Bosnia Remains a Terrorist Shadow Land

By Douglas Farah

Like so many places that once riveted the world, Bosnia is now off the policy map and its brutal war largely forgotten. But as Evan Kohlmann has described so well, it was also the great al Qaeda experiment in Europe in the years immediately after the Afghan war.

After spending a week in the region exchanging information with people who track these issues, it is clear that Bosnia, while not on the policy radar screen, retains great attraction for the terrorist network and remains a crossroads for the Jihadi worldwide movement. Some, it appears, are seeking to penetrate Europe (and possibly the United States), others may be using Bosnia and surrounding states as way stations on the way to Iraq. There are also radicals with strong ties to Iran, who govern their own banks and control security forces, often the elite troops of now-disappeared state armies. Because of its geographic location and European ties, Bosnia offers many things to a terrorist network.

Much of the government and those of the surrounding states that once comprised Yugoslovia are greatly influenced by different organized criminal networks that have a hand in fuel deliveries, electricity, banking, and other economic activities. Yet the region enjoys much better communications facilities than, say, a failed state such as Liberia. It also has remnants of the Muslim population sympathetic to jihad and its supporters from the early 1990s. Couple this with a thriving trade in false passports and other identification cards that allow one to travel to a host of countries without a visa, and it becomes clear why Bosnia and surrounding states poses a continuing challenge on the radical Muslim front. Click here for the rest of the blog.

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