All it takes to hoodwink many in the West is a portrayal of one group as a victim, whether or not anything is known about how two or more groups came to be in the particular adversarial relationship being portrayed. Ethnic conflict, and ethic cleansing, back and forth, had gone on in the part of the world for several centuries. And, of course, the Muslims in the Balkans aligned themselves with the Nazis in WWII.
The Muslims were portrayed as victims and the Serbs as aggressors, or ethnic cleansers, and most Americans never understood the conflict in any more depth than that. And still don’t.
I hope more accurate histories are available, or will soon be available. Americans and Euros need to take a more in depth look at that conflict, and they part the West played in it.
That makes about as much sense as me observing that the Serbs alligned themselves with Communists after the war.