The Bin Ladens of the Balkans, Part I

Around a thousand mujahideen, veteran Arabic fighters from the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan, showed up in Bosnia in the mid-1990s to fight a jihad against Serbian Orthodox Christians. They thought they would be welcomed, and they were right. The European community imposed an arms embargo on all of Yugoslavia during the Bosnian civil war which preserved the imbalance of power and arms in favor of Slobodan Milosevic and his nationalist Bosnian Serb comrades in arms. The Bosnian army was multi-ethnic and multi-confessional – it included Serb and Croat Christians as well as Bosniak Muslims – but its leaders chose to accept help from the so-called “Afghan Arabs” because they were desperate.

The radical Arab mujahideen matured slightly between the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, and they probed the anti-Milosevic guerilla movement known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to see if they could lend a hand there, as well. Kosovo, though, isn’t Bosnia. 90 percent of the population is ethnically Albanian, and most of them are at least nominally Muslims, but the KLA wasn’t too keen on throwing open the doors to their country to violent Middle Eastern fanatics. “In the two years that I covered the conflict in Kosovo,” journalist Stacy Sullivan wrote, “never once did I see the mujahideen fighters I saw in Bosnia, or hear KLA soldiers even allude to any kind of commitment to Islam. Most said they were offended by such allegations, bragged about how they were Catholic before the Ottomans came and converted them, and said their only religion was Albanianism.”

Even so, the likes of Al Qaeda wanted to “help.” Representatives of Osama bin Laden approached a Brooklyn man named Florin Krasniqi and said they wanted to send men into Kosovo to fight a jihad against Serbs.

Krasniqi is an Albanian-American roofer who ran what he called the Homeland Calling Fund to raise money for the KLA back home. He raised 30 million dollars from Albanian-Americans and sent cargo planes stocked full of weapons and uniforms from the United States to Northern Albania where the goods were then smuggled over the border into Kosovo. “We were approached by fundamentalist Muslims from every direction – Al Qaeda – but most of the leaders of the KLA just didn’t feel right about working with them,” he said to Dutch filmmaker Klaartje Quirijns in the documentary film The Brooklyn Connection. “I would have cooperated with the devil to free my country. I didn’t care who they were.” Later, he said he realized the KLA commanders were right to turn down help from Islamist extremists

And it’s a good thing they did, or Kosovo’s Islamist problem might be much more severe than it is.

The KLA may have refused entry into Kosovo to radical groups from the Middle East during the war, but that hasn’t stopped dubious characters from the Gulf states from showing up in Kosovo anyway since the war ended. Saudi-funded NGOs volunteered to help rebuild mosques destroyed by the Yugoslav Army and Serbian nationalist paramilitary forces, which is fine and good as far as it goes, but there’s a catch. The same individuals hope to transform Kosovo’s liberal Balkan Islam into the much sterner Wahhabi variety practiced in the harsh deserts of Saudi Arabia.

“We don't call them Wahhabis here,” a prominent Albanian woman told me. “We call them Binladensa, the people of Bin Laden.” Believe me, in Kosovo that isn’t a compliment.

Read the rest at MichaelTotten.com