NOVI PAZAR, Serbia – The discovery of a mountain cave packed with plastic explosives, masks and machine guns – and the recent arrests of men devoted to radical Islam – have fueled fears that extremists are trying to carve out a stronghold in this remote corner of Europe. Police in southern Serbia's Sandzak region last month arrested six local Muslims and accused them of belonging to a fundamentalist Wahhabi sect – an austere brand of Sunni Islam promoted by extremists, including the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda fighters.
Recently leaked Western intelligence reports allege that the tense, impoverished area, along with Muslim-dominated regions in neighboring Bosnia, are rich ground for recruiting so-called “white al-Qaeda” – Muslims with Western features who could easily blend into European or U.S. cities and carry out attacks. Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups, the reports warn, may be trying to increase their influence in the Muslim-populated regions in the southern Europe to penetrate deeper into the continent.
The presence of radical Muslims in Sandzak, the poorest region of Serbia, is linked to the advent of mujahedeen foreign fighters who joined Bosnian Muslims in their battle against the Serbs in Bosnia's 1992-95 independence war. Sandzak's Muslims like to be called Bosniaks because they believe they ethnically belong to Bosnia, not Serbia.
A March 16 police raid on what authorities said was a mountain terrorist camp just south of Novi Pazar unveiled a large cache of weapons, ammunition, hand grenades, plastic explosives and face masks. Authorities captured four of the suspected Wahhabi Muslims in the raid, and two others four days later. TV footage of the cave broadcast in Serbia also showed a black flag with a Quran inscription in Arabic, and propaganda material that investigators said praised bin Laden and al-Qaeda. “The lethal mix of inter-Muslim and interethnic tensions, poverty and organized crime definitely has a potential for trouble,” a Western diplomat, who asked not to be named in order not to interfere with the police investigation, told The Associated Press.
“The 'white al-Qaeda' certainly can find fertile ground in the region,” he said. Police claimed that up to 30 radical Muslims trained at the mountain camp, and that militants they referred to as “Wahhabi terrorists” planned unspecified actions at home and abroad.
Police in Kosovo said they were searching for one of the suspects, whom they identified as Ismail Prentic – a man they warned “should be considered armed and dangerous.”
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