalyshinkov on a street corner outside of the embassy — slump to the ground. Police arrested the wounded man and took him away in an ambulance as pedestrians watched from behind buildings and...

SARAJEVO -- An unidentified man on Friday in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, fired shots at the building housing the embassy of the United States. The shooter is seen at a Sarajevo intersection (Tanjug) Initially, local media in Sarajevo said that the shooter was "shot and killed by members of the Bosnian police", but Tanjug news agency is reporting that it received confirmation that the man was lightly injured and arrested. Some local media also claimed that the attacker was accompanied by two other men. A Bosnian police officer was also injured during the incident. Eyewitnesses claimed earlier on Friday that the attacker...

Sarajevo. A gunman with an automatic weapon opened fire at the United States embassy in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo on Friday and police rushed to the scene, a Reuters witness said. A Reuters photographer said police were trying to surround the gunman, who was armed with a Kalashnikov rifle. A source close to the embassy said two security guards had been wounded. The U.S. embassy is located in the central business, university and shopping district of the capital.

NATO peacekeepers have used tear gas against Serb protesters in northern Kosovo. They dispersed the crowd in order to start dismantling barricades erected in a protest against deployment of customs checkpoints on the border. The tension has already spilled into violence in Kosovo, reports RT’s Maria Finoshina. One Serb was gunned down and two wounded near the city of Pec in the west of the province. The shooting was done by their Albanian neighbor, she says. Meanwhile some 300 Serbs tried to prevent the Kosovo peacekeeping force (KFOR) from tearing down the barricades in Kosovo’s north, but the soldiers were...

As the deadline for Serbs in northern Kosovo to dismantle their border barricades nears, they remain firm in their protest. The barricades are meant to stop attempts by Kosovan police, and NATO and EU forces to take over border crossings with Serbia. Stones and sand of the barricades are the only weapons the Serbs living in Kosovo have in their arsenal to make the others listen to them. The roadblocks they have set up throughout the northern part of the region are making headlines and getting feedback. Local resident Voityla is reading a leaflet that KFOR, a NATO-led international peacekeeping...

To the naked eye, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to be moving from strength to strength. Erdogan was welcomed as a hero on his recent trip to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. The Arabs embraced him as the new face of the war against Israel. The Obama administration celebrates Turkey as a paragon of Islamic democracy. The Obama administration cannot thank Erdogan enough for his recent decision to permit NATO to station the US X-Band missile shield on its territory. The US is following Turkey's lead in contending with Syrian President Bashar Assad's massacre of his people. And according...

KFor soldiers from the US stand guard at a barricade at the closed Serbia-Kosovo border crossing of Jarinje. Photograph: Marko Djurica/Reuters Cultural claims persist in regions as Belgrade refuses to acknowledge independence of Kosovo MILEVA PREMOVIC and her neighbours while away the afternoon in the shade of a broad tree. The unseasonable warmth makes it hard to imagine that the green Kapaonik mountains, rising up a few miles away in Serbia, will soon be white with snow and busy with skiers. It would also be hard to believe that bullets were fired and blood shed here just a few days...

German chancellor Angela Merkel has received undeserved praise for adopting an uncompromising position regarding Kosovo in meetings with Serbian president Boris Tadic. The latest example of a laudatory reaction is the piece [3] by Morton Abramowitz and James Hooper. Abramowitz and Hooper are thrilled that she made it clear to Tadic that “Kosovo would not be partitioned” and that “the area inhabited by Serbs north of the Ibar River was Kosovo territory.” Further, she told the leader of a still-fragile democratic Serbia that the Kosovo issue “had to be resolved before Serbia could enter the EU.” Rather than meriting praise,...

As the son of Cuban exiles, junior Florida senator Marco Rubio should be particularly sensitive to attempts at painting a people as crazed criminals, often done in service of an underlying political agenda. But in his speech last week at the Jesse Helms Center in North Carolina, Senator Rubio said, “The American armed forces have been one of the greatest forces of good….They stopped Nazism and Communism and other evils such as Serbian ethnic cleansing.” A year after our leaders lied to us in 1999 about the particularly insidious but ultimately mythical “Operation Horseshoe” (the ethnic cleansing plan subsequently shown...

Porous borders, especially in the north, are blamed for the trend. [Reuters] Kosovo hаѕ achieved the dubious distinction аs а transit country, but іs unprepared to handle the situation. Since 1999, Kosovo has ѕeen аn increasing number of asylum seekers frоm Asia and Africa. They have other destinations in mind, but use Kosovo aѕ transit point аnd оften end uр being arrested bу police at thе borders for illegal passage. Mainly, their countries of origin arе Afghanistan, Palestine, Pakistan and Nigeria. It іѕ uр tо thе internal affairs ministry tо determine whethеr thеy wіll remain in Kosovo or be deported....

Tito We have reported earlier of the possible transfer of the U.S. stealth fighter technology to China from the Serb Army which got its hands on it from the downed Stealth Bomber F11 during NATO's bombing campaign in 1999, as it was reported by other sources as well. This will not be the first time for such significant, possibly turning-point, military transfers to originate in the Balkans. The MA theses of Mehta Coleman Armstrong named "'A Rat Hole to be Watched'? CIA Analyses of the Tito-Stalin Split, 1948-1950" talks about the same type of transfer of the top military technology...

Violence on the border between Kosovo and Serbia continued to escalate on Wednesday as members of the Serbian minority in northern Kosovo set fire to a border post that has been in dispute since Monday. The attackers also reportedly fired shots at a nearby outpost run by the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR). The border station has been contested since the beginning of the week when Kosovo's special police seized two northern border crossings in attempt to enforce an import ban on Serbian goods. On Tuesday a Kosovar police officer was killed, reportedly with a gunshot to the head. KFOR troops...

Serbian authorities have arrested Goran Hadzic, the last remaining fugitive war crimes suspect sought by the UN tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Mr Hadzic, now 52, led Serb separatist forces during Croatia's 1991-1995 war. Within hours of the arrest, a Serbian court approved his extradition to the Hague. He has been charged with the murder of hundreds of non-Serbs. The arrest comes less than two months after Serbia caught former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic. Serbian President Boris Tadic confirmed Mr Hadzic's arrest at a news conference. He said the suspect had been detained early on Wednesday in the...

The high school in Vitez, where the Croat children attend classes on the upper floor and the Bosnian children on the lower floor. In Bosnia, the complex system of checks and balances between ethnic groups has cemented the divisions rather than healed them, local residents say, and reconciliation has still not happened. VITEZ, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA — Every morning at the local grade school formerly known as Brotherhood and Unity, the Catholic Croat children head to the right, and the Bosnian Muslims head to the left. The Croats study in the school’s cheerful looking main building, which was recently renovated....

Aleksandra's Note: Ironically, even though it was Great Britain who betrayed General Mihailovich in the Second World War, it was some of her officers, diplomats, and journalists who were fairest and most effective at pinning down and exposing the truth about what really happened in Yugoslavia during WWII and the British complicity in the consequences of what transpired during and after the war. A number of excellent and honest articles about the Mihailovich tragedy were published in independent British papers during and after his trial at the hands of Tito's Yugoslav communists in 1946. Of those, the following essay by...

Dr. Archibald Rudolph Reiss Aleksandra's Note: Three proverbs capture the essential nature of how things work in the Balkans. They are: "History repeats itself", "The first casualty of war is truth", and "What's old is new again". The more one researches the history of the Balkans the more one becomes struck with just how relevant the past is to today's events. The unfortunate thing about this phenomenon is that those in power and the policymakers and the historians and journalists who evaluate what is going on presently never seem to pay attention to the fact that the same lies keep...

I don’t think any civilized and informed person either condemns or doubts the reason why Ratko Mladic was arrested by Serbian security forces, and handed over to an international war crimes trial in The Hague. He is alleged to have led a force that slaughtered 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, and almost certainly did so. He was captured because Belgrade desperately wants to become part of the European Community, and knows it has to expunge any former connection with ethnic cleansing and tribal atrocities. The chances are that many in the Serbian government knew full well where Mladic had...

BELGRADE, Serbia – Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic says he's innocent of war crimes charges that include orchestrating some of the worst atrocities of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, the suspect's son said Friday after visiting the former fugitive in jail. "His stand is that he's not guilty of what he's being accused of," Darko Mladic told reporters. After spending a night in jail, Mladic was due back in a Belgrade court for a second hearing on his extradition to the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands on charges that include directing the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys...

President Obama is calling the arrest of Ratko Mladic, a Bosnian Serb general charged with genocide and other crimes against humanity in the 1990s, as “an important day for the families of Mladic’s many victims, for Serbia, for Bosnia, for the United States, and for international justice.” However, Obama noted in a statement, the United States and others must “recommit ourselves to supporting ongoing reconciliation efforts in the Balkans and to working to prevent future atrocities.” Here’s Obama’s full statement: “Fifteen years ago, Ratko Mladic ordered the systematic execution of some 8,000 unarmed men and boys in Srebrencia. Today, he...