While Lebanon Burns, Watch Bosnia
By Douglas Farah
It is always very hard to focus on broad pictures when so many fires are in need of being put out. But it is imperative to keep in mind in the ongoing conflict Iran's long-standing ties not only to Hezbollah, but to Islamists in Bosnia, a relationship that spans more than a decade.
There is concern among Bosnian contacts that, if Iran feels things are going badly in Lebanon and that the war needs another front, it would take little to ignite Bosnia. It would not be hard to do and the international presence in Bosnia is greatly reduced. So is the intelligence capacity developed in the late 1990s. Several key intelligence-gathering units have been dissolved in Bosnia in the past six months, meaning the West is more blind there than any time since the mid-1990s.
To date, Iranian intelligence maintains a huge apparatus in Bosnia with several dozen, if not hundred, trainers with the elite units of the Bosnian military. In addition, several hundred mujahadeen who fought in Afghanistan and then Bosnia remain scattered around Bosnia, many of them still with the elite Bosnia units or in the intelligence apparatus. My full blog is here.
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Courtesy of the Counterterrorism Blog:
By Douglas Farah
It is always very hard to focus on broad pictures when so many fires are in need of being put out. But it is imperative to keep in mind in the ongoing conflict Iran’s long-standing ties n... [Read More]
