UNHOLY
TERROR

BOSNIA, AL-QA'IDA, AND
THE RISE OF GLOBAL JIHAD

JOHN R. SCHINDLER

PROFESSOR OF STRATEGY, U.S. NAVAL WAR COLLEGE

CONTENTS

Introduction ................................ 7

Chapter 1-Islam in Bosnia: Myths & Realities ... 15

Chapter 2-Framing Bosnia .................. 55

Chapter 3-The Great Deceit ................. 77

Chapter 4-With Koran and Kalashnikov ...... 115

Chapter 5-MOS and Mujahidin ............. 147

Chapter 6-Not-So-Secret Secrets ............. 177

Chapter 7-Bosnia: The Real War ............ 193

Chapter 8-From the Drina to Dayton ........ 213

Chapter 9-Whose Victory? ................. 237

Chapter 10-Europe's Afghanistan ............ 273

On Spellings and Sources ................... 325

Notes ................................... 327

Index ................................... 363

Introduction

This book is a challenge and a corrective. To many readers it will be revealing, to others heretical, to some dangerous. Its purpose is to tell an untold story in detail, an account of importance in the aftermath of 9/11, as America faces a protracted struggle against radical Islam. This is the first thorough investigation of Bosnia's place in the global jihad, the extended campaign to spread a virulent strain of Islam worldwide by propaganda, by force, by terror.

The Bosnian war of 1992-1995 was the leading foreign policy story of the last decade. In an era of post-Cold War tumult and disorder, the Bosnian disaster caught and held the attention of the world's media and many governments. Journalists of all varieties made good copy on the Balkan chaos, not least from its sordid, even sickening, side. Thanks to countless articles, TV spots and documentaries, and books and films focusing on the depravity of the Bosnian war, Western governments-above all the American-found themselves paying close attention to that unfortunate country, often despite themselves. That international media could not just advance a story, but policy, became evident as never before in Bosnia.

The version of that war that gained instant currency among journalists in their supposed "first draft of history" presented a simple account of good versus evil, of a mostly Muslim but actually multicultural government besieged by radical nationalists-Croats and especially Serbs-bent on annihilating the Muslims of Bosnia and their virtuous society. The methods used by Christians against Muslims in Bosnia were presented as especially barbaric and without precedent in the region. Atrocities committed by Muslims, however, were seldom reported. The humanitarian catastrophe at Srebrenica in July 1995, above all else, seemed to confirm the utter depravity of the Serbs, whose cause was unjust and probably genocidal. As witnessed by the world, this was not a civil war, or even a war in a conventional sense at all, but a struggle of light against darkness, of postmodernity against neo-medievalism.

The brusque, photo-unfriendly Bosnian Serbs-practically the only people on earth uninterested in mugging for CNN cameras-did little to counter the caricatures that passed for commentary on Bosnia in the Western media. But were the Serbs uniquely guilty for the Bosnian war and its crimes? It was a question few bothered to ask, indeed one many would have considered indecent to mention when the answer was so obvious. Such a climate of journalistic groupthink, which led inexorably to like-minded attitudes among many governmental, and particularly nongovernmental, officials rendered important aspects of the Bosnian conflict out-of-bounds and unmentionable.

No underreported aspect of that Balkan war would prove more consequential than the role of radical Islam in Bosnia's disaster. While religious aspects of the conflict got very little coverage in Western media outlets, with reporters generally displaying scant interest in deities of any variety, the Islamic nature of Sarajevo's government was the great unmentionable. Whether through ignorance or design, Western journalists failed to note that the Muslim ruling party, while portraying itself as thoroughly democratic and impressively multicultural, in fact was run by and for Islamists of a radical bent whose ideal society was revolutionary Iran. Worse, the presence of thousands of holy warriors among the Bosnian Muslims, imported at Sarajevo's request from across the Islamic world to wage jihad in Europe, was scarcely mentioned. Although the Islamist International and its mujahidin, from al-Qa'ida and related groups, made only modest efforts to mask their presence, few Westerners seemed to be paying attention.

The neglected truth is that in the 1990s, Bosnia played an identical role in the global jihad to that of Afghanistan in the 1980s, serving as a convenient place to wage war against the infidel while providing sanctuary and training for the next generation of militants. For Osama bin Laden's holy warriors, Zenica and Travnik proved every bit as satisfying and transforming as Jalalabad and Khost had been a few short years before. To mujahidin across the Muslim world, Bosnia beckoned: they came, they saw, they killed, they networked. It is no coincidence that since the mid-1990s a distressing number of the most wanted terrorists around the globe turned out to have cut their teeth in the Bosnian crucible. Many have been caught, dead or alive, with Bosnian passport in hand. From bombings and shoot-outs across Europe and the Middle East to East Asia, from the Millennium Plot of 1999 down to 9/11, the Bosnian trail is unmistakable.

The importance of Bosnia to al-Qa'ida and the Islamist International has long been hidden in plain sight. Top mujahidin have regularly spoken of the significance of the Balkan jihad to their cause. Near the beginning of his famous July 2005 message to the Iraqi mujahidin (specifically their leader Abu Musab al-Zargawi), Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qa'ida's number two, placed Bosnia's holy war in perspective:

As for the battles that are going on in the far-flung regions of the Islamic world, such as Chechnya, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Bosnia, they are just the groundwork and the vanguard for the major battles which have begun in the heart of the Islamic world. We ask Allah that He send down his victory upon us that He promised to His faithful worshippers.'

Not many Westerners would consider Bosnia a front in al-Qa'ida's global jihad, and few would be comfortable viewing the Bosnian war of 1992-1995 alongside Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Kashmir in bin Laden's annals of glory. Fewer still would see any connection between the last decade's Bosnian conflagration and the current Iraqi holy war, much less 9/11. Yet the enemy certainly does.

The causes of this occidental amnesia aren't hard to detect. Hardly any of the standard works on bin Laden and al-Qa'ida even mention Bosnia. "Terrorism studies" is a newfound field whose scholarly accomplishments are modest to date; most of the experts, some of them self-proclaimed, know something about theories of terrorism but not much about cases, bad guys, and modi operandi. Broad trends are easier to present-and render as sound bites-than knotty detective work. None would deny that it is far more pleasant to do research in libraries and attend conferences than spend time in muddy boots in war zones. Moreover, even the serious students of Islamist terrorism are generally Arab-focused and pay too little attention to underreported fronts of this worldwide problem.

Just as important is the strong desire among Balkan specialists in the academy and the press not to besmirch the Bosnian Muslim cause-and their own positions-with unfortunate truths. Pointing out that the wartime government in Sarajevo was criminally dishonest, and bin Laden found a happy home in Bosnia for his legions will win you no friends in the right-thinking circles that dominate debate on the topic still today. To suggest that there is perhaps another side to the Bosnian war is alone sufficient to bring anathema on the inquirer in many quarters. The journalists and scholars who became advocates for the Bosnian Muslim cause persist in maintaining the black-and-white image of the war that was questionable a decade ago and is unsupportable today. While it is undeniably true that the majority of Bosnia's Muslims consider the mujahidin unwanted foreigners and dangerous lunatics too, it is no less true that bin Laden's holy warriors gained a foothold in Europe thanks to the support of the government in Sarajevo.

I know what Sarajevo's cheering section thinks because I once had a seat, if not in the front row, then a good spot in the bleachers. While the Bosnian war raged, I was in graduate school-always an excellent place to develop unbalanced views of the world-and I swallowed the Muslim propaganda line without indigestion. I had few excuses, as I knew the people, the region, and the language, but like so many others who followed the Balkan conflagration with a mix of horror and attraction, deep down I wanted Sarajevo's version of the truth to be reality. Hence I have some sympathy for the many who averted their eyes when Bosnia took center stage in the global jihad, serving as a bridge between the Afghan campaigns of the 1980s and the road to 9/11. Their prejudices by and large were mine.

My views changed, however, when I did an unusual thing for an academic: I became a spy. Sensing that the faculty-lounge view of reality was not my own, and suspecting that the ivory tower, for all its easygoing charms, might be less than a challenge-and suffering from a morbid if unspoken fear of entering college at seventeen and leaving at sixty-fiveI responded to a strangely uninformative letter from an agency of the U.S. government that was reluctant to reveal its name, much less its mission.

Thus began my adventure with the National Security Agency, which was to last the better part of a decade, most of it on the Balkan beat. Inside America's most secretive intelligence service, I learned a new view of reality, one far different from anything I had known as a budding academician. Moreover, it gave me the chance to spend more time in the Balkans, seeing all with fresh eyes. It turned out that pretty much everything I thought I knew was simply wrong-or worse, a hazardous half-truth. My convictions were unmasked as hardly more than prejudices and wishful thinking. I began to wonder how so many scholars and journalists-my former friends, who spoke with such authority-had gotten facts so wrong, how they had advanced stories that were, at best, misinformed. How had they missed the enormous role played by radical Islam and its awful terrorist fringe? Was this mere stupidity-a factor never to be underestimated, as I knew from both academia and the government-or was something more sinister at work? Disillusioned and embittered by the gross shortcomings of our "best and brightest" and nearly everything they said about Bosnia, I swore to tell the real story someday, when I was free to do so. That time is now.

It is important to note at the outset what this book is not. It is not an insider's expose of the shortcomings and failures of the U.S. government; though there is ample evidence herein that demonstrates how short-sighted and ultimately destructive much American policy in the Balkans was, criticism for its own sake is not the point of this work. As an intelligence officer by experience and historian by vocation, I am aware of how difficult it is to render important decisions, and how easy it is to criticize those decisions from a comfy chair long after the guns fall silent.

Still less is this an effort to disclose the secrets of the U.S. government. Although I knew pretty much all that Washington considered worth knowing about the Balkans, the reader will search in vain for leaked documents or purloined secrets in these pages. Where I cite intelligence information, it comes from official releases or other legitimate sources. In no way do I seek to endanger the sources and methods that help defend our homeland and provide intelligence for our forces waging the war on terrorism on many fronts. I took an oath to protect this nation's secrets to the grave. I am confident that when the U.S. government sees fit to declassify and release its impressively full archives of intelligence about the Bosnian war and the Balkan jihad, decades hence, this account will be confirmed and amplified.

Moreover, my years in the espionage business convinced me that intelligence is not the panacea it is widely reputed to be, especially in the au courant search for quick fixes to daunting national security dilemmas. While occasional flashes of the most sensitive and hard-to-get intelligence open a door to a hidden world, with profound implications for decision makers (and, lest we forget, for the counterspies), most of what passes for intelligence is pretty mundane stuff. One of my great shocks upon gaining access to the "crown jewels" was the discovery that over 90 percent of the intelligence I saw was not much more detailed than the reportage in quality newspapers, with a bit more salaciousness and a few more misspellings. I soon agreed with Malcolm Muggeridge, the great British journalist and decorated intelligence officer during World War II, that, at bottom, intelligence is merely "journalism at war." Espionage is no substitute for hard-won knowledge of a region, its peoples, its languages, its culture, and its history; while good intelligence will make the truly informed even more so, it can be misleading to those without grounding in basic truths regarding what those in the business politely term "the target."

Upon immersing myself in everything knowable about the Balkans, I discovered to my delight that there was decent reportage to be had in open sources (known, inevitably, as OSINT in the acronym-addicted intelligence community). Although most journalism in the region, as across Eastern Europe, doesn't work its way up to the color yellow, there are happy exceptions. Over the past decade, brave individuals of all ethnic groups and religions through their reporting have sought to cleanse their benighted homeland of fanaticism, terrorism, corruption, and crime, working throughout for interethnic reconciliation and cooperation. Their intrepid efforts against daunting odds form no small part of the sources for this book. I consistently found that the best local reportage about Bosnia surpassed in detail and fact all but the very best classified sources. I particularly want to praise two Bosnian Muslim journalists: Senad Avdic, the muckraking editor in chief of his country's truth-telling magazine, Slobodna Boma; and Esad Hecimovic, star reporter for the rival magazine Dani, whose one-man struggle to expose Sarajevo's terrorist-criminal nexus offers Bosnia a chance at undoing the damage wrought by the Balkan jihad.

Given the poisonous nature of ethnicity and religion in the Balkansincluding the oft-noted yet mysterious ability of Bosnia to turn apparently rational people into blind partisans-a brief disclaimer is in order. I don't have a drop of Balkan blood in me, yet I have some sympathy, and not infrequently contempt, for all the former warring factions in Bosnia. Neither am I a congenital Islamophobe. I grew up in a typical postmodern American suburb, beloved of progressives, where all religions were held to be equally (in)valid. My liberal Protestant parents were so theologically openminded as to be anything but horrified when, at the age of ten, I made best friends of our Muslim neighbors and professed a desire to pray with them; for a time I had my own prayer rug. Islam didn't stick with me, but I was left with a deep respect for aspects of the religion-unlike the Episcopalians I knew, Muslims actually meant what they said, and lived it-and therefore found the criminal misuse of Islam in Bosnia that I witnessed as an adult especially tragic. I have spent long hours with Bosnian Muslims recounting the human toll of the recent past, I have sojourned with them at cemeteries overfilled with needless dead, and with them I share an ardent desire for Bosnia to leave behind the criminality, mendacity, stupidity, and fanaticism of the last decade-and-a-half.

What I am in favor of is truth, peace, and the rule of law. I have a longstanding love affair with inconvenient facts, and my professional life has taught me to always seek what spies and soldiers term "ground truth," based on the suspicion that things are rarely what they seem to be at a safe distance. Bosnia was the first extended war to unfold in the era of 24/7 television news, to the detriment of truth and accuracy. Coming after the rise of what might be termed the "CNN factor" yet before the birth of Internet fact-checking, the Bosnian war stands as perhaps the most misrepresented conflict of modern times, to the great benefit of radical Islam and the global jihad. Many hard questions were seldom asked and never answered. This book is intended as a corrective-better late than never.

CHAPTER 1

It was the achievement of a lifelong dream. As Adil Zulfikarpasic arrived at Velika Kladusa, in the northwestern corner of Bosnia, in mid-September 1990, he felt a pride and a hope he hadn't known since his youth. He was returning to his homeland for the first time in forty-four years to help the cause of his people, Bosnia's Muslims.

Zulfikarpasic had spent most of his life in Switzerland, a bittersweet exile. From a distinguished family, he had been an early supporter of Tito's Partisans in Yugoslavia and nearly gave his life for the antifascist cause in World War II. But his belief that Communism would provide Bosnia a better future was soon dashed, and he became an emigre just after the war's end. He became a successful businessman, living a comfortable life in Zurich, but the fate of his people was his passion. A devout Muslim, Zulfikarpasic was nevertheless a firm believer in secular politics and the need for Bosnia's Muslims and Christians to coexist peacefully.

It was with anticipation that he greeted the slow collapse of Communism in the late 1980s, assisting Bosnian Muslim political causes from abroad with funds and advocacy. In early 1989, he was a cofounder of the Party of Democratic Action, the first Muslim political party in Bosnia in a half-century. He came to Velika Kladusa to celebrate the party's first mass rally and grand debut, in advance of the first free elections in Bosnia since well before World War II.

It was therefore a shock for Zulfikarpasic to look out on the enormous crowd gathered, at least three hundred thousand people-some said as many as a half-million, in any event it was the largest gathering of Muslims ever in Bosnia-and see among the party banners deeply disturbing signs of jihadchic. There were oversize banners in bright green, the color of Islam, men adorned menacingly with sabers and turbans, shouts of "Long live Saddam Hussein!" and, worst of all, banners and paeans to Iran.

Zulfikarpasic turned to Alija Izetbegovic, the new party's leader, who had recently been a political prisoner for advocating radical Islam, and pleaded for reason: "By God, Alija, why are you doing this? Don't you know that in a half-hour these pictures will be shown around the world?" Zulfikarpasic was terrified of giving ammunition to the enemies of Bosnia's Muslims. But Izetbegovic did not respond, even when Zulfikarpasic-the party's chief fund-raiser and one of its three vice presidents-admonished him, "I don't want to participate in the slaughter of Muslims. Why do you have Khomeini's picture?"

Izetbegovic's nonresponse mystified and saddened the old man, who quickly concluded that the new party was leading his people to disaster. Two days later he resigned his party posts and distanced himself from Izetbegovic and the party they had founded together; in it, Zulfikarpasic said he found "vast evidence of intolerance, religious exclusion, clerical meddling and deceit."' Adil Zulfikarpasic hastily began a campaign trying to warn Bosnians that the party's program and leadership were charting a road to ruin. No one listened.

BOSNIA-THE IMAGINED COUNTRY

Since the descent of Bosnia-Hercegovina2 into war and chaos in the spring of 1992-the bloody conflict that Adil Zulfikarpasic predicted-few regions of the world have received greater attention from reporters and scholars. The number of books, articles, and TV programs devoted to Bosnia over the past dozen years numbers in the many thousands. If the quantity of works is impressive, the same cannot be said for their quality.

Bosnia, and in particular its Muslims, have long generated disproportionate study among historians and social scientists. Though there are only two million of them, they have launched more than their share of dissertations. As the only sizable population of Slavic Muslims, Islam's followers in Bosnia have been a topic of interest as an anomaly, a residue of the Ottoman Empire. Their presence over the centuries has made the history and culture of Bosnia unique and, to many, alluring.

Scholars of the region, after long labor in semi-obscurity, found the limelight suddenly thrust upon them when the collapse of Yugoslavia grew violent in 1991. The answers most of them offered-that Bosnia was a mul ticultural society where violence was an anomaly and, moreover, the current war was caused by malevolent Christian, particularly Serb, paranoia about Islam-found a receptive audience in the academy and the media. Confronting an instant orthodoxy made by aggressive media advocacy, dissenters found little audience; many were shunned.

Balkan scholarship had long been suspect in any event. The Communist regime that ruled Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1991 cultivated Western academicians who presented a favorable view of the Titoist state, and made life difficult for those who didn't. As a result, several decades of scholarly books and articles focused in frequently numbing detail on the never-never land of Communist politics and the alleged successes of Yugoslavia's semi-Marxist economy, while giving short shrift to essential topics such as the role of ethnicity, nationalism, and religion in that very divided and diverse state. Many who had devoted their scholarly lives to Yugoslavia seemingly found it impossible to believe that the state created by Tito and kept in place by his charisma, ideology, and secret police evaporated so suddenly. Most found it difficult to find anything meaningful to say about the Bosnian catastrophe of the 1990s.

Those who did attempt to address Bosnian issues spoke with a distressingly singular voice. They aggressively advocated the view that the war was a terrible anomaly caused by the criminal behavior of Serbs and Croats; Bosnia's Muslims, inasmuch as they were Muslims at all, were presented as innocent victims. Certainly there was no threat of radical Islam, as the Muslims of Bosnia were "particularly rotten Muslims," according to one of the best known journalists who covered the war; hardly any of the country's Muslims went to mosque.3 Instead, blame for the catastrophe was laid at the feet of what one scholar-advocate memorably termed the "Christoslavic hatred of Muslims," finding in that mysterious witches' brew the underlying cause of the war.4

What the academy peddled-with strong support from the media, thinktankery, and NGO-dom-was Bosnia's alleged history of multiculturalism and tolerance, which was being undone by non-Muslims, and for political, not religious, reasons. As expressed concisely by two well-regarded Bosnia scholars, "For all practical purposes ethnic violence in Bosnia erupted for the first time in World War II." No less, they added, "nowhere do we find evidence of the alleged centuries of hatred (whether religious or ethnic) among various Bosnian groups that has supposedly permeated their history"5

Religion was something most Western scholars were uncomfortable discussing in the present tense, in Bosnia and elsewhere; heavily secular, inhabitants of the academy seldom had any feel for any living faith, and found religion itself suspect, save in groups they judged safely antiquarian in their faith, like Bosnia's Muslims. It's difficult to avoid the suspicion that Balkan experts were quick to pronounce religion a nonissue in the Bosnian war since they didn't know any religious people, and the Bosnians they met seemed just as reassuringly secular as they were. Religion, then, was a nonstarter as an explanation for the war, among Muslims or Christians. Bosnians, after all, were "urban cultured Europeans," the professors assured us:

The only difference among them is their different religious backgrounds. And I want to stress the word background, for to say "religious" would give the wrong emphasis. After fifty years of a very secular and secularizing Yugoslav state, few modern-day Bosnians (and certainly almost none of those leading any of the sides in the current war) are deeply religious.6

But was it so? Was religion, and the considerable ethnic and cultural issues that accompanied it, really such an absent factor in the war of 1992-1995?

Certainly there was ample evidence to contradict the cultivated image of peaceful, multicultural Bosnia, even beyond the daily fare of violence and mayhem provided by CNN. The Bosnians themselves were painfully aware of their country's long history of ethnic and religious fear, loathing, and violence. Had not No Andric, Bosnia's only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, warned that in his superficially tranquil homeland, "storms of hatred lie hidden in opaque depths"?7 Yet this reality-based view of Bosnia found scant audience in the media and the academy, which with few exceptions advocated the view that Bosnia's Muslims were innocent victims, and their government alone was trying to uphold the tradition of ethnic tolerance and religious freedom. Their blame for the war was therefore nonexistent.8

Peddlers of the Muslims-as-victims hypothesis were guilty of accepting uncritically what the Muslim government said constantly, at least when Western journalists were present; to all appearances, agitprop was not agitprop when stated by a Sarajevo spokesperson. Journalists and scholars saddled with the deepest skepticism about their own countries and leaders proved remarkably credulous regarding the claims of Bosnia's Muslim leadership and their many well-wishers in the West.

This viewpoint reached its logical conclusion in a book by a leading Bosnian Muslim scholar, tellingly titled Bosnia the Good. In this, the author presented the case that his people were not the country's historic ruling class, as they had been for nearly half a millennium, but constituted instead an extended study in victimology. Bosnia's Muslims, he stated, "are vulnerable to persecution and humiliation: this makes up much of their history."9 Muslims, embattled through no fault of their own, embodied the country's traditions of tolerance and were uniquely virtuous. The reader could not fail to note, however, that Bosnia the Good began with a customary Islamic dedication: "In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate!" in best Koranic style.

There was the rub. The wartime advocacy of the Bosnian Muslim cause by the chattering class managed to overlook facts that were so obvious that, to paraphrase Orwell, you had to be an intellectual not to notice them. Bosnia's Muslims were really Muslims, and some of them adhered to a faith that was deeply hostile to Western concepts of freedom, democracy, and human rights. Western fans of Sarajevo were in love with "Bosnia"-an oasis of secular multiethnicity and postmodern tolerance-more than with any country that actually existed. That the object of their affection upon close examination was not as lovely as they had supposed required not a reassessment of the affair, nor their views, but merely not looking very closely. Sarajevo's propaganda efforts found success because there were plenty of Western journalists and scholars who were willing to keep the lights low.

Islam, especially its aggressive, radical side, which by the mid-I 990s had a robust presence in Bosnia, thus became the war's great taboo, the topic never to be discussed. Those who dared mention it were derided as bigots or worse. It was precisely this inattention, this willingness to overlook inconvenient and unwanted facts, on the part of the Western fourth estate that opened the door to the global jihad, allowing bin Laden and his legionnaires to make the Bosnian cause their own.

BOSNIAN ISLAM TO 1945

Comprehending the roots of the Bosnian war of the 1990s requires an understanding of how Islam came to the country in the first place. As in most of the Muslim world, the Prophet's message was borne on sword points. Conquest of "infidel" land was the key to converting the population to Islam. The coming of the Ottoman Turks to Bosnia in the mid-fifteenth century would therefore prove the most momentous event in the country's history.

The late medieval conquest of Bosnia, part of the broader drive of the Ottoman jihad in Europe, was not an overnight phenomenon. The first Ottoman invasion came in 1386, followed by another in 1388; both were turned back by Bosnian forces under Vlatko Vukovic. However, with the decline of Christian fortunes in the region after the Serbian defeat at the epic battle of Kosovo in 1389, where a contingent of Bosnians under Vukovic fought on the losing side, Ottoman incursions became more frequent, and less resisted. By 1415, they were a regular occurrence, leading to the total conquest of the country in 1463 by forces under Mehemed al-Fatih ("the Conqueror"), ten years after the fall of Constantinople. Once Bosnia's armies were defeated and the Ottomans beheaded the last Bosnian king, the country's fate was sealed.

Though Ottoman control over Bosnia and Hercegovina developed gradually, for the country's Christian population a dark night had descended that would last for nearly five centuries. At the time of the conquest, nearly all Bosnians were Christians, many of them adherents of the so-called Bosnian Church, a late-medieval heretical offshoot of Roman Catholicism, whose relations with Rome by the mid-fourteenth century were complex and not entirely clear to either side. The Eastern Orthodox population was smaller. The South Slavic country had been Christian for centuries, awkwardly positioned astride the dividing line between Catholic and Orthodox Europe, and disputes with Rome and between Eastern and Western Christians had taken their toll on local churches.

The fluid nature of Christian practice in Bosnia was doubtless a major factor in the gradual conversion of much of the country's population to Islam during Ottoman rule.10 Yet it is impossible to understand the growth of Islam in Bosnia without reference to Ottoman practices towards the nonMuslim populations they conquered. As Muslims, indeed fervent ones, who ran an expansionist jihadi empire, the Ottomans believed that until the world is wholly Muslim, there are only two places: the House of Islam (dar al-Islam), where the true faith has taken root, and everywhere else, the House of War (dar al-Harb). As expressed concisely by the leading expert on the Ottomans, Bernard Lewis:

Between the two there is a morally necessary, legally and religiously obligatory state of war, until the final and inevitable triumph of Islam over unbelief. According to the law books, this state of war could be interrupted, when expedient, by an armistice or truce of limited duration. It could not be terminated by a peace, but only by a final

Not only was the Prophet's call to holy war at stake, but basic strategic considerations were as well. Because Bosnia represented the northernmost Ottoman bastion in Europe, it was necessary to build a strong Islamic society there to stand as a bulwark against European (i.e., Christian) incursions. The Ottomans initially considered forced conversion of all Christians-this was advocated by Sultan Selim I in 1520, who was talked out of it by levelheaded advisers who considered the idea impractical-but because few Anatolian Turks settled in Bosnia, imperial policy instead focused on gradual conversion of the local population.12

Therefore the conversions to Islam in Bosnia that would leave the population more than one-third Muslim when Ottoman rule ended in 1878 were by and large voluntary, strictly speaking. Yet it would be wrong to portray conversions as a matter solely of faith; for many Bosnians, it was a question of status, even survival. Although it has been fashionable for decades in the West to portray Ottoman rule over the Balkans and elsewhere as delightfully tolerant of non-Muslim minorities, the truth is darker and more complex. While the Ottomans never resorted to forced conversions on a large scale, neither were they tolerant of other faiths by any modern Western standard.13

Islamic teaching, which the Ottomans practiced, considered the occupant of the dar al-Harb, known as harbi, to be "by definition an enemy." An adherent of other monotheistic faiths-i.e., Christianity and Judaism-living in the dar al-Islam, though still a semi-enemy, had a different status known as dhimmi, simply defined as "the unbeliever who submits to Muslim rule, accepts Muslim protection, and pays the poll tax to the Muslim state."14 While the Christians and Jews of Bosnia were seldom martyred for their faith-though outbursts of pogrom-like violence were far from unknownneither did they possess any rights; they were in no sense a protected minority. It is a "common cliche" in the West to term the dhimmi of the Ottoman Empire "second-class citizens," but this is meaningless, notes the leading scholar of the subject, as Christians and Jews under Ottoman rule were not citizens and had no rights as modern Westerners understand the term.15

Instead, the dhimmi is best seen as a person in tributary status, whose obligations to the Ottoman rulers included accepting his condition, with all of its restrictions under Islamic law (shari'a), and paying a hefty poll tax. The last, known as jizya, was particularly loathed, as it was imposed even on widows and children, and dhimmi had to wear proof of payment, a parchment or seal on their person, on pain of death, an obvious public stigma.16

Lifelong humiliation was an inescapable aspect of dhimmi life, one that caused long-lasting resentment. That non-Muslims had no legal status was omnipresent and inescapable, and demeaning. Christians and Jews had no standing in court, and could not testify against Muslims, as those who refused to accept Islam were considered inherently untrustworthy. Hence Muslims regularly committed crimes against Christians and Jews without fear of penalty; this was especially serious if non-Muslims were accused of blasphemy-among the most serious offenses, and the most subjective-as the penalty was death, and a Muslim's accusation could not be countered. Conversion usually offered the only way around the executioner's sword.

There was a plethora of nonlethal but deeply offensive restrictions on the non-Muslims of Bosnia. According to shari'a, they could not bear firearms, wear conspicuous clothing (and nothing in green, the sacred color of Islam), were expected to dismount when a Muslim passed, could not build a residence bigger or better-looking than those of Muslim neighbors, and their houses of worship could not have bells and had to be low and inconspicuous. As a result, churches were hardly ever built. (For instance, by the mid-nineteenth century, the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo had a hundred mosques and one Orthodox church, although the city had a substantial Christian population.) Marriage and sex between Muslim women and dhimmi men were punishable by death, while the converse was not true, indeed Muslims frequently took dhimmi women under coercive conditions and converted them through marriage. This was all profoundly galling, and "the Christian remained in a distinct and recognized inferior position. It was perhaps this aspect of Ottoman rule that was most resented by the subject population."17

It is therefore unsurprising that many Bosnians over the centuries opted for Islam to escape the legal restrictions on dhimmi that made life unpleasant. While conversion was a long-term and complex phenomenon, there can be no doubt that the greatest motivator was Ottoman mistreatment of nonMuslim subjects. Individual Ottomans could be sympathetic to dhimmi, but for most Muslims, the Christians of the Balkans existed to be exploited, and they deserved their fate. Accepting Islam was rooted in "a natural desire to escape from the ignominy of being forever a second-class citizen. It was a one-way traffic. No Muslim would ever demean himself by accepting a religion that was politically and socially inferior; and had he done so he would have incurred the death

Although Bosnian Christians have substantially agreed with No Andric's assessment of Ottoman rule as "absolutely negative," Western scholars with few exceptions have downplayed the harsh impact of the Ottoman centuries on Bosnia's Christians; some practice a historical revisionism that amounts to whitewashing an unpleasant past. Many present Turkish rule as benign, even enlightened, while those who acknowledge that life as a dhimmi was unpleasant and deeply resented-some have admitted that Islam "clearly grated" on Bosnians of other faiths-they place blame on the Ottomans, since this was an "imported" phenomenon.19 In truth, the Turks left the dirty work of imposing shari'a to local converts, and Bosnian Muslims quickly gained a reputation across the Ottoman realm as practitioners of fervent and forceful Islam.

The most hated aspect of Ottoman rule in Bosnia, and the one whose memory lingers most sharply even today, was the practice of devshirme, the blood tax imposed on Christians. For three centuries beginning with the conquest of Bosnia, the Ottomans annually levied male children as tribute; every year, up to one-fifth of Christian boys in Bosnia-usually aged fourteen to twenty, but some were younger-were forcibly taken from their families in contingents of a thousand and shipped to the imperial court at Istanbul to become warrior-slaves in the Janissaries, the sultan's elite guard. They were converted to Islam and most became fierce soldiers; more than a few rose to high position in the Ottoman military and civil service.

The annual levy became a focus of horror among Bosnian Christians. At a fixed date, every father had to gather his sons in the main square of the local village and allow the authorities to select the best to be sent away, in most cases never to be seen again; resistance brought instant death, and some fathers disfigured sons to prevent their enslavement. (Even less fortunate boys, aged six to ten, were levied as eunuchs in the sultan's seraglio.)20

Illustrating how different Bosnia's past has seemed to Western scholars, many have presented devshirme not as child kidnapping, but as a sort of Ottoman affirmative action program to assist non-Muslims, including discussion of its "benefits" for Bosnia, and for the parents who supposedly wanted their sons to get into the program.2' On occasion, devshirme did produce unintended assistance for Bosnian Christians, since some of the boys taken away rose to high rank in the empire: the classic case being Sokollu-Pasha-born Sokolovic-who rose to Grand Vizier in the mid-sixteenth century and in that position proved unusually sympathetic to his people, the Orthodox Christians of Bosnia. Yet this was the exception that proved the rule, and to this day Bosnia's non-Muslims view devshirme as a nightmare and no more acceptable or attractive than the enslavement of Africans by Europeans (and Arabs) over the same centuries.

By the end of the fifteenth century, Ottoman rule in Bosnia was stable and firmly entrenched, in a pattern that would prevail for another three hundred years. The Ottomans organized their subjects, in Bosnia and elsewhere, according to the concept of milet (from a Persian word meaning nation), which divided groups along confessional lines, with profound longterm implications for Bosnia. The dominant milet was Muslim, while others were divided into Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish milets. Religious authorities were invested with secular powers, and served as the representative and protector of their peoples. Ottoman authorities had no concept of an imperial identity and were content to allow the confessional groups to keep to themselves. The Ottoman province (elayet) of Bosnia, formally established in 1580 with its seat in Banja Luka, had an unusual degree of autonomy in the empire due to the small number of Anatolian Turks resident there. In 1639 the provincial capital moved to Sarajevo, the town formerly known as Vrhbosna-its new name came from the seraglio-and the Muslims who controlled the province's bureaucracy and nearly all its land were local converts who proudly called themselves Turks (turcz): though they were not Turks in any ethnic sense, they aggressively professed the Turkish faith.22 Bosnian Islam-contrary to the claims of latter-day Western apologists-was considered unusually harsh from the outset, as it faced Christian Europe, in the guise of Habsburg Croatia, on its northern border and lived in fear of losing its precarious status on the extended Ottoman frontier. After the second and final Ottoman invasion of Central Europe was turned back in defeat at Vienna in 1683, and the Habsburgs commenced their slow reconquest of occupied Christian lands, relations between Muslims and Christians in Bosnia took a turn for the worse. Bosnia's capital relocated to Travnik in 1699, initiating a process of economic and political decline.

By the early nineteenth century, after more than a century of political and military setbacks, the Ottoman Empire faced an uncertain future, and Bosnia was in crisis economically and politically, while its relations with the Sublime Porte, the imperial capital, were eroding. The condition of the country's Christian peasantry was dismal, among the worst in the Balkans, with over 40 percent of peasant income being taken by excessive taxes. Yet Ottoman efforts at reforming their declining empire were met with fierce resistance in Bosnia-not from Christians, but from the dominant Muslims. Jealously guarding their privileged socioeconomic status, Bosnian Muslims proved willing to resist reform with force. Thus did Bosnia, once the empire's most loyal redoubt, become a severe headache for the Ottomans.

Antireform conservatism had such a strong hold over the Muslim elite-known as ayans to the Turks but as begs locally-that they led revolts against the Ottomans in 1821, 1828, 1831, and 1837. They refused to relinquish their local autonomy and improve the plight of the Christian peasantry, which was becoming restless. The 1831 revolt was the most serious, led by Kapetan Husein Beg Gradascevic, the famed "Bosnian Dragon" (Zmaj od Bosne), to protest reforms in the Ottoman military, and was put down by imperial troops with considerable difficulty.

The Balkans were in ferment by the 1820s, a rebellious period that would last for a half-century. Revolts against Muslim rule had not yet reached Bosnia, where the majority Christians remained cowed and unarmed, but in Greek lands they became a major threat to Istanbul, and rebellions were put down with fury. In the most notorious case, an 1822 Christian revolt on Chios was suppressed by massacring or selling into slavery all but 1,800 of the island's 113,000 inhabitants.23

Istanbul was unable to reassert its authority over Bosnia until 1850, when imperial forces under Omer Pasha Latas (a Croatian Serb who fled to Bosnia to escape embezzlement charges, and converted to Islam and entered Ottoman service) crushed rebel Muslim forces. The capital again moved to Sarajevo and Ottoman authorities attempted to coerce the local elite into political and economic reforms, to stave off the province's complete collapse. By and large they failed, and Western diplomats in Bosnia reported that relations between Muslims and Christians were abysmal, mutual hatred was rife, and the outlook for reform was bleak. It continued to be the worst place in the Balkans to be a Christian. As the British consul in Sarajevo expressed the situation concisely in 1860: "The hatred of the Christians toward the [Muslims] is intense. During a period of nearly three hundred years they were subjected to much oppression and cruelty. For them no other law but the caprice of their masters existed." The consul added that post-1850 Ottoman reforms were so ineffectual that they actually hurt the Christians economically. Moreover, even welcomed reforms-for instance, a newfound freedom to build churches-were resisted by local authorities effectively, and courts remained legally rigged against non-Muslims, so that Christian rights continued to be functionally nonexistent.24

By the mid-1870s, Christians in Bosnia and Hercegovina were at last ready to take up arms against their Muslim overlords, spurred by worsening conditions and an agricultural crisis. The revolt of 1875, which involved many local rebellions across the country, particularly in Hercegovina, was put down with a violence that dismayed Europeans, who were appalled by Ottoman tactics that torched hundreds of Christian villages and produced hundreds of thousands of refugees. Western observers noted the role played by local Muslims in putting down the revolts, hoping to use violence to roll back the limited reforms enacted since 1850 and thereby keep Christians in their abysmal socioeconomic status.25

The Bosnian massacres of 1875-1877 were a step too far, however, inducing the European powers to finally take diplomatic action to bring stability to the region and prevent further depredations against Christians. The result was the Congress of Berlin in June 1878, the first-but by no means last-effort by the major powers to bring peace and order to the Balkans from afar. This resulted in the end of Ottoman rule over Bosnia, with Austria-Hungary, the Porte's old Habsburg nemesis, being granted permission to occupy, though not formally annex, the troubled province. Yet the Austro-Hungarian invasion of late July 1878 was anything but a walkover, contrary to recent depictions of the campaign, and the Habsburg military encountered unexpectedly tough resistance in Bosnia.26 Fearful of losing their privileged socioeconomic status, Muslims (39 percent of the population) battled the Austrians bitterly, without any official help from the Ottomans, and Vienna ultimately required a force of over a quarter-million troops to conquer Bosnia, at a cost of over five thousand casualties. Nearly a hundred thousand Muslims rallied to the green standard of Islam to resist the infidel invader. Although Bosnia's Catholics (18 percent) greeted the Habsburgs as liberators, more than a few Orthodox (43 percent) joined the resistance, out of fear that the Austrians would force "schismatic" Eastern Christians to convert to Catholicism-a valid concern, as previous Habsburg incursions into Bosnia had been accompanied by platoons of Jesuits with exactly that intention.

But by the fall of 1878 Habsburg rule was entrenched, and a significant rebellion against the Austrians in eastern Hercegovina in the opening months of 1882-a last gasp of resistance triggered by the imposition of conscription in the province-could not threaten Vienna's hold on Bosnia. Dashing the fears of Muslims and the hopes of Christians, Habsburg rule brought few of the anticipated changes in governance and society. Vienna's management of Bosnia was essentially colonial-Austria-Hungary did not formally annex its new province until 1908-and the primary interest was stability on the Balkan frontier. Policy therefore aimed at modest economic and political development that would not cause tumult. Although there was the beginning of industry and modern transportation thanks to Austrian rule, there was no far-reaching land reform, indeed Ottoman land tenure laws were kept in effect; as a result, in 1910 the situation was hardly different than before Vienna invaded: 91.15 percent of landlords were Muslim, while the serf-like peasants, known as kmets, were 73.92 percent Orthodox and 21.49 percent Catholic.27 Economic burdens on the peasantry remained steep, and grievances were inevitably seen in ethnic and religious terms.

No less galling to Christians, and especially to the Orthodox, who viewed the Habsburgs with only slightly less distaste than the Ottomans, was the manner in which Austro-Hungarian authorities were careful to preserve Muslim perquisites. Fearful of igniting rebellion-they learned their lesson in the 1882 revolt, which had been partially sparked by the mufti (i.e., senior Muslim cleric) of Sarajevo issuing an Islamic legal decree (fatwa) opposing service by Muslims in the Habsburg military-the colonial authorities never challenged Islam's place in Bosnia's social, economic, and political life. In a legal sense, the Habsburgs actually strengthened Islam by establishing the Reis ul-ulema as the chief cleric for Bosnia in 1882, selecting the mufti of Sarajevo as the first to hold the powerful post.28

Austro-Hungarian authorities accommodated themselves wherever possible to the wishes and mores of the Bosnian elite, which was nearly all Muslim. There was no effort to convert Muslims to Christianity; on the contrary, Habsburg bureaucrats built large numbers of religious schools and buildings for Muslims, and even constructed government buildings in the Moorish style. Among the new establishments was a shari'a institute opened in 1887, which soon became the principal school for educated Muslims. Religious instruction in schools was required for Muslims, with metkebs for children and medresas, or theological middle schools, for the clerically inclined.29 Muslim recruits in the Austro-Hungarian Army were supplied with religiously acceptable rations and required to pray five times per day. Except for the freedom to build houses of worship, Bosnia's Christians could be forgiven for wondering what had changed when the Habsburgs took over their country.

Like so many Western colonial powers, the Austrians were undone by the improvements they brought, principally in the realm of education. By building a modern school system where none had existed, and in particular by making secondary education accessible to youths of all backgrounds, they wound up creating a new literate class, many of whom viewed the colonizer skeptically. Expansion of education went hand-in-hand with the birth of nationalism in Bosnia. A concerted effort by the long-serving Habsburg governor Benjamin von Kallay (1882-1903) to craft a Bosnian identity that would appeal to all ethnic and religious groups-he called it "Bosnianism" (bosnjastvo)-did not take into account the depths of bitterness left by centuries of Ottoman rule, and failed to transcend the power of rising nationalism. After three decades of Habsburg rule, there existed a cadre of nationalists eager to see the Habsburgs gone, and the country's Orthodox (43.49 percent by 1910) and Croats (22.87 percent) no longer saw themselves as Bosnians of a particular faith, but as Serbs and Croats.30

For Bosnia's Muslims (32.25 percent by 1910), the identification of Orthodox as Serbs and Catholics as Croats was an ominous portent. Few Muslims-probably no more than 10 percent-fled Bosnia rather than live under Habsburg rule, and their community's privileged status was largely unchanged by the departure of the Ottomans in 1878, but many felt insecure all the same. They had long defined their identity in terms of the Ottoman Empire, and as part of the worldwide Muslim community or umma; they had no nationality in the modern sense. Their Islamic universalist worldview was shattered by the Ottoman collapse, leaving a void. Many of the new educated class found the ideology of Pan-Islamism attractive, seeing it as an alternative to Western ideologies. This placed Bosnia in the broader context of global Islam, and gave Muslims a sense of belonging to the umma even if they were no longer legally or administratively part of it. In the years before 1914, Pan-Islamism made deep inroads among educated Muslims, in tandem with loyalty to the Habsburgs for protecting their interests vis-a-vis the Christians in Bosnia.31

Muslim enthusiasm for Austrian rule was ironic, given how bitterly Muslims had resisted Habsburg rule at first, but it reached its peak in 1914, when a young Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo on June 28. The murder of the heir to the Habsburg throne led to anti-Serb riots in towns across Bosnia, and Muslims and Croats responded enthusiastically to the call to arms when the crisis plunged Europe into World War I that August. Bosnian units, staffed disproportionately by Muslims, proved to be the most reliable element in the Austro-Hungarian military, and the legendary 2nd Bosnian Regiment won more decorations for bravery than any other of Emperor Franz Joseph's regiments. Indeed, on a per capita basis, Bosnia's Muslims lost more men in the war than any other ethnic group in the Habsburg Empire.32

Bosnian Muslim sacrifices in the cause of Europe's last Catholic great power are not without pathos, as the Habsburgs lost the war and with it their ancient empire. It was a political setback from which the Muslims of Bosnia have still to recover. Yet there was a darker side, a precursor to patterns of interethnic violence and hatred in Bosnia that would last throughout the twentieth century. Austro-Hungarian authorities rooted out suspected spies and traitors among the Bosnian Serbs with distressing fervor, with 5,500 prominent persons being rounded up in the war's opening months; of these, at least 700-and perhaps as many as 2,200-died in captivity due to maltreatment. Muslims played a disproportionate role in this effort, which relied heavily on the paramilitary Schutzkorps, tasked with hunting down rebel Serbs, and whose ranks were heavily Muslim; Schutzkorps units were particularly active in Serb areas of eastern Bosnia, and their sweeps had a habit of rounding up any enemies-real or imagined-that they could find.33

It is therefore not surprising that the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in October 1918 brought chaos to Bosnia. As Austrian authority evaporated, and Bosnia was occupied by victorious troops from neighboring Serbia, there were outbursts of violence across the country. Much of this was really a jacquerie, with hungry peasants seizing land and wreaking havoc, while some of it included acts of retribution by Serbs against Muslims for wartime atrocities. Hard figures are difficult to determine, but between 1914 and 1920 there were several thousand deaths in Bosnia, mostly Serbs and Muslims in the eastern region of the country, inflicted by paramilitaries and gangs, and hidden in the greater disorder of war and defeat. They left a legacy of bitterness on both sides that was not soon forgotten.

In late 1918, the South Slav portions of the Habsburg Empire found themselves joined to victorious Serbia in the newly christened Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (it would not be formally termed Yugoslavia until 1929). This was an unhappy marriage from the start. For nationalist Serbs in Bosnia and across the South Slav lands, the birth of the new state was a moment of triumph. Although Serbia's losses in the war were horrificno country would suffer proportionately as much in World War I-the conflict's outcome represented the maximalist desires of the Serbian Kingdom. It treated Yugoslavia as an extended Serbia, having swallowed Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, and south Hungary (Vojvodina to the Serbs) essentially whole.

Yet rule by Belgrade turned out to be less harsh and vindictive than Muslims had expected. Although long-overdue land reforms were enacted, which benefited Christian peasants at the expense of Muslim landowners, Islam itself was never attacked; Muslim religious schools, societies, and houses of worship remained unmolested. While Bosnia's Muslims unquestionably felt a loss of power, they were hardly victims, and were rather less dissatisfied with Yugoslavia than their neighbors in Croatia. Belgrade, like Vienna before it, turned out to be mainly interested in stability, and had no desire to cause turmoil by inflaming Muslim passions.

The main problem plaguing interwar Yugoslavia was an overcentralized and corrupt bureaucracy; the country was run by Serbs from Serbia for their own benefit, to everyone else's disadvantage. Within a decade of its birth, the new South Slav state was a focus of resentment among all the exHabsburg peoples-Croats, Muslims, Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia, and Slovenes, in that order. There was, however, little confrontational activism among Bosnia's Muslims. No longer in control of Bosnia, they adopted the accommodation strategy that they would practice for decades to come, as the best way to serve Muslim interests and defend their rights.34

Defining who the Bosnian Muslims were in the age of nationalism became an imperative for all sides, for straightforward demographic reasons. Since there was no majority group-with Muslims about a third of the pop ulation, Croats with a fifth, and Serbs with the rest, slightly over 40 percentthere was a rivalry between Serbs and Croats to win over the Muslims: whoever did so would be the majority in Bosnia. As there was no Muslim category in the Yugoslav census, which grouped individuals by nationality, not religion, they were encouraged to identify themselves as either "Serbs of Muslim faith" or "Croats of Muslim faith." Between the world wars, more opted for the former, displaying the Muslim tendency to adapt to the direction the Balkan political winds were blowing. Their political party, the Yugoslav Muslim Organization, generally sided with the dominant Serb political establishment.

Yet this in no way resolved the question of Muslim identity in a Bosnia they no longer controlled, and which was politically cut off from the Islamic world. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, and the abolition of the caliphate soon thereafter, Muslims in Bosnia could no longer dream of reunion with Istanbul. After World War I, a modernizing current affected the Muslim leadership, and in 1927 Reis ul-ulema Dzemaludin Causevic caused a scandal among his conservative flock by arguing against men wearing the fez and women wearing the veil, stating that these were customs, not a religious duty; such views were considered dangerously modern by most Bosnian Muslims.35

There was another current simultaneously at work. The Pan-Islamic orientation had not disappeared in 1918, and it grew quietly in the interwar years, drawing inspiration from political and religious trends in the wider Muslim world. Bosnian students frequently went abroad to undertake advanced religious study, and they brought back new ideas. Particularly influential were those who had studied at Cairo's Al-Azhar, the leading Islamic university. In Egypt, they had witnessed the birth of a movement dedicated to Islamism, that is the broad effort to apply Islamic principles, particularly shari'a, to modern governance.36

This movement found its voice in 1928 with the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin) by Hassan al-Banna, a twentytwo-year-old Egyptian student who hated the decadent, pseudo-Western culture he saw polluting his homeland. The son of an Al-Azhar graduate and local Islamic leader, al-Banna spent five years in Cairo as a student and emerged with a radical vision of how to resist the West's colonial influence and decadent, immoral, and atheistic culture. His answer was the Brotherhood, a secret society dedicated to establishing a Pan-Islamic government, a restored caliphate, based on the Koran and shari'a. It advocated the rule of Islam over the individual, the family, society, and the state. Al-Banna's vision was global, rejecting Western concepts of the state and nation; the Brotherhood declared that "Islam is the only homeland for a Muslim." Within a few short years, the Brotherhood had penetrated influential corners of Egyptian life, including the military, the civil bureaucracy, and education. By 1940, the Brotherhood was forming paramilitary units, and was undertaking acts of terrorism against government officials it disliked. By 1946, the Brotherhood claimed five hundred thousand active members and another five hundred thousand sympathizers in five thousand branches across Egypt. Its sometimes violent tactics led to overt and covert counterattacks by the authorities, leading to the death of al-Banna at the hands of Egyptian internal security in 1949. But the killing of its creator did little to halt the expansion or influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose history of sedition and violence forms a cornerstone of modern Islamic radicalism around the world.37 The impact of al-Banna and his followers was being felt in Bosnia within a decade of the Brotherhood's founding.

By the late 1930s, there was a group of radical Muslims in Bosnia, centered on Sarajevo, who looked to the Brotherhood as an example to follow. Key members of this tiny cabal were no more than teenagers, but they compensated for their inexperience with fanaticism and vigor. While war clouds formed over Europe, they met in secret to plot the downfall of the infidel state and the creation of an Islamic society and state in Bosnia to be aligned with Muslims worldwide. It was a fantastic vision, essentially copied from the Muslim Brotherhood.

The group was formally established as the Young Muslims (Mladi Muslimani) in late March 1941, on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia. Their founding convention was held in Sarajevo, at the offices of the Muslim Sobriety Organization, and their political program was concisely defined as "the practical achievement of Islam." Like the Brotherhood, they agreed with the 1917 declaration of the Ottoman Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha that "the fatherland of a Muslim is wherever the shari'a prevails." They considered the Islamic clerical establishment to be stodgy at best, corrupt at worst, and advocated direct action to achieve their goals. From the outset, the Young Muslims had a close relationship with El-Hidaje (Instruction), a local Islamist publication with a reputation for intellectual discourse and influence among radically minded Muslims.38 From this modest start came the foundation of an Islamist government that would take power in Bosnia a half-century later. In the meantime, the Young Muslims waited for events to unfold around them, as they did without delay.

On April 6, 1941, Axis forces invaded Yugoslavia, and the divided state collapsed quickly under the combined blows of Germany, Italy, and Hungary. This brief, inglorious campaign would be remembered as the "April war," a stark contrast with Serbia's gallant resistance in World War I. For the foes of Royal Yugoslavia, this was an opportunity. The Axis powers wiped the country from the map, dividing the spoils, while Bosnia was swallowed by the misnamed Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Drzava

This expanded Croatia was an Axis puppet state, divided awkwardly between German and Italian control, that soon won a reputation for fanaticism and barbarism unsurpassed in Fascist Europe. It was led by the Ustasha (Uprising) party, an ultranationalist clique with little support in Croatia that had spent most of the interwar period in exile in Mussolini's Italy, plotting sedition and terrorism. The Germans installed the Ustashas in power, reckoning them to be pliant and like-minded, which they proved to be; yet the party and its leader, Ante Pavelic, were hardly the choice of most Croats, however pleased the population was to be freed of Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, and the Ustashas in practice firmly controlled not much NDH territory outside the capital of Zagreb.39

For Bosnia's Muslims, the collapse of Royal Yugoslavia was a cause for hope, not least because the Ustashas were sympathetic to Islam in theory. They adhered to one of the stranger points of Croatian ultranationalist ideology, viewing Bosnia's Muslims as not merely Croats who had converted to Islam, but as "the purest Croats." Therefore they flattered the Muslim elite and offered concessions to strengthen Islam politically and socially, including the appointment of a leading Muslim politician, Dzafer Kulenovic, as NDH vice president in November 1941.

Yet such flattery was mostly window dressing; the Ustashas had no intention of sharing power with anybody, despite Muslim support for many of Pavelic's policies. This was probably just as well, since suspicions about Christians, even sympathetic ones, ran deep among leading Muslims in Bosnia. Fehim Spaho, Reis ul-ulema when the Ustashas came to power, was pro-Croat, yet nevertheless argued strongly against getting too close to Christians, and told his flock never to enter their houses of worship.4° That said, Muslims participated fully in the military and police forces of the Ustasha regime, which made them accomplices in the genocidal acts of the NDH.

The Ustasha vision for their Greater Croatia, based on fuzzy, Nazi-like race-thinking, called for the elimination of Jews, Gypsies, and the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia-something like 40 percent of the new state's popula- tion.41 Zagreb planned to expel a third of the Serbs to Serbia, convert another third to Catholicism, and kill the rest. The Germans found Ustasha violence, which was visited heavily on the young, old, and unarmed, to be counterproductive and distasteful-they relied less on the mechanized genocide of Himmler's SS, more on old-fashioned barbarism-and NDH excesses against Serb civilians generated protests even from senior German military and police officials.42

Such crimes generated resistance by Serbs across the NDH. They largely founded the Partisan movement in Croatia and Bosnia, based on the underground Communist Party-by the middle of the war, 70 percent of Partisans in Bosnia were Serbs, with some Croats and very few Muslimswhile the nationalist Chetnik movement was a Serbian phenomenon.43 The Chetniks, led by the Yugoslav Army Colonel Dragoljub Mihailovic, were recognized by the Allies as the official resistance movement, and their aim was the restoration of Royal Yugoslavia and the protection of Serb populations from Ustasha and Nazi attacks.44 The Chetniks were a decentralized organization that fought against Germans, Italians, Ustashas, and Partisans-and sometimes collaborated with all of them too, depending on the political climate. At bottom, they were waiting on the hoped-for Allied liberation of Yugoslavia that would end Ustasha terror. At the local level, Chetnik units engaged in counterterror, particularly against Muslims in Bosnia, settling scores and exacting vengeance for Muslim crimes against Serbs. The worst incident came in early February 1943, in a four-day orgy of killing by Chetniks in the Foca area of eastern Bosnia, which left nine thousand Muslims, mostly civilians, dead. As with such crimes in World War I, there was ample horrible behavior on all sides, and the victims were mainly noncombatants. Neither Muslims nor Serbs in Bosnia were collectively innocent of war crimes-and it needs to be stated that Croats, especially the Croats of western Hercegovina who played a disproportionately significant role in the NDH terror apparatus, were more responsible than anyone-yet as in World War I, the cycle of mass terror and counterterror was not started by the Serbs.

By the middle of the war, Muslim dissatisfaction with the Ustashas had grown serious. Unhappy with their share of power, and concerned that Ustasha forces, having unleashed a terrible civil war in Bosnia, were unable to protect Muslims from Chetnik counterattacks, the Muslim elite looked to the Germans for assistance and protection. There was much mutual admiration between Islam and Nazism. Heinrich Himmler, the SS leader, was something of an Islamophile, seeing in that combative religion the martial virtues he admired, in contrast to effeminate Christianity. For many Muslims, the Nazi ideology was not without appeal, and Hitler's enemies-Jews, Communists, Western colonial powers-were theirs. The exiled Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a gifted propagandist, was on Berlin's payroll and was a vociferous supporter of the German cause. He took an interest in Bosnia, seeing the possibility of a genuine Nazi-Muslim alliance there, stating in March 1943 that, "The hearts of all Muslims must today go out to our Muslim brothers in Bosnia, who are forced to endure a tragic fate."

What the Muslim elite wanted was autonomy under the Third Reich, separating the solidly Muslim areas of central Bosnia from the NDH and attaching them to Germany. This would protect Muslim rights and privileges in an Islamic state. The bridge to do this was the creation of Bosnian Muslim units of the Waffen-SS, Himmler's private army.45 Himmler advocated this, believing that an SS division of Bosnian Muslims would be the equal of the formidable Bosniaken regiments of the Austro-Hungarian Army, while Sarajevo's view was summed up by Muhamed Pandza, the Reis ululema: "The Germans are our friends."

In early April 1943, Haj Amin al-Husseini made a well-publicized trip to Bosnia to drum up support for the SS initiative, making the most of the photo opportunities and lauding the local Muslims as "the cream of Islam" in a sermon at Sarajevo's largest mosque. His visit was well received by the Bosnian Muslims, and the response of the more radical element was rapturous.`'' Response to the call for recruits for the division was strong, and there was no difficulty finding twenty thousand suitable volunteers. The Bosnian Muslim formation was formally titled the 13th Volunteer Mountain Division of the Waffen-SS (Handschar),47 and its official ideology was PanIslamism. Several well-known Bosnian imams served as division chaplains, including Husejn Dzozo, a leading member of El-Hidaje. The division was strongly supported by Bosnian Islamists, including the Young Muslims, who encouraged members to join the SS.48

The Young Muslims were collaborators with the Nazis from the beginning of Bosnia's occupation in 1941. They provided the Gestapo with lists of "progressive" students at Belgrade University, many of whom were arrested, even killed, for suspected pro-Communism.49 The organization actively supported Bosnia's occupiers throughout the war, and their only incident of "protest" was telling. This was a singularly mild action in 1943 at Sarajevo's Trebevic Theater, against an Italian film, Captain Tempest, depicting the long-ago battle for Cyprus between Turks and Italians. The Young Muslims objected to the film's depiction of Islam; as explained by Nedzib Sacirbegovic, one of the veterans of the "Trebevic action," "what bothered us was the misrepresentation of Muslim worship in general and the call to prayers in particular." To register their complaint, Sacirbegovic and a teenage friend, Alija Izetbegovic, accompanied by a third Young Muslim member and a contingent of veiled female supporters, attended a screening of Captain Tempest and, when the "insulting" scenes appeared, they stood up in the theater, made noise, banged metal objects, and stopped the show.50 The next day the film was pulled. One wonders what Bosnians who were in the hills around Sarajevo that night, fighting and dying to free their country from Fascist occupation, would have made of such a "protest."

Despite strong local support, Himmler's Bosnian division ultimately did little to help the Nazi cause or defend the Bosnian Muslims. The quality of Muslim soldiery had declined since World War I, the division was penetrated by Communist cadres who staged a mutiny, and morale dropped when it became apparent that the division was not to be used solely to defend Muslims from Chetnik attack, but might serve anywhere in Yugoslavia. As a result, the 13th Division's actual combat record was slight, while its depredations against unarmed Serbs were impressive; the Muslim troops spent more time killing and looting than actually fighting, and the unit proved a disappointment to the Waffen-SS. Efforts to raise a second division of Bosnian Muslims for the manpower-hungry SS proved stillborn, and the 13th Division ended the war ingloriously, plagued by war crimes and desertion. Its war service was explained simply by the leading expert on the subject: "The Bosnians seldom performed well unless under strict German supervision. 1151

Despite its modest fighting prowess, the Handschar Division had succeeded in tarring the Bosnian Muslims with the taint of collaboration with the occupiers, specifically enthusiastic cooperation with the SS. While it is unfair to place blame for this on all Bosnian Muslims, there was ample liability in the case of the Muslim religious establishment, and especially with Islamist groups such as the Young Muslims. As the tide of the war turned decisively against the Germans in 1944, and the Wehrmacht commenced a gradual retreat out of the Balkans, those who had collaborated with the Nazis and Ustashas faced a bleak future. It was only in the last months of the war that Muslims joined Tito's Partisan forces in any numbers, and that was mainly because the Communists enforced conscription in liberated areas, which by the end of 1944 included most of Bosnia and Hercegovina. (Among the less-than-willing soldiers in Partisan uniform in the last months of the war were the Young Muslim activists Alija Izetbegovic and Nedzib Sacirbegovic.) As the Partisans, now recognized by the Allies as the legitimate resistance army in Yugoslavia, marched to victory in the spring of 1945, they brought with them a militant ideology that was hostile to all religion. When the Partisans liberated Sarajevo in early May 1945, as part of their last offensive that finished off the remaining Axis forces in the country, they encountered a population fearful of what the Communists might do in the guise of victor's justice. Muslims had legitimate cause for concern, for alone among Bosnia's peoples they had made no real contribution to Allied victory, and their collaboration with the Nazis had been unsurpassed.

"OUR PATH IS JIHAD"

Although their loathing of religion was universal, Marxists considered Islam especially retrograde, a medieval superstition devoid of redeeming values. Soviet policy towards Islam in the 1920s and 1930s, which included mass killings of Muslim clergy in Moscow-controlled Central Asia, earned Communism an evil reputation among Muslims worldwide, and fears in Sarajevo in the spring of 1945 appeared well founded.

However, Yugoslav Communists did not intend the head-on assault on religion that Stalin had perpetrated in the Soviet Union; controlling religion and shearing its most objectionable features was sufficient for Marshal Tito and his movement. Associating religion with nationalism, the Communists wanted faith to be a wholly private matter that could never threaten the state or cause another civil war. The fratricide in Yugoslavia from 1941 to 1945 claimed over a million lives, most taken by fellow Yugoslavs, and the Communists considered religion to be a prime motivator of interethnic hatred. The years immediately following victory in 1945 saw harsh restrictions placed on all faiths, and vigorous prosecution of perceived enemies of Yugoslavia's new order, but no purging of religion for its own sake. Indeed, the Bosnian Muslims counted their blessings when Bosnia-Hercegovina was separated from the defunct NDH and recreated as one of Yugoslavia's six republics, within its more-or-less traditional frontiers; the Communists decided not to unite Bosnia with Serbia.

The restrictions placed on Islam were comprehensive. The state suppressed shari'a courts in 1946, banned the veil and other Islamic dress in 1950, closed Muslim schools (metkebs and medresas) and societies beginning in 1946, and banned Dervish orders in 1950. This last was a harsh blow to Bosnian Islam, as the Sufi orders had historically played a significant role in local Islamic life, and Dervish houses (tekije) were sorely missed by average Muslims. The Communist program consisted of removing Islam from the public square altogether-no Islamic textbook would be printed in Yugoslavia until 1964-which was an experience without any precedent in Bosnia.52 All the same, the Titoist campaign against Islam was no harsher than that undertaken by Kemal Ataturk in Turkey after 1922, where religious schools and foundations were closed, Dervish and mystic orders were banned, shari'a was replaced by civil law, and traditional Islamic dress was made illegal. Indeed, the political persecution endured by Islam in Tito's Yugoslavia was comparable to that inflicted on the Orthodox Church, and rather less than that endured by the Roman Catholic Church.

The Communist Party's method of ensuring compliance with its religious laws was the co-opting and supporting of the official Islamic Community (Islamska zajednica-IZ), which supervised Bosnia's clerical structure. The state funded the IZ and allowed it some latitude; in exchange, the state-meaning the Yugoslav secret police-had a hand in the selection of imams and gained an inner look at Islamic happenings down to the village mosque. The IZ proved a willing partner in many anti-Islamic actions, such as the closing of the Dervish orders, which the clerical hierarchy had never liked anyway.53 The secret police placed large numbers of collaborators in the IZ, to keep tabs on suspect activities, and the Muslim clerical hierarchy was thoroughly penetrated by regime spies.54

As a result, the IZ was very responsive to Communist wishes, and displayed no interest in Pan-Islamism or any activities outside Yugoslavia. When Bosnian representatives were invited to attend a world Islamic Conference in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1952, the Reis ul-ulema declined with scorn.55

A minority of Muslims was unwilling to cooperate with the state, however, and some of them went underground. The Young Muslims found life under Communism uncongenial-not least because some of its members were in prison or wanted for collaboration with the Nazis-but they continued their activities clandestinely. One of their major accomplishments was the publication of their journal El-Mudiahid (The Holy Warrior), whose first edition displayed unmistakable signs of Pan-Islamist radicalism: calls for jihad, ample Koranic quotes, recitation of the tekbir ("Allahu Akbar!" i.e., "God is Great!"), condemnation of Western mores (especially drinking), and the memorable poem "On Jihad":

The inaugural edition of El-Mudzahid appeared thanks to the editorial work of Alija Izetbegovic, who was arrested shortly thereafter with his friend and coconspiritor Nedzib Sacirbegovic.57 Following their April 1946 arrest, Izetbegovic and Sacirbegovic went before a military tribunal-they were still serving in Tito's army-and the twenty-oneyear-old Izetbegovic admitted his membership in the Young Muslims and some of his conspiratorial activities (though he denied any personal cooperation with the Germans or membership in the Waffen-SS); as a result, he received a three-year prison sentence, while Sacirbegovic got four years.58

Ironically, this sentence saved Izetbegovic from a longer jail term, as he missed the state's major campaign against the Young Muslims, which culminated in large-scale arrests and a public trial in 1949. The parry and secret police feared the Young Muslims for their radicalism and collaboration with the Nazis. Yugoslav authorities thoroughly investigated the organization and denounced the Young Muslims as a terrorist group. A secret police report perceptively noted that its aim was the "Islamization of Muslims," but it was not a nationalist organization per se, as "nationalism is alien to Islam and a Muslim cannot be a nationalist unless his nationalism implies patriotism for an all-Islamic homeland."59

The 1949 trial laid bare the extent of collaboration between the Young Muslims and Bosnia's Fascist occupiers. It resulted in extended sentences for leading activists, effectively breaking the organization for several years, and denunciations by the Islamic Community, which declared the Young Muslims a "terrorist organization." An August 1949 IZ resolution further denounced the group for "preparing terrorist attacks to achieve its loathsome and treasonous goals," and prohibited Muslims from joining its ranks.60 For the Young Muslims, it was the beginning of four decades of underground existence, which would see many of its members-the group claimed five thousand-sentenced to Communist prisons.

After he emerged from prison, Alija Izetbegovic attended law school and established himself in Sarajevo as an attorney. But his free hours were devoted to the cause of radical Islam and, despite his lack of theological training, Izetbegovic was the leader of the remnants of the Young Muslims in Sarajevo. They met regularly at the Tanner's Mosque in Bascarsija, Sarajevo's Turkish quarter, a maze of medieval shops and religious buildings. Although they feared the Yugoslav secret police, State Security believed the Muslims radicals had been crushed by the 1949 trial; the secret police were more suspicious of Croatian and Serb nationalism than Islamism, which they considered old-fashioned and a spent force.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, the Young Muslims quietly reabsorbed members emerging from prison and reestablished ties with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The two secret societies were closely related, sharing an ideology and a conspiratorial milieu; the Bosnians had nothing but admiration for the Brotherhood, which had burrowed itself clandestinely throughout Egyptian society. Its motto summed up their ambition: "The Koran is our constitution; the Prophet is our guide; death for the glory of Allah is our greatest ambition." For their part, the Young Muslims had a similar slogan: "Our path is jihad" (Nas put je dzihad). Under Izetbegovic's direction, the Sarajevo group maintained ties with the Brotherhood via secret meetings in several countries, and arranged for contraband Islamic literature to be smuggled into Bosnia.6'

While the Islamists worked in secret, plotting their jihad, Yugoslavia gradually became a more welcoming place for Muslims. Part of this was for external reasons. In the as Tito's international cachet grew thanks to his clever positioning of his heretical Marxist state between the Soviet Union and the West, Belgrade's diplomatic power increased out of proportion to the country's size. Tito found the new Non-Aligned Movement especially congenial, with its neither-East-nor-West philosophy and ample photo opportunities, and Yugoslavia's Muslims found a niche therein. They were suddenly a bridge between Yugoslavia and what was newly termed the Third World, another factor that set the country apart from the rest of Communist Eastern Europe. A Muslim name thus became a benefit in the party and in the diplomatic service.

There were internal reasons, too. The party considered the Bosnian Muslims, now shorn of their radical elements, to be relatively nonthreatening. The 1960s therefore saw a flowering of Islamic institutions in Bosnia that continued into the next decade. Between 1950 and 1970, the state built 800 new mosques in the republic, so that, despite the limits placed on Islam after the war, there were more houses of worship and imams in 1970 than there had been before the Communists came to power: 1,437 houses of worship and 1,300 imams by 1970, versus 1,043 and 1,090 respectively in 1930.62 The state now permitted Islamic texts to be published, and 1970 saw the appearance of Preporod (Revival), an official journal for the discussion of Islamic ideas. The medresa at Gazi Husrevbeg mosque in Sarajevo, Bosnia's preeminent house of Islamic worship, reopened, and in 1977 a Faculty of Islamic Theology was established in Sarajevo, to fill the educational gap created when the party shuttered Bosnia's Islamic institute in 1946. The Muslims again had their own higher school for shari'a (ierijat to the Bosnians). This was encouraged by the secret police, as Bosnian Muslims had been going abroad to receive Islamic education, where they were exposed to radical ideas.

The growing tolerance for Islam formed part of a broader party strategy to define the status and identity of Yugoslavia's Muslims in ideologically acceptable terms. For nearly a generation after the war, just who the Muslims were was left ambiguous: a clear problem for Bosnia, where twothirds of Yugoslavia's three million Muslims resided.63 The party recognized Muslims as a distinct ethnic group beginning in 1961, and their situation improved thereafter, thanks to a mid-decade purge that removed Aleksandar Rankovic from the party; a Yugoslav vice president and longtime Tito intimate, as well as the highest-ranking Serb in the party, Rankovic had been the secret police boss since the war, and was considered hostile to Muslims. His departure opened possibilities, and at the Fifth Congress of the Bosnian Communist Party in January 1969, Muslims were pronounced an official Yugoslav nation (narod), with complete equality with the other nations (e.g., Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins). Yugoslavia's 1971 census was the first to feature "Muslim in the ethnic sense" as a choice, and the vast majority of Bosnia's Muslims identified themselves as such, revealing that they were now the largest ethnic group in Bosnia; no longer were Serbs the preeminent nation, a development attributed to several factors: a high Muslim birthrate, the departure of Serbs to Serbia for economic reasons, and large Bosnian Serb demographic losses in World War II thanks to Croat and Muslim massacres.64

It is important to note that this "Muslim nation" was a wholly secular concept, and implied no endorsement of Islam by the party; rather the contrary, as the Communists viewed this as a "progressive" development that would allow the Muslims to mature in a political identity separate from reli- gion.65 There can be no doubt that many Bosnian Muslims welcomed the party's actions, and increasingly identified themselves in secular terms. Urban and educated Muslims in particular distanced themselves from Islam, a religion that the party considered retrograde and which had besmirched its reputation through collaboration with Fascism. Communist secularization efforts, on top of increasing urbanization and improved nonreligious educational opportunities, had an impact on Muslims, as they did on all Yugoslavs, and Muslims who joined the party or took jobs with the state were almost by definition secularists.

Yet they were by no means the only Muslim voice in Bosnia; there remained plenty of devout Muslims-though they were wise enough to remain quiet about it-and in nonurban parts of the country Islam retained much of its traditional hold on the population. For this reason, the development of a secular Muslim identity under party auspices was viewed as a threat in certain quarters, the opening of a potential Pandora's box; some party officials, including Bosnian Muslims, feared that any endorsement of Islam, no matter how indirect, would encourage religious-based radicalism.

The ink was hardly dry on the 1971 census when ominous noises began to be heard. Senior party members commenced agitation for a separate Muslim republic in Bosnia and the recognition of Bosnian as a language distinct from Serbo-Croatian.66 In 1972, two leading party officials, Avdo Humo and Osman Karabegovic, were expelled for Muslim "exclusivism" and "nationalism." The following year saw warnings from the party about emergent Pan-Islamism, and the pointed admonition that Muslim nationalism was still objectionable, and every bit as dangerous as Serbian and Croatian nationalism. Fearful that the rise of nationalism among Muslims would cause similar outbursts among Bosnia's Serbs and Croats, in February 1974, Sarajevo's leading newspaper, Oslobodjenje (Liberation), published a four-part series that criticized current trends in Bosnia, noting that Muslim nationalism, even when wearing the party's "red veil," was nevertheless a breeding ground for "anti-socialist forces," and condemned efforts to "identify everything positive in Bosnian culture with the Islamic

The battle over Muslim identity raged inside the party through the 1970s, with nasty squabbles that periodically burst into the state-controlled media. Bosnia's Communist ranks were filled disproportionately by Serbs, thanks to Bosnian Serb overrepresentation in the wartime Partisan cause, and with few exceptions they took a very dim view of Muslim nationalism, whether "progressive" or not. Muslims who were senior party officials were hardly more sympathetic. Not many Bosnian Muslims counted as start borci ("old fighters," meaning those who supported the Communists early in World War II), but those who did comprised something of an ideological old guard (younger Muslim party officials were another matter). By the end of the decade, Hamdija Pozderac, a member of the "first family" of Bosnian Muslim Communists, and at the time the sole Muslim on the Yugoslav Central Committee, publicly condemned Pan-Islamism in an effort to stem the tide. Charges of clerico-fascism were leveled at Muslim nationalists by elements of the Islamic Community as well, and in October 1979, Preporod, the party-approved Islamic journal, was purged of "Islamic socialists" said to be operating under "Arab spell" and spreading dangerous ideas.68 What had happened?

Developments abroad had an electrifying effect on Bosnia's Muslims, especially the Islamist element, and none proved more momentous than Iran's Islamic revolution of 1979. Although the Sunni Muslims of Bosnia had theological disagreements with the Shia of Iran, they nevertheless drew inspiration from Tehran, and the Young Muslims heartily agreed with the Ayatollah Khomeini's statement, "Islam is politics or it is nothing." Izetbegovic and his group apparently weren't aware, as Western "experts" repeatedly maintained, that the Sunni-Shia division was an insurmountable obstacle in the Muslim world. At last, an Islamic state had rebelled against Western ways and was establishing a society fully according to shari'aexactly what Islamists throughout the umma had as their goal.

Secret links between Bosnian Islamists and their brethren abroad grew substantially in the 1970s, with the Muslim Brotherhood continuing to be the linkage of choice. The Young Muslims developed relationships with leading Islamists from Egypt and other Arab countries. One of the most important was the connection to Sudan via Fatih al-Hasanayn, who arrived in Sarajevo in 1964 as a student and stayed in Yugoslavia for much of the next two decades pursuing a medical education in Bosnia and Belgrade; related to leading members of the Islamist underground in Khartoum, alHasanayn developed an enduring friendship with Izetbegovic that would take on political significance.69

The Muslim Brotherhood dispatched members to Yugoslavia to maintain ties with local allies; the Egyptians, posing as students, took sanctuary in the country and spent their time propagandizing and assisting the Young Muslims. The Brotherhood felt so secure in Yugoslavia-they were watched but not molested by State Security-that Hasan Nasser, one of the planners of the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, took refuge there, bringing more Brothers with him under cover as students.70

By 1982, however, the Yugoslav secret police could no longer look the other way. Reports of overt Iranophilia in Sarajevo-portraits of the Ayatollah Khomeini displayed in windows were causing concern-combined with the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood inside the country brought increased scrutiny. When Damascus cracked down on the Brotherhood's Syrian underground without restraint, members fled to Yugoslavia, making several attempts to assassinate Syrian diplomats in Belgrade; in retaliation, the Syrian secret police killed Mahmud Wadeh, a leading Brother, in Belgrade in 1981.

But the final straw was evidence of ties between the Young Muslims and Iran's revolutionary regime. In the summer of 1982, Alija Izetbegovic and his longtime associate Omer Behmen, who had served eleven years in Communist prisons for his service to the Islamist cause, proceeded to establish contact with Tehran via the Iranian Embassy in Vienna, using a third Young Muslim, Teufik Velagic, as a cutout; Velagic's task was passing a copy of Izetbegovic's Islamic Declaration, an unpublished manifesto of their movement that had been circulating underground in samizdat fashion. Apparently the Iranians liked what they saw, as they agreed to have the leadership of the Young Muslims visit Iran; they also arranged to meet with Bosnian Islamists in Abu Dhabi-a safer third country-to discuss mutual interests.71

The Abu Dhabi meeting never took place, as Izetbegovic had gone too far. State Security became aware of the contacts with Iran, and the leadership of the Islamist group was arrested in late March 1983 on charges of terrorism and collaboration with enemies of the state. The resulting trial of the "Muslim intellectuals" became a media spectacle, giving the Islamists a chance to showcase their views. Among the most serious charges was that Izetbegovic and other top Bosnian Islamists made a secret trip to Iran in early 1983. Izetbegovic made the most of the trial, comporting himself with quiet dignity throughout, but to most Bosnians the event seemed like a time warp. The public had heard little mention of the Young Muslims in decades, and as far as Bosnians were aware the group had ceased to exist long ago.

The trial would prove otherwise, beginning with denunciation by the party and its media organs. The best witness for the prosecution was the Islamic Declaration, which began with two maxims: "Our objective is the Islamization of Muslims" and "Our motto is to have faith and fight." The unpublished book called for a "political revolution" and stated without qualification, "There can be no peace or harmony between the `Islamic religion' and non-Islamic social and political institutions."72

The defendants received prison sentences totaling ninety years-fourteen for Izetbegovic, fifteen for Omer Behmen, and ten for the only youthful member of the group, Hasan Cengic, a twenty-seven-year-old cleric and graduate of the recently reopened shari'a institute in Sarajevo, who displayed pronounced radical views. Oslobodjenje spoke the common wisdom by describing the convicted as "Ghosts of the past in the terrorist mantle," while Hamdija Pozderac, party boss for Bosnia, denounced the "Muslim intellectuals" without restraint: "I would say that their extremist approach is absolutely identical to the platform of the terrorist organization that our recent history knows under the name of Young Muslims."73

Although the 1983 trial decapitated the Islamist network in Bosnia for a second time, it was not a final verdict. Unlike the 1949 trial of the Young Muslims, this had been a public event that allowed Izetbegovic and his brethren to pose as dissidents being oppressed by the heavy hand of the secret police. Theirs became a cause celebre among average Muslims, including those who had no sympathy for their radical views. As a Sarajevo skeptic observed, the "tragedy" of the 1983 trial was that "imprisonment under the [Communist] system made political dissidents out of them, although they had never been dissidents. They were advocates of obsolete ideas that history had trampled under long before."74

At trial, Izetbegovic encapsulated his philosophy by stating that, "Islamic society without an Islamic government is incomplete and impotent." Five years later, he would emerge from prison to a different world, finding Yugoslavia's Communist system in free fall. Political pluralism was returning to Bosnia with a vengeance. In a development none would have foreseen, the hour of the Young Muslims had at last arrived, and they would use the "aura of martyrs" they had acquired in 1983 to decisive effect.75

ENTER THE SDA

The 1980s witnessed the slow unraveling of the Titoist system. The decade began with the March 1980 death of the "Old Man," an event long anticipated by all Yugoslavs, and mourned by most. Whatever the sins of his regime, Tito was regarded as necessary by most of his subjects; what Yugoslavia would be without him no one knew, and many feared. The political and economic challenges were daunting, and the rot began to show not long after his death. While the party attempted to define itself without the man who created the state and its ruling class-the best slogan they could come up with was `After Tito, Tito!"-average Yugoslavs saw the stability and modest prosperity of Titoism evaporate.

In Bosnia, the problems were both political and economic. Events like the 1983 trial caused shudders in Sarajevo, as they were a troubling sign that political and religious extremism-which Communism claimed to have vanquished-were alive and well. Moreover, the Bosnian economy, never strong, was fraying in important ways by the mid-1980s. This was a crisis across Yugoslavia, as Tito had been borrowing from Western banks for years to keep afloat the country's smoke-and-mirrors economy, grandly theorized as a "self-managing" Communist system; it was all a mirage, and within five years of Tito's death the financial stability that had been attained through credit had become a straitjacket of inflation, unemployment, and unserviceable debts.

By the time Alija Izetbegovic emerged from Foca prison in October 1988, Bosnia's economy was in depression. Unemployment was over 20 percent and rising, while actual income was receding to 1950s levels thanks to runaway inflation. All the progress of Titoism was disappearing before Bosnian eyes. It was hardly a recipe for political stability. As across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, Communism was losing its legitimacy with unanticipated speed; what would replace it was the question.

Upon returning to Sarajevo, despite public reassurances that he no longer had any interest in politics, Izetbegovic reunited with the remnants of the Young Muslims, including veterans of the 1983 trial who were being paroled, and crafted a strategy for conquest. It was evident that, with the imminent demise of the Communist Party, political pluralism was returning to the country soon. This was an opportunity the Islamists would be ready to exploit.

Izetbegovic made the first of several trips to Switzerland to gain the support of Adil Zulfikarpasic in Zurich. Something of a celebrity among Bosnia's Muslims, he came from a distinguished family and had ample funds at his disposal from his successful business ventures; Zulfikarpasic was sympathetic to Izetbegovic and the others convicted in 1983, viewing them as victims of a corrupt police state that was biased against Muslims. Though he was no theocrat, Zulfikarpasic had contributed to their defense and had gained them good publicity in the European media, helping craft their dissident image. It was in Zurich on February 24, 1989, that Izetbegovic and Zulfikarpasic agreed to form a political party to represent the interests of the Bosnian Muslims.76

The name they settled on was the banal-sounding Party of Democratic Action (Stranka demokratske akcije-SDA); any use of nationalist or religious titles was forbidden by the election laws, though Izetbegovic admitted he wanted to call it "the Muslim Party." Just what the SDA was, what it represented, what it stood for, was an enigma from the start, and has remained so, precisely as Izetbegovic wished it to be. The continuing mystery surrounding the SDA has a great deal to do with the intentionally crafted misunderstandings about the man behind the party. Although he had a well-honed public image, the real Alija Izetbegovic never emerged into public view.

The official biography was straightforward enough. The son of a bankrupt tradesman from Bosanski Samac in the northwest of the country-his father Mustafa was a semi-invalid due to war wounds incurred while fighting on the Italian front in the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I- Izetbegovic had lived in Sarajevo since age three. Except for attendance at a metkeb as a boy, he had no religious education, and his grades in law school weren't stellar; he was an autodidact with an impressive, if superficial, knowledge of many subjects. He nevertheless considered himself an intellectual and compensated for any shortcomings in his education with drive and ambition-seen as pushiness by his detractors. He was a private family man who was really known to no one outside a small circle of relatives and a few longtime veterans of the Young Muslim cause. His tendency to make flatly contradictory statements on major issues-a kind of pandering that amounted to gross dishonesty-was well honed and contributed to a sense that he and his new party stood for everything and nothing all at once.77

That Izetbegovic was an Islamist could be doubted by none who read his writings with open eyes. The most damning indication of his mindset was the Islamic Declaration that had been of interest to the secret police. Apparently written over years beginning in 1969, it was not completed until the early 1980s; it was not available to the public until its publication in Sarajevo in 1990, igniting a firestorm of controversy. A singularly odd manifesto, the Islamic Declaration is a rambling document that never mentions Bosnia (that would have guaranteed immediate arrest by State Security), yet places Izetbegovic's religious-cum-political philosophy midstream in the Islamist current. It states at the outset that its objective is "creating a uniform Muslim community from Morocco to Indonesia," and "a Muslim can only die with the name of Allah on his lips and for the glory of He agreed that Islam was a wholly political religion: "History knows of no true Islamic movement that was not at the same time a political movement as well."79 At pains to demonstrate that Islamism was democratic, he added that "an Islamic order may be implemented only in countries where Muslims represent the majority of the population," a moderate view undercut by the statement that "establishing an Islamic order is thus shown to be the ultimate act of democracy."80 There is also the usual anti-Semitic venom: "Palestine is a provocation to all Muslims of the world," and a classic Izetbegovic attempt to have it both ways: "We would like to distinguish between Jews and Zionists, but only if Jews themselves find strength to find the difference."81

No aspect of Izetbegovic's platform was more retrograde, or more inflammatory to Bosnia's non-Muslims, than his overt Ottomanophilia. As a youth, he had called for ruling the country in Ottoman style, based on religiously devout Muslim clans, and even signed his name in Turkish form: Izet-beg. In later years, he extolled the alleged virtues of Ottoman rule, spoke warmly of his Turkish ancestors, including those who were high-ranking in Ottoman service, and left no doubt of his affection for how the Turks ran Bosnia, indicating that a return to dhimmi status for non-Muslims was his plan: "These are not new laws of our new Islamic politics towards Christians and Jews, not new laws dictated by a new political situation. They are just the practical conclusions taken from the Islamic recognition of Christians and Jews which comes straight from the Koran."82 The reaction of Bosnian Christians to such rhetoric was understandably immoderate; they viewed Izetbegovic's writings as "a sort of Islamic Mein Kampf." In American terms, this would be tantamount to a white Southern politician who publicly extolled his slave-owning ancestors while running for office on a platform calling for a return to antebellum values and practices. The opinions of African-Americans in such a scenario would be easy to predict, and rather like how non-Muslims in Bosnia viewed the rise of Izetbegovic.

Yet Western experts with few exceptions have portrayed Izetbegovic's philosophy as Western and anything but extremist. As one leading Bosniawatcher explained, the Islamic Declaration was hardly threatening, and Izetbegovic "explicitly rejects" Islamic radicalism.83 Such blindness has been induced in part by Izetbegovic's heavy reliance on Western literary and artistic references in his work, a kind of name-dropping that appeals to intellectuals everywhere and proved sufficient to inoculate Izetbegovic from a close reading of his statements relating to Islam. The same was true of his second book, Islam Between East and West, a meandering tome even less coherent than his first book-"an amateurish work, an intellectual hodgepodge," admitted a defender-but which was, a leading American student of Islam concluded, filled with Western cultural references and therefore "not the work of a Muslim fundamentalist."84 The best example of Izetbegovic's literary style was his 1980s prison diary, a mixed bag of self-pity, unfocused thoughts, and references to Western thinkers from Friedrich Hegel to Marvin Minsky; yet its form and content exist in a wholly Islamic frame of reference that creates the author's reality.85 It proves that, despite the claims of Western "experts," one can think kindly of the films of Truffaut and the need for jihad at the same time.

Besides, if one accepts the mainstream view of Western scholars, no Islamic radical could have been elected leader of Bosnia's so-very-moderate Muslims in any event. The reality, as ever, was more complex. It is certainly true that the "Muslim intellectuals" were a small, conspiratorial cabal whose actual views had few admirers in Bosnia in the late 1980s. Yet the Young Muslims had always been careful to keep their real agenda obscure, and the lesson that Izetbegovic took from the 1983 trial was that politicians could play the Islamic card, and gain the sympathy and votes of the Muslim masses, without showing their full hand.

The birth and triumph of the SDA was a classic case of Lenin's revolutionary vanguard in action. When Communism collapsed in Yugoslavia in 1990, there were probably no more than a few hundred ardent PanIslamists in Bosnia, and their influence on the country's secular intelligentsia was essentially zero.86 Yet Bosnia, like so many places, was not as secular as its urban, educated elite. Some 37 percent of Muslims claimed to be religious in 1990, compared with 34 percent of Serbs and 53 percent of Croats. While some 30 percent of Bosnian marriages in urban areas were interethnic (meaning, in local terms, between people of different religious backgrounds), the old ways remained powerful in rural parts of the country. The villages and small towns of Bosnia had been less affected by Communism, and Islam's hold on the population remained strong. Mixed marriages were rare in rural Bosnia, and religious-based prejudices ran deep. Identity continued to be based on concepts of religion that owed more to Ottoman practices than Communist ones. Memories of massacres in the 1940s remained vivid on all sides, and there was much less trust between Muslims and Christians than might be encountered in Sarajevo. While Muslims dealt peaceably with non-Muslims in rural areas, there was not much mixing or affection.87

It was therefore in Bosnia's villages and small towns that the SDA made its move in 1990. They organized at the village level, ensuring that SDA representatives were in contact with local imams in each of Bosnia's 106 municipalities. Each mosque became, in effect, a party outpost. Grass roots campaigning paid handsome dividends. After the collapse of the Communist Party-its remnants renamed themselves the Social Democrats and tried to shake off its legacy, without much success-the SDA was the sole Muslim party in Bosnia, and it positioned itself as the defender of Islam's interests. A message of moderate self-interest proved appealing, particularly among rural Muslims who still felt the call of religion; the Islamic Community, despite some initial misgivings about the SDA-the imams hadn't forgotten the Young Muslims' history of anticlericalism-proved a crucial supporter of the new party. After almost a half-century of official atheism, the IZ and many average Muslims were ready to rally to the standard of any party that said it stood for Islam.88

Izetbegovic wasn't a vibrant orator, but he had a folksy manner of speech, filled with popular aphorisms that appealed to average voters. Moreover, his lack of a Communist past was a vote-getter; he would be the only president of the six successor republics that emerged from Yugoslavia in the early 1990s who had never been a party member. The SDA started strong, being the first ethnic party to be registered in Bosnia, and by the time it held its first convention in Sarajevo on 26 May 1990, the party had a coherent structure with expanding roots across Muslim areas of Bosnia. Although Izetbegovic was always careful not to appear too Islamic before the cameras, he began his address at the convention, held at the Holiday Inn, with "In the name of Allah, gracious benefactor" in Arabic, and stated that the time had come to destroy a system made without God, expressions that were off-putting to more secular-minded Muslims.89

Izetbegovic regularly lied about the relationship between his parry and Islam. He declared that he wanted the separation of church and state, and asserted, "there isn't a single religious officer in the leadership of our party." But he could also be alarmingly frank, for instance his admission that the SDA wished to represent not just Bosnia's Muslims, but all Muslims in Yugoslavia; in June 1990 he spoke of the SDA's imminent plans to open branches in Croatia, Kosovo, and Sandzak, something that was sure to ignite passions among non-Muslims and investigations by the secret police. His statement that "Our concern is with all three million Muslims in Yugoslavia" seemed calculated to arouse the fears of the SDA's detractors, who feared the specter of a "Greater Muslim" state in the Balkans.90

As a counterweight, Izetbegovic took care to gain the support of Muslim leaders who were known as secularists, or at least were viewed with less suspicion than he was. He gave high-level party posts to Adil Zulfikarpasic and the respected intellectual Muhamed Filipovic, both considered enemies of the state for their pro-Muslim political activism. Even more significantly, he won over the most popular politician in Bosnia, Fikret Abdic. A folk hero from western Bosnia, Abdic was a businessman with a cheerful grin and gregarious demeanor who had been embroiled in a major scandal in 1987 when his conglomerate, Agrokomerc, was accused of gross financial fraud, earning Abdic a brief jail term. But the Muslims of western Bosnia only loved him more for it, considering him the region's only economic hope and the victim of anti-Muslim forces.91 "Daddy," as he was known to his devoted followers, was a major boost to SDA fortunes, despite his secularist views; Abdic was worth the large payment the SDA allegedly used to bring him into the parry, as his appearance at a rally guaranteed a large crowd.

Abdic soon broke with the SDA, however, viewing it as a nest of Islamic radicalism, and Zulfikarpasic and Filipovic quit the party in disgust after the Velika Kladusa rally that revealed the ugly side of Izetbegovic's vision for Bosnia. Izetbegovic drove them out, purging them after they had been milked for money and respectability and were no longer needed. Abdic decided to run against Izetbegovic in the coming Bosnian presidential election, while Zulfikarpasic and Filipovic founded their own party, the Muslim Bosniak Organization, to represent secular interests. Zulfikarpasic confidently stated, "We have the Bosnian intelligentsia in our hands. We will make a liberal European party with an open democratic structure.... We can count on sixty percent of Muslims."92 It was not to be. Zulfikarpasic's party received but 1. 1 percent of the vote when the elections came around.

Izetbegovic and the SDA succeeded in winning the majority of Muslim votes in Bosnia, despite a covert radicalism that had little appeal to voters. The party's ability to mask its true intent was the key to success; inexperienced with democracy, Bosnians were easily taken in by the SDA's bland declarations in defense of Muslim rights. As one voter admitted, "The SDA is the only party, I still don't know what their program is, it's true. Somehow they don't say!"93 Of the forty founders of the SDA, only eight had been Young Muslims, but those veterans, Izetbegovic's trusted cabal, ran the party from its foundation. They mostly held key posts behind the scenes, serving as the movement's "untouchable core." For instance, the SDAs personnel committee, which decided all appointments, was headed by Omer Behmen, codefendant at the 1949 and 1983 trials. What the parry would look like had been explained in the Islamic Declaration: "The struggle for an Islamic system, and a thorough rebuilding of Muslim society, can only be successfully carried out by hardened personalities, forming a strong and homogeneous organization. This organization is not a political party from the arsenal of Western democracy; it is a movement based on Islamic theology." In a rare moment of candor, Izetbegovic admitted that the role of the Young Muslims was vital: "the fact is that a huge number of those people-most of them-participated in the creation of the SDA in 1990."94

The November 1990 elections rendered a mixed verdict. Although the SDA was clearly the dominant party among Bosnian Muslims, Izetbegovic didn't actually win the presidency. Muslims had the demographic advantage: the last Yugoslav census, in 1991, revealed that Muslims were the largest group in Bosnia, with 43.7 percent (1,905,829), versus Serbs at 31.4 percent (1,369,258), Croats at 17.3 percent (755,892), and Yugoslavs at 5.5 percent (238.845, meaning citizens, often the offspring of mixed marriages, who refused to identify with a particular ethno-religious group). Izetbegovic took the largest share of Muslim votes, with 874,213, but Fikret Abdic got substantially more overall, 1,040,307, taking many non-Muslim votes too. But in a backroom deal that has never been explained, the victor stepped aside and permitted Izetbegovic to assume the Bosnian presidency, setting the stage for tragedy.

From the start, newly appointed President Izetbegovic acted as if he had a mandate, and wasted no time fanning the flames of interethnic paranoia. Perhaps the most alarming of his actions was his courting of what State Security termed the "foreign factor." The secret police noted an upswing in the number of suspect foreigners from Muslim countries in the late 1980s. State Security determined that there were 107 members and sympathizers of the Muslim Brotherhood in Bosnia by 1990, and they were engaged in providing covert support to the SDA and the radical cause in several Bosnian cities and towns. Just as alarming, there were 606 Iranian nationals in Yugoslavia, and they seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time in Bosnia-doing exactly what the secret police couldn't be sure.95

Fulfilling the fears of State Security, Izetbegovic spent the opening months of 1991 visiting friendly Muslim countries, courting political and financial backing for the Bosnian Muslims, starting with Libya in February. Izetbegovic also visited Turkey, a country whose past he loved but present he seemed to loathe (he stated in the Islamic Declaration that "Turkey as an Islamic country used to rule the world. Turkey as an imitation of Europe represents a third-rate country."). Close observers noted that Izetbegovic refused to visit the grave of Kemal Ataturk, founder of the secular republic; closer observers noted that the only other visiting head of state who refused to pay homage to the father of modern Turkey was the Ayatollah Khomeini.

It was the visit by Izetbegovic and his retinue of SDA higher-ups to Iran that caused the most discomfort back home. When the delegation arrived in Tehran in early May, its stated tasks included discussions of financial aid, founding a joint Iranian-Bosnian bank, and opening an Iranian consulate in Sarajevo.96 There was another agenda. Izetbegovic and his entourage, including his son, were treated royally by the Iranians, the culmination of the Bosnian Islamists' love affair with revolutionary Iran. They wanted Tehran's help, and they received it. Izetbegovic asked Iranian leader Rafsanjani about the views of Iranian intelligence regarding the situation in Bosnia, regarding the risks of a war, and explicitly asked for Iranian "help" if hostilities broke out. The Bosnians were pleased when they were informed that they could count on Iran's full support; they received blank checks, being informed that "As of now, the state budget of Iran will be projected as if Iran had two million more inhabitants than it currently has."97

Although Iran's unlimited support was unknown to the public, what was reported back in Bosnia was bad enough. Non-Muslims and secular Muslims alike were outraged by the SDAs affectionate outreach to Tehran, which confirmed the worst suspicions regarding Izetbegovic and his clique. But the controversy did nothing to moderate the behavior of the Young Muslims, reincarnated as the leadership of the Party of Democratic Action. In November 1991, with war only months away, the SDA held its first Party Congress in Sarajevo; the main, if unstated, agenda item now that power had been achieved was purging the top leadership of non-Islamists, which was carried out to ensure the ideological dominance of the Izetbegovic group. A tiny, conspiratorial movement of radical Islamists had taken over the government of a republic without a Muslim majority, a striking and unexpected accomplishment. When the Young Muslims held their first-ever congress a few weeks later, fifty years after that movement had been established-it was finally possible for them to meet openly in Sarajevo-any careful observer couldn't help but notice that the guests of honor, the inner clique of longtime Islamists, also made up the SDA leadership.98

CHAPTER 2

Modern-day historians and commentators are deeply unsympathetic to the notion of conspiracy. There is no harsher critique than to deride a thesis as a "conspiracy theory": no follow-up is required. As a result, the once uncontroversial notion that people do in fact conspire-has not nearly every great revolution or movement begun as a sort of conspiracy?-has passed from Western political consciousness.

Other parts of the world, Bosnia included, are not yet so advanced. They take for granted that people and groups indeed conspire, for good and ill. Conspiracy is seldom the prime mover of human events, yet neither is it an absent factor. Modern Bosnian history is replete with conspiracies, successful and unsuccessful. Tito's Communist movement was enamored with conspiracy in all its forms, and used this to decisive effect in World War II, defeating its enemies in the secret espionage war as a prelude to winning on the battlefield. The Young Muslims were a successful conspiratorial organization, a secret religious society whose ultimate triumph was possible only because it conducted its vital affairs in secret, constantly vigilant about possible penetrations by outsiders, never letting the public in on its actual designs and agendas. The recent history of the Balkans cannot be understood without reference to conspiracies great and small, winning and losing; their role is clear for those who wish to see.

Similarly, historians generally do not like determinism, the view that what did happen had to happen. Unless they are adherents of fundamentalist religion, Marxism included, Western scholars avoid the notion of predestination. Yet despite this widespread tendency, the Bosnian war of 1992-1995 as commonly presented includes more than a whiff of determinism, the notion that the war was unavoidable because it was willed by evildoers and evil ideologies. In truth, the Bosnian tragedy was eminently avoidable, and was nearly dodged on several occasions. It was the irresponsible actions of politicians in 1991 and 1992, and none more than Alija Izetbegovic, that brought on a catastrophe. The real story of how the war came, and might have been avoided, makes for illuminating if depressing reading, yet is a knowledge that must be had to comprehend how Bosnia came to be a leading front in the global jihad.

"OZNA KNOWS EVERYTHING"

Throughout the Cold War, Tito's Yugoslavia received good Western press. After the split with Stalin in 1948, the heretic Communist regime was a strategic convenience for NATO, offering political and military benefits to the West. In the 1950s, Yugoslavia was a major recipient of U.S. military aid, and its oversized military was quietly counted in NATO totals in war planning against the Warsaw Pact. That the photogenic Tito was appealingly human, unlike his Soviet bloc counterparts, helped matters.

Western capitals, Washington included, therefore protested quietly, if at all, about the power and pervasiveness of Yugoslavia's secret police. For Tito's republic was a thoroughgoing counterintelligence state on the Soviet model, where dissidence was seldom tolerated, and political prisons were filled by a robust secret police that searched vigilantly for deviations from the party line. Yet Yugoslavia's secret police, with its bewilderingly complex history, was much less studied than those of other East Bloc states, doubtless for political reasons; few in the West wished to point out that Belgrade's supposedly more enlightened brand of Communism looked rather like the Soviet Union's.

Similarities to the Soviet KGB were hardly coincidental, since Tito's secret police had been founded by Soviet advisers during World War II, who constructed Yugoslavia's state security apparatus as a carbon copy of their own. Established in May 1944 as the Orwellian-sounding Department for the Protection of the People (Odel enje za zastitu naroda-OZNa), Tito's secret police earned a reputation for brutality and cunning from its effective hunting down of "fifth columnists" well into the postwar period. It is worth noting that Tito himself had an illustrious career in the service of Soviet intelligence, with thirty-three cover names to his credit during his years as a Comintern agent in the 1920s and 1930s. I The purpose of OZNa, Tito proclaimed, was "to strike terror into the bones of those who do not like this kind of Yugoslavia," and that was precisely what the secret police, heralded as "the Sword of the Party," proceeded to do.

By penetrating every corner of Yugoslav society to uncover enemies both real and imagined, Tito's secret police developed a sinister reputation among average citizens, who cited a mordant rhyme: OZNa sve dozna (OZNa knows everything). It emerged from World War II, what the Communists termed the People's Liberation War, as a fully entrenched component of the Yugoslav state, part of the ruling triumvirate with the party and the army.2 Retitled the State Security Directorate (Uprava driavne bezbednosti-UDBa) in 1946, the secret police saw its reputation enhanced during the spy war with Moscow between 1948 and 1953. UDBa successfully blunted aggressive efforts by the Soviet bloc to subvert the Yugoslav state through espionage, subversion, and terrorism, including multiple assassination attempts against Tito. The secret police thoroughly purged the party, the army, and itself-some 1,700 UDBa officers were imprisoned, and some executed, for suspected pro-Soviet sympathies-to rid Yugoslavia of Soviet agents in a counterintelligence struggle of epic proportions.3

Victory over the KGB enshrined Yugoslav State Security's role in the defense of the regime. But it was not the sole intelligence agency. No less important was the military's Counterintelligence Service (Kontraobavestajna sluiba-KOS) of the General Staff, which rooted out spies and saboteurs in the ranks of the Yugoslav People's Army (Jugoslovenska narodna armija- JNA). However, because KOS was given a broad mandate to defend against all potential threats to the military and national defense, its purview extended deep into civilian society. KOS also played a notable role in the internecine party squabbles that were a feature of Titoism. Most famously, it was called on by Tito to secretly investigate the State Security Service (Sluzba driavne bezbednosti-SDB, as UDBa was renamed for the last time in 1964), an affair that culminated in the July 1966 purge of the SDB leadership amid accusations of widespread corruption and institutionalized graft, as well as abuses of power.4

Bosnia always aroused more than its share of interest from Yugoslavia's counterintelligence organs. As the republic with the most entrenched ethnic problems, and where the last war had been fought most bitterly, Bosnia was perennially held under the secret police's microscope in its never-ending search for "nationalists," "extremists," and "terrorists." Though OZNa actually did hunt down numerous groups of terrorists and other state enemies in Bosnia in the 1940s-Ustashas, Chetniks, Muslims, and other collaborators-State Security sometimes acted as if the war had never ended. Hence the spectacles made of trials of the Young Muslims in 1949 and 1983. To its credit, the SDB in Bosnia, staffed by officers from all the republic's nationalities, went to great lengths to avoid ethnic bias, and was equally vigilant regarding the possibly suspect loyalties of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. Indeed, its drive for fairness was sometimes obsessive. Operating under the party's guideline that "the key" (kl u) of ethnic equality had to be maintained, if a Serb were arrested for suspected nationalism (meaning deviation from the party line), it was certain that a Croat and a Muslim would soon be brought in on similar charges. Such practices, instead of calming passions, merely ensured that all parties felt aggrieved.

In defense of the secret police's paranoid worldview, the Yugoslav state really did have enemies. Radical nationalists, mainly Croats and Serbs but occasionally Muslims too, did operate in Bosnia and elsewhere and, most alarmingly to the authorities, cooperated with emigres and foreign intelligence services against Yugoslavia; the most dangerous groups were led by wartime collaborators living in the West.5 A commando-style infiltration of Bosnia by a band of nineteen exiled Croatian ultranationalists in 1972 caused a panic in Sarajevo, not least because it took the police several days, with army help, to crush the would-be uprising. A thorough hunt for suspected Croatian extremists in Bosnia inevitably resulted.

By the early 1980s, however, the Islamic issue was garnering increased scrutiny from police organs in Bosnia. Riots in the mostly Albanian (and Muslim) province of Kosovo in 1981, which were nationalist rather than religious in orientation, caused concern across Yugoslavia. KOS, fearing more outbursts of ethno-religious violence, preemptively initiated a secret campaign to root Islamic radicalism out of the military, a covert struggle that lasted several years and resulted in the exposure of several hundred alleged spies and saboteurs, mostly Albanian, including several JNA officers. In Bosnia, the KOS effort was led by the crafty Aleksandar Vasiljevic, counterintelligence boss for the Sarajevo Military District in the mid-1980s; a gifted spymaster, Vasiljevic relied on a cadre of selected KOS officers, mainly Bosnian Muslims of unquestioned loyalty to the party, to detect and crush cells of Islamic radicals in the ranks. His most trusted subordinate was Fikret Muslimovic, a Muslim and career KOS officer whose successes against the "Islamic factor" were considered legendary.6

KOS operations resulted in penetrations of numerous Muslim institutions in Bosnia, far beyond the military. In addition to State Security surveillance of the Islamic Community, which included the co-opting of a high percentage of imams, KOS scrutinized students who were sent abroad, mainly to the Middle East, to Islamic theological programs; a significant number of students appear to have been recruited by KOS-mainly to spy on fellow students-as a condition of being allowed to study abroad.?

Such activities created a climate of mutual suspicion in Bosnia, even in the tightest-knit groups, a constant worry about penetration that was often justified. The Young Muslims had been penetrated by secret police spies, a factor in the arrests leading to the 1949 and 1983 trials, and there was no reason to think anything had changed. Indeed, the SDA was penetrated by KOS at the highest levels from the party's establishment. Salim Sabic, a close friend of Izetbegovic and leader of the SDA's Zagreb base, was one of the party's three vice presidents selected in 1990. He was also an agent of military counterintelligence.

Rumors about Sabic's links to the secret police turned out to be well founded. Concerned about KOS subversion, Adil Zulfikarpasic obtained a copy of Sabic's secret police dossier from Josip Manolic, Croatia's new prime minister and a career State Security officer who had once headed the SDB apparatus in Croatia. In the confusion surrounding the collapse of the Communist system in 1990 and 1991, many secret police papers disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Zulfikarpasic bought the file for forty thousand Swiss francs-it left no doubt that Sabic was a valuable KOS spy-and showed the contents to Izetbegovic. Manolic, befitting a career counterintelligence officer, recommended that Sabic be controlled, i.e., placed in a position where he could not continue to do damage, or better yet be doubled, in other words, be used to feed disinformation to KOS. Yet in a move that would become trademark, Izetbegovic failed to respond to the news and acted as if nothing had happened. Sabic remained in place and continued to be one of the SDA's leaders. Zulfikarpasic was astounded by Izetbegovic's ability to ignore bad news, an inaction he could not comprehend. He would not be the last.8

"SERBIA IS RISING"

Events in Bosnia did not occur in a vacuum, and were affected by developments across Yugoslavia, particularly in Serbia, the most populous republic in the faltering federation. The same nationalist ferment in the late 1980s that brought the SDA to power in Sarajevo existed in every Yugoslav republic, and took different forms depending on local circumstances and perceived grievances. All the Yugoslav peoples reacted to the slow demise of Communism-and with it the dissolution of party orthodoxies-by reexamining the forbidden past.

The official Communist viewpoint, hammered into every citizen in schools, factories, and barracks, was "brotherhood and unity" (bratswo i jedinstvo). According to the party, differences between the Yugoslav peoples were manufactured by capitalism and the bourgeoisie, and had been overcome by the shared efforts of all Yugoslav nations in the People's Liberation War of 1941-1945. Under Communism, Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Montenegrins got along as never before, in socialist cooperation, thereby healing the wounds inflicted by Fascism and its collaborators in the war. Like all political myths, this was a necessary one, and by no means entirely untrue. But its essential premise was false, and every Yugoslav knew it.

The difficult truth was that not all Yugoslav nations had contributed equally to the Partisan cause, and some-Croats and Muslims-had more collaborators than freedom fighters; moreover, even most Serbs didn't want a Communist state in 1945. Thus the wounds of the terrible civil war that raged across Yugoslavia from 1941 to 1945 never healed, in fact they festered over decades thanks to the party's insistence on no discussions of the war that challenged Communist orthodoxy. Intimidated by the secret police, Yugoslavs-and particularly Bosnians-kept quiet and nursed their grievances at home, telling tales of massacres, blood feuds, and revenge over the hearth, as such Balkan sagas had been shared and passed down for centuries.

Therefore, when the party's hold began to slip in the late 1980s, Yugoslavs talked about the war above all else, with each group striving to show that it was the most aggrieved. Among Serbs this was particularly obsessive, with some cause, as their wartime losses had been the greatest; the Serbs of Bosnia and Croatia were also the only Yugoslav nation exposed to actual genocide, at the hands of the Ustashas. This resulted in a predictable, if unhealthy, revisiting of wartime death tolls, often in a lurid fashion. Serbian charges of genocide against Croatia met with replies from Zagreb that the Serbs hadn't suffered as much as they claimed, with the implication that numbers were being cooked for political advantage; in time, such sentiments infected even the Communist Party.9 Waving the bloody shirt paid off, however, resulting in the election of Franjo Tudjman, an unrepentant Croatian nationalist, as Croatia's first post-Communist president in 1990. More importantly, it brought Slobodan Milosevic to power in Belgrade.

The rise of Milosevic constitutes one of the odder moments in recent Balkan history. Never a nationalist himself, indeed a colorless Communist functionary from central casting, he nevertheless succeeded in harnessing the power of Serbian nationalism when it emerged from under the ice in the late 1980s. He did so through his control of the parry's organs in Serbia, to eventually include elements of the Belgrade secret police; the Milosevic phenomenon was from the start a stage-managed outburst of national emotion, not the "happening of the people" it was reputed to be. While the sentiments of Serbs were real, and the slogan "Serbia is rising" was accurate, the political reaction to it was anything but spontaneous.

The main issue wasn't Bosnia, but Kosovo. There, in that Serbian province, which under Yugoslavia's 1974 constitution had a degree of autonomy amounting to de facto republic status, the Serbian population was in decline, demographically and politically. Once the majority, Serbs by the 1980s made up barely a tenth of Kosovo's population and numbers were falling; the province, the heartland of the Serbian Orthodox Church and the cornerstone of Serbian nationalism, appeared all but lost. The 1981 riots caused a storm of controversy in Belgrade that would last for years, as Serbs grew outraged at the fate of countrymen at the hands of Albanians. Through the decade, the Serbian press ran stories, sometimes lurid, about the crimes committed by Albanians against innocent Serb civilians in Kosovo, creating explosive sentiments among average Serbs, who saw in the situation the continuing story of oppression of Serbian Christians by Albanian Muslims.

It was this outrage that Milosevic exploited, catapulting himself to the presidency of the Republic of Serbia in 1987, and rescinding the autonomy of Kosovo, and Serbia's other autonomous province, Vojvodina, by 1989, through a series of internal party intrigues with the covert, if poorly concealed, assistance of the Serbian secret police. Milosevic proved himself a canny bureaucratic fighter able to use legalisms to maximum effect, while employing the secret police to deal with knotty problems quietly. 10 By 1990, Milosevic had a stranglehold on the collapsing Yugoslav federation, as he or his lieutenants controlled four of the eight federal units (Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Vojvodina). Milosevic never challenged the tenets of Titoist governance, and was in no sense a "reformer"; he was a Red functionary who sought personal power through party channels that were collapsing everywhere in Yugoslavia but Serbia. By the time nonCommunist governments were elected in Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia in 1990, it was clear that his intention was to create a Third Yugoslavia that, while'I'itoist in outline, and including Milosevic as the "new Tito," would better represent Serbian interests-which was exactly what most Serbs wanted.

It is important to note that Milosevic's interest in Bosnia was slight; before 1991, it was at best a peripheral concern. An attorney by training and inclination, his rise to power in the late 1980s was cautious and lawyerly; his legal mandate as party boss in Serbia was clear, while Bosnia, as a separate republic dominated by non-Serbs, was another matter. Indeed, Serbian nationalism in Bosnia appeared on the public scene in 1990 in reactive fashion. Its organ, the Serbian Democratic Party (Srpska demokratska stranka- SDS), was established in July 1990, after the SDA's founding, and in explicit reaction to it.

The new party's leader, Radovan Karadzic, never escaped the lessthan-serious image that the Sarajevo press gave him at the outset. An imposing man with a shock of gray hair, Karadzic, like Izetbegovic, had never been a Communist; he, too, was a religious and private man who only truly trusted members of his close-knit family. He had lived for years in Sarajevo, around the block from Izetbegovic. A Montenegrin by background, he was a traditional Serbian nationalist whose father had been a Chetnik. His professional life as a psychiatrist displayed no great distinction, and he was considered an odd man out by Sarajevo society, to which he sought to belong but never did. The secular intelligentsia considered Karadzic something of a rube, with his love of Serbian folk music and poetry; incidents like his effort to improve the performance of Sarajevo's soccer team through group hypnosis didn't help his image. His political efforts were hard to decipher-he started in the late 1980s as a representative of the Green Party-but he was known to have a relationship with State Security. Despite this, Karadzic and Milosevic were never close-like most SDS leaders, Karadzic had a congenital dislike of "Commies," while the Serbian party boss seems to have considered the Bosnian rather a buffoon-and in the end they hated each other.

In the heady days of 1990, as Communist power evaporated, the SDA and the SDS were in a sense allies, representatives of national interests in Bosnia that had been submerged for nearly fifty years. The Serbs, despite their fears about Izetbegovic's real agenda, at the outset sought a partnership with the SDA, seeing the Muslims as fellow anticommunists. The October 1990 elections gave Izetbegovic's party 86 seats in the 240-seat Bosnian parliament, versus 72 for Karadzic's party and 44 for the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica-HDZ, the local outpost of the new ruling party in Zagreb). Even before the SDS was established, Karadzic requested a meeting with Izetbegovic, but the SDA leader sent Muhamed Cengic in his place; they met at Karadzic's office in Kosevo hospital in downtown Sarajevo, and the psychiatrist explained that Bosnia's Serbs were forming a political party and wanted a coalition with the SDA. The Muslims expressed no

It bears noting that there was no hostility between Izetbegovic and Milosevic in 1990 and 1991. In a sense, their views were compatible. Milosevic wanted Bosnia and Hercegovina to remain in Yugoslavia, but failing that he would settle for a partition that would leave the ethnically Serbian parts under Belgrade. Since Izetbegovic was always willing to accept some sort of partition, despite many public statements to the contrary, the devil was in the details of dividing Bosnia. There were also strange connections between radical Muslims and radical Serbs. Bosnia wasn't a very big place, and anticommunists of all stripes knew each other. In one of the odder developments, an edition of the Islamic Declaration was published by Nova rec, the Serbian firm owned by the ultranationalist Vojislav Seselj, the hardest of all hard-liners, who had served time in Communist prison for his agitation and was no more a "dissident" than Izetbegovic.12

At that critical time, the SDA and the Young Muslims considered secular coreligionists a much greater foe than the Serbs. This view had been clearly expressed by Dzemaludin Latic, editor of Preporod and the SDA's leading ideologist, when he denounced nonpracticing Muslims as "more dangerous to Muslim believers than Chetniks. We must change people."13 While Izetbegovic viewed Serbs with a distaste that was typical of Muslim traditionalists, he did not consider them a threat. As Muhamed Filipovic, a prominent Muslim intellectual who witnessed the birth of the SDA from the inside, recalled of the party's leadership, "They never considered Karadzic and Krajisnik [the SDS vice president] their enemies."14 The insular world of the SDA's top echelon, composed of like-minded Islamists wholly convinced of their righteousness, managed to avoid seeing that their views were charting a course to disaster for themselves and Bosnia. Their worldview, encapsulated fairly by a noted Yugoslav scholar, allowed Izetbegovic and his allies to essentially ignore the majority of Bosnians who were not Muslim:

Muslims imagined Bosnia as an independent state in which they should predominate. Although it was only Muslim extremists who thought non-Muslims should be expelled from Bosnia, most Muslim leaders believed only a Muslim should be allowed full citizenship. Religious Muslims based their demand for supremacy on the traditional belief that the rule of non-Muslims over Muslims was blasphemous.15

Such back-to-the-Ottoman-future thinking guaranteed instability in Bosnia, reigniting as it did deep-seated resentments among Bosnia's majority Christians.

Neither did Izetbegovic's behavior help matters. In July 1991, while visiting Turkey, he requested that Bosnia join the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a Saudi-backed forum with a reputation for propagandizing extreme forms of Islam. This brought immediate condemnation by Karadzic and was, even Izetbegovic's defenders admitted, "a foolish gesture which he surely knew would merely serve to antagonize his Serb and Croat In truth, Izetbegovic's outreach to the OIC wasn't "foolish," but a logical act for an Islamist seeking to create a Muslim state; what was foolish was his willful disregard of the impact such acts would have in Bosnia.

By mid-1991, a year after the SDA rebuffed efforts at forming a coalition, the Bosnian Serbs had had enough. It was by now apparent that Izetbegovic's vision for Bosnia would never be acceptable to non-Muslims; moreover, the SDA leadership was increasingly acting like a majority government, which it was not. Bosnian Serbs in rural areas, who like their Muslim counterparts adhered to their religion and traditions, and remembered the last war vividly, were growing fearful of what sort of country they were living in. SDS representatives began making public denunciations of radicalism among the Muslims. In a fashion that would become trademark, in May the SDS stated in a press conference that Bosnia should be protected from "Islamic fundamentalism," and Karadzic challenged Izetbegovic to "renounce his Islamic Declaration in public and declare that he will not establish an Islamic state in an independent Bosnia and And, in a practice that would become equally trademark, the SDA and Izetbegovic refused to answer the charges.

THE MILITARY LINE

Through the tumultuous months of 1991, as Tito's Yugoslavia entered its death throes, his army stood as the last remnant of a unified state. The military had always enjoyed special status under Tito: it brought Communism to power, it embodied the guarantee that another civil war would not take place, and it was Yugoslavia's only truly functional multinational institution. No less, the Yugoslav People's Army was genuinely popular with most citizens, who respected its heroic wartime sacrifices and considered it one of the few places in society where ethnic resentments didn't prove insurmountable.

For the JNA, the impending collapse of the state they defended created enormous tensions and complications. Without a Yugoslav state, there would be no military-and therefore no defense budget, no salaries, possibly no pensions. There was an ideological factor too. The military saw itself not merely as the defender of Yugoslavia against foreign invasion, but as the guardian of the revolution inside the country as well. Officers, most of whom entered cadet schools as teenagers, lived apart from civilians in a privileged Titoist cocoon, and were intensely indoctrinated in the regime's ideology from a tender age. Though 70 percent of officers were Serbs or Montenegrins-which can be attributed to the overrepresentation of those groups in the wartime army, plus the traditional popularity of military service among Serbs and Montenegrins-hardly any of them were nationalists, and certainly none of the generals were (it is worth noting that even Ratko Mladic, the JNA colonel who would become the commander of the Bosnian Serb Army during the 1992-1995 war, was married to a Macedonian and declared himself a Yugoslav in the 1991 census, a common practice among career officers, who considered themselves above nationalism). In addition, the party made sure that the military's top echelon was more ethnically balanced, and non-Serbs were found on the General Staff in rough proportion to their share of Yugoslavia's population.

JNA careerists viewed nationalists of all stripes with a distaste bordering on revulsion, and most considered the leaders of nascent nationalist movements-whether Serbian, Croatian, or Muslim-to be little more than the losers of the last war reborn as "democrats." Despite a common ethnicity, there was no love lost between Karadzic and his party and the JNA leadership in Bosnia; they viewed each other with suspicion, and the Bosnian Serbs criticized the military for doing little to assist them in their efforts to keep Bosnia in Yugoslavia.

Knowing the sensitivities in Bosnia, the army in the months leading to war in most cases tried to place itself between Serbs and Muslims and defuse tensions, despite its largely Serbian officer corps, according to military policy of "equal closeness and equal distance" vis-a-vis all Yugoslav ethnic groups. Troubles mounted during the summer of 1991, with declarations of independence by Slovenia and Croatia in late June, leading to a brief, failed effort by the JNA to keep Slovenia in Yugoslavia by force; confusion in Belgrade rendered that campaign stillborn, and by early July Tito's Yugoslavia was no more.18 Much worse was the ill-fated Croatian war, which lasted nearly until winter, pitting Croatian Serb militias, backed by the JNA, against the newly established Croatian National Guard. For the JNA, the Croatian campaign was a disaster, with many units failing to perform effectively, and popular resistance to reserve call-ups in Serbia. By November, thanks to its heavy-handed efforts at Vukovar and Dubrovnik-no one had told the Yugoslav military that 1945 tactics were now deemed unacceptable in polite European society-the JNA was viewed in the West as a semi-criminal organization, thanks to media coverage that emphasized Yugoslav military misdeeds, and although it controlled roughly a third of Croatian soil, occupied by Serbs, it had failed to suppress Croatian independence. The struggle for Croatia was the death knell for Tito's army, and by the end of 1991 the JNA was mortally wounded, partially defeated in battle, tarred with the taint of war crimes, and deprived of the state and ideology that gave it purpose.19

While Croatia burned, Bosnia moved closer to the abyss. Although it was evident that any move towards independence would create irresolvable political tensions, the SDA continued preparations to take Bosnia out of Yugoslavia. On October 15, 1991, the Bosnian Parliament, with the support of Bosnia's Croats as well as Muslims, proclaimed the sovereignty of the republic, a move rejected by the Bosnian Serbs, whose November 9 and 10 referendum confirmed that they wished to remain in Yugoslavia. Izetbegovic angered the JNA by telling Muslim reservists not to report for duty. Then, on December 19, he informed General Vojislav Djurdjevac, commander of the JNAs 4th Corps, headquartered in Sarajevo, that the SDA intended to seek Bosnian independence, an act Djurdjevac saw as a virtual declaration of war. True to form, Izetbegovic then semi-backed away from his statement, leaving confusion in his wake, and a suspicion in military circles that he was pathologically dishonest.20 The military's presence in Bosnia had swollen to seven corps, including large numbers of troops leaving neighboring Croatia, and at the end of the year the General Staff dispatched General Milutin Kukanjac to Sarajevo as head of the newly established 2nd Military District. It was Kukanjac's task to stave off disaster.

While the Yugoslav military tried to reduce tensions, there was a hidden dimension in the struggle to keep Yugoslavia together, and in particular to prevent Bosnian independence. KOS had several well-placed agents in Sarajevo. Aleksandar Vasiljevic, by 1990 a major general and the KOS chief, later admitted that military counterintelligence "had two of its people in the very top ranks of the Muslim party," and they kept Belgrade well informed about SDA plans and intentions. During 1991, while Slovenia and Croatia left Yugoslavia, determining the fate of Bosnia was the highest KOS priority.21

The KOS assessment of the situation was that an alliance between Bosnia's Muslims and Croats had to be prevented at all costs, as such a development "would be fatal for the Serbian nation in Bosnia and Hercegovina." Based on insider information, KOS concluded that, "a particularly negative role may be played by Alija Izetbegovic, who is an irresolute politician inclined towards Islamic fundamentalism." Furthermore, KOS reported that, "his statements about a civil state should be interpreted conditionally." Above all else, it was imperative that the SDA be prevented from forming an armed force, a Muslim army, which, KOS reported, "according to certain operational information would be commanded by Alija Izetbegovic."22

KOS ran several counterintelligence operations in Bosnia in 1990 and 1991 that aimed at preventing Bosnian independence. There were some successes, for instance Operation DAM (BRANA) in late 1990, which, thanks to the silent cooperation of Bosnian Interior Minister Alija Delimustafic, prevented Sarajevo authorities from seizing tons of weapons belonging to the Bosnian Territorial Defense, a reserve force whose arms KOS feared would fall into the hands of the SDA. But KOS was itself involved in arming the Bosnian Serbs, in a large-scale operation known as FRAME (RAM in Serbo-Croatian).

Belgrade sought to arm the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia, fearing that Yugoslavia was headed for dissolution. The secret project commenced no later than mid-1990, and was run by the Serbian SDB, which was loyal to Milosevic. (In addition to the Federal SDB, each republic had its own State Security Service.) RAM was entrusted to the SDB's "military line" (vojna linija), which handled paramilitary affairs. The JNA General Staff was not brought into the plan, as Milosevic and the Serbian secret police considered the military insufficiently Serbian and therefore unreliable, though individual trusted officers, including KOS staffers, supported the shipping of weapons to the Croatian Serbs, and beginning in the summer of 1990, observers noted unusually large shipments of what manifests termed "heavy food" being carried in JNA trucks across Bosnia, headed for Croatia.23

Arms shipments to the Bosnian Serbs began in early 1991, after the Serbs in Croatia had been equipped. Though the weapons were mostly small arms, and not of recent vintage, they were enough to equip small armies. RAM was the cornerstone of a broad Belgrade strategy to keep Serbian populations in Yugoslavia, even if Croatia and Bosnia seceded from the state; the Serbian minority in those republics would be assisted with weapons and protected by the JNA. While Belgrade saw this concept as defensive, a plan to protect Serbs outside Serbia-and, in extremis, to prevent another genocide against Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia-to Zagreb and Sarajevo it looked more like a scheme to build Greater Serbia. It is clear that by early 1991, before Yugoslavia began to shatter openly, the pro-Milosevic elements of the JNA General Staff were pessimists who expected the state to collapse; they wanted to keep all Serbian land together in a Third Yugoslavia, and RAM was the paramilitary component of that strategy. But no one bothered to tell the rest of the officer corps about the secret plan.

Ironically, therefore, the RAM plan had less impact on the course of events than anticipated, as in its obsession with secrecy, the executors failed to inform JNA generals in the field about what was happening. As a result, JNA garrisons in Bosnia in late 1991 reported ominously about mysterious arms shipments to all ethnic groups-including the Bosnian Serbs, whose weapons were clandestinely coming from JNA arsenals! Even inside KOS, there was considerable misunderstanding about what its objectives were in Bosnia: Were the military, and its spies, supposed to be preventing Bosnian independence, or helping it happen on terms acceptable to Belgrade? Such confusion caused resentment among the JNA personnel trying to defuse the mounting crisis, who felt that the covert activities of some KOS personnel were making their lives harder. No wonder that one JNA senior officer considered military intelligence in Bosnia to be "totally incompetent and powerless to do anything in its remit properly."24

Just as mysterious, and no less significant, was the reaction of Alija Izetbegovic to the RAM plan. In the spring of 1991, hearing reports of illegal JNA support to the Bosnian Serbs, the Sarajevo office of the Bosnian SDB, which was loyal to the SDA, opened an investigation. This soon revealed ample information about nefarious activities sponsored by Belgrade on Bosnian soil, including taped conversations between Milosevic and Karadzic in which arms shipments were discussed; at least one JNA general, Nikola Uzelac, commander of the 5th Corps in Banja Luka, was likewise taped talking about the RAM plan.

These bombshells were leaked, causing a media sensation when they appeared serialized in several editions of Sarajevo's leading newspaper beginning in late September.25 The Bosnian secret police informed Izetbegovic about RAM in late May, months before it appeared in the press, but he expressed little interest; neither did the public furor caused by the story's appearance in the Bosnian media spur him to action. This was deeply mysterious and troubling to the SDB officers in Sarajevo who discovered the secret Serbian program; why the SDA leadership chose to do nothing they could never understand. Izetbegovic had reacted similarly to learning that top SDA officials were KOS agents: although he knew long before the war that Salim Sabic and Alija Delimustafic were spies for Belgrade, he did nothing to remove them from their powerful posts. Some of them concluded, without evidence, that KOS and Belgrade actually wanted Izetbegovic in power, as his Islamic radicalism was sure to discredit Bosnian independence; based on his inexplicable inaction, a few Bosnian spy-hunters speculated-without a shred of proof-that Izetbegovic was himself the leading KOS mole in Sarajevo, having been turned by the secret police during one of his jail terms.

THE PATRIOTIC LEAGUE

In the second half of 1991, contrary to Izetbegovic's public pronouncements of a peaceful future, the SDA was highly active in its preparations for the Bosnian war the parry's leadership knew to be imminent. As early as June, even before Slovenia and Croatia declared independence and ten months before open hostilities broke out in Bosnia, the SDA hierarchy agreed to form its own paramilitary, and behind closed doors some party leaders flatly stated that a war was unavoidable.26

The birth of the Muslim paramilitary force, known as the Patriotic League (Patriotska liga), is one of the least reported stories behind the Bosnian war; in most Western accounts it is mentioned in passing, if at all.27 The Patriotic League was placed under the leadership of Hasan Cengic, the thirty-four-year-old cleric who came from one of the leading Muslim clans and had been a codefendant with Izetbegovic in 1983. Known as the "flying imam" for his frequent trips to Islamic countries, Cengic was an adept organizer and a dedicated Islamist possessing a "conspiratorial logic" that awed friends and rivals alike; before the end of 1991, he was arranging secret arms shipments into Bosnia to outfit his paramilitary, including from newly independent Slovenia, which was happy to make money and cause trouble for the Serbs simultaneously. The Muslims in 1991 were also purchasing ex-Warsaw Pact weapons and ammunition in Vienna, while Lebanon was selling off excess firepower to their Bosnian coreligionists.28 It is important to note that the Patriotic League was created as the SDA's private militia, not as a Bosnian force; its officers were selected by the party, and it was established to serve Izetbegovic and his cause.

Funding the Patriotic League was a top priority for Izetbegovic. The paramilitary, which drew on the structure of Bosnian Territorial Defense units in Muslim areas, required weapons, munitions, supplies, and uniforms. Hasan Cengic was sent to friendly Islamic countries to raise funds; he told sympathetic audiences that the money was needed to secure an allMuslim state in Bosnia. Edhem Bicakcic, a veteran of the Izetbegovic group and the 1983 trial, defined the SDA's "primary interest" concisely: "a Muslim state that will enable our survival, and not a shared life which other nations have no interest in."29 Before long, KOS was receiving reports that the SDA was planning a thirty-thousand-man force, trained and equipped with assistance from Iran and Saudi Arabia. Just as troubling to Belgrade's counterspies was the SDA recruitment of Muslim officers in the JNA to help staff and run the Patriotic League.

While Cengic and others prepared for war, Izetbegovic continued to play a double game that maddened his friends and foes in equal measure. Adil Zulfikarpasic, putting aside his dislike of the SDA in favor of any chance at peace, met with Izetbegovic in mid-July 1991 to discuss power-sharing with the Serbs to avert war. Izetbegovic agreed this was a worthwhile effort, but when Zulfikarpasic returned with a plan to share power with the Bosnian Serbs and thereby purchase peace, the SDA leader rejected it out of hand. The details of this incident are revealing. When Izetbegovic returned from Washington, DC, on July 23, fresh from talks with senior Bush administration officials on how to prevent a Bosnian war, he participated in a group session with Zulfikarpasic and Muhamed Filipovic from the Muslim side, and Radovan Karadzic, as well as two other top SDS officials, Nikola Koljevic and Momcilo Krajisnik, representing the Bosnian Serbs. In the group, Izetbegovic was positive and optimistic, stating, "I think that our positions are very close, that we are close to reaching an agreement," and asked Filipovic and Koljevic to draft an agreement between the Serbs and Muslims. But Izetbegovic had hardly left the room when he renounced his request. To add insult to injury, he proceeded to cut the negotiators off at the knees on live television. The proposed power-sharing plan, understood by Bosnians to be the way to avoid a war, was the topic of a live program on Sarajevo TV, featuring Filipovic and Koljevic. While the show was in progress, a fax arrived at the studio from SDA headquarters stating that the party would not participate in any power-sharing arrangement with the Serbs. The incident was described as "absolutely politically harmful" by Filipovic, who never expected the Serbs to trust Izetbegovic or the SDA again.30

Tensions were on the rise not only in Sarajevo, but across Bosnia. The months leading up to open hostilities in April 1992 were filled with numerous incidents of local violence throughout the country; in the main, these garnered little attention, and none in the West, but they served to poison an already unhealthy political climate. Several of the worst incidents happened in the Drina valley, in eastern Bosnia, where the mixed Muslim and Serb populations viewed each other with deep suspicion. Both the SDA and the SDS were active in the valley, disseminating propaganda, funds, and weapons too. Muslims feared that the Serbs were readying for war in collaboration with the JNA, while Serbs feared Izetbegovic's plans for an Islamic state, and were worried by emerging SDA paramilitary forces.31 Both sides had begun arming quietly in valley towns in the summer of 1990, and titfor-tat violence became commonplace by the fall of that year, with attacks, some fatal, being perpetrated by Serbs and Muslims alike.32

When Milutin Kukanjac assumed his post as the top JNA general in Bosnia in the first week of January 1992, he faced the unenviable task of keeping the peace. He was a by-the-book soldier, well meaning but no politician; he owed his position to his popularity with General Blagoje Adzic, the JNA chief of staff, but he was hopelessly out of his depth. It didn't help that he was largely kept in the dark by the Federal Defense Ministry in Belgrade and KOS. Kukanjac's intentions appear to have been sincere, but he was never given the forces required to accomplish the mission he was assigned.

Like most JNA generals, Kukanjac took a dim view of Izetbegovic, whom he regarded as an unpleasant chameleon with dangerous views, yet he had no choice but to deal with him. The military's perception of the SDA leader was neatly summarized by a former JNA senior officer:

He was regarded as an extremist who was known from Tito's time. He was not taken seriously, even though he had served a jail sentence for nationalist activity.... He undertook moves that the military leadership proclaimed unconstitutional and illegal, and then stopped worrying about them. Yet it was perfectly clear that the only thing Alija Izetbegovic feared was the JNA.33

Izetbegovic knew it was imperative that the military be kept out of Bosnian affairs as much as possible, and in particular that the JNA not be allowed to derail the SDA's plans.

By early 1992, military counterintelligence faced the difficult situation of being aware of large-scale preparations for war by the Muslim leadership, yet having no idea what to do about it. A full-scale preemptive assault on the SDAs paramilitary was out of the question on political grounds. KOS chief Aleksandar Vasiljevic, unsure how to proceed, requested a meeting with Izetbegovic. It was arranged by Bosnian Interior Minister Alija Delimustafic, known to be very close to KOS (a fact he did little to hide), and took place on February 5 in Izetbegovic's office.

The purpose of the get-together was "most of all preventative in nature," according to Vasiljevic, who confronted the SDA leader directly with hard evidence of preparations for war by the Muslims. Vasiljevic told Izetbegovic that he wanted to inform him about the "secret military organizations" that were operating in Bosnia, something the president needed to be aware of; Izetbegovic, pretending surprise, replied that the idea was "ridiculous." The KOS chief countered with specific information about the Patriotic League, but Izetbegovic still said he couldn't believe it was true. Vasiljevic then showed him internal SDA papers, some of them encrypted, which discussed the organization and disposition of the Patriotic League, obviously obtained by high-level KOS moles in the party. To this, Izetbegovic replied that the force wasn't illegal, and was only intended to defend Muslims; then he reconsidered and added that the documents looked inauthentic, that KOS must have been fooled. This frustrated Vasiljevic, who conceded that his opponent was "actually very good at the game." He then pulled out his trump card, a covertly obtained video of a Patriotic League meetingsomething seemingly impossible to discredit, but Izetbegovic continued to deny that anything was amiss in the SDA. For Vasiljevic, it was a maddening experience that convinced him that dialogue with the Muslim leadership was fruitless, but it was a vintage Izetbegovic performance.34

By the late winter of 1992, the situation in Bosnia was worsening by the day. Violent incidents between Muslim and Serb paramilitary forces had become a regular occurrence, corroding the already tenuous political situation, while a quiet war was taking place in western Hercegovina, where Bosnian Croats, with assistance from Croatia's National Guard, attacked JNA units in a campaign that was an extension of the war in neighboring Croatia. On March 19, the Yugoslav military demanded that all paramilitary groups operating in Bosnia disarm as a prerequisite for any political solution; JNA sources estimated that there were one hundred thousand paramilitary troops in all.35

Political events launched by Izetbegovic had developed a momentum that would be difficult to halt. At the beginning of the year, fearing that Izetbegovic planned to declare Bosnia's independence from Yugoslavia, the Bosnian Serb leadership announced that they were forming a separate Serbian republic in the country which would secede if Sarajevo tried to cut ties with Belgrade. On January 25, Muslims and Croats in the Bosnian Parliament approved an independence referendum to be held at the end of February, with the support of the European Community. One day before the referendum, on February 28, the Bosnian Serbs approved a constitution for what they termed the Republika Srpska; they were preparing to act if Izetbegovic got his wish at the polls.

The outcome of the February 29-March 1 vote was not the outright victory the SDA wanted. With the support of the Bosnian Croats, the Muslim-backed referendum got 62.68 percent of the votes counted; most Serbs had boycotted, not wanting to give their imprimatur to the event. Yet this wasn't the two-thirds vote required by the Bosnian constitution. Izetbegovic prepared to declare independence nevertheless.

Many Serbs took it as a provocation and a bad omen that the second day of the referendum saw an attack on unarmed Serbs by Muslims in downtown Sarajevo, who fired on a wedding party. The assault took place in Bascarsija, the city's old Turkish quarter, and resulted in the death of the groom's father and the wounding of an Orthodox priest. It was apparent to clear-headed observers that Bosnia was headed for the abyss, and soon.

The Europeans made one last-ditch effort to stave off disaster in the third week of February. Portugal's Prime Minister Jose Cutleiro, acting on behalf of the European Community, brought together the representatives of Bosnia's nations in Lisbon. The conference included Izetbegovic, Karadzic, and Mate Boban, leader of the Bosnian Croats, and met with initial success. All parties agreed to the principle that Bosnia and Hercegovina would be a single, independent state organized on the basis of ethnic regions or cantons with significant local authority. Lisbon represented a major step forward, with the Serbs agreeing to a united Bosnian state, so long as the Muslims could not rule it in a centralized fashion, which was where cantons came in. Izetbegovic agreed to the plan, apparently seeing it is as the only chance to avoid war and thereby maintain an independent Bosnian state. However, upon arrival back in Sarajevo, he decided to scrap the initiative, with the apparent encouragement of Warren Zimmermann, the U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia; even his defenders admitted, "No sooner than he had given the go-ahead, then Izetbegovic changed his mind." Only two days later, on February 26, Karadzic and Boban met secretly in Graz, Austria, to discuss the future of Serbs and Croats in a partitioned Bosnia.36

The Lisbon debacle was the immediate cause of the war. Although some politicians on both the Muslim and Serb sides desperately wanted to avoid a civil war they knew would be terrible, it was clear that Izetbegovic had gone back on his word so many times that the SDS no longer had faith in negotiations. Yet there was one last peace attempt by the Bosnian Serbs, on March 15, when Muhamed Filipovic and Momcilo Krajisnik met to try and defuse the crisis. Krajisnik, an SDS leader and speaker of the Bosnian Parliament, asked Filipovic to immediately go to Izetbegovic and propose a meeting with Karadzic to attempt to avert war. Filipovic passed the request to Izetbegovic's daughter, his chief of staff, who told him word would come soon. But twenty-four hours passed without a call from the SDA front office, at which point Krajisnik expressed his regret and the two Bosnians parted formally, knowing what was coming.37

In spite of the mounting crisis, and clear evidence that hostilities were imminent, General Kukanjac continued to send optimistic reports to Belgrade. On March 19, he informed the General Staff, "The situation is improving." Whether Kukanjac really believed this or was merely passing wishful thinking to his superiors is not known; but there can be no doubt that, as Bosnia spiraled towards catastrophe, the JNA leadership was substantially disconnected from events. In fairness to Kukanjac, hardly any Yugoslav generals could believe that Bosnia would declare independence and civil war would return. Even Dzemil Sarac, a Muslim retired general who advised the SDA on military matters, flatly denied that the JNA could be dragged into a civil war: "We created that army, and that cannot happen."38

Remarkably, Izetbegovic uttered similar sentiments in public, down to the day that open hostilities broke out. Displaying an astonishing degree of either naivete or cynicism, he repeatedly made statements that assured citizens that war was an impossibility: "Two sides are needed for a war, and we don't want a war," and, "Sleep peacefully, there will be no war." Given Izetbegovic's knowledge of the deteriorating situation in Bosnia, such comments are difficult to explain away; many Muslims would later blame Izetbegovic's grossly inaccurate claims for engendering widespread disbelief when war actually did come, costing civilian lives.

Worse was the simple fact that Izetbegovic and the SDA had led Bosnia into a needless civil war that the Muslims were unready to fight. Although the Patriotic League had been organizing and preparing for nearly a year, its forces were small and ill-equipped compared to the units, both paramilitary and JNA, available to the Bosnian Serbs if hostilities broke out. Sarajevo's defenses were unready, a fact that one of the top generals in what was soon to be called the Bosnian Army would later attribute to "the defeatist behavior of the Bosnian government, its incompetence and superficial knowledge and monitoring of the military and political situation."39

On April 6, 1992, the European Community affirmed Izetbegovic's declaration of independence by recognizing the Republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina as an independent state. Within hours, the Bosnian Serbs declared the independence of the Republika Srpska, as Radovan Karadzic had promised. War had at last come to Sarajevo.

CHAPTER 3

As Walt Whitman famously said of America's Civil War, "The real war will never get in the books." That the terrible, inexpressible realities of savage conflicts cannot be fully conveyed on the page or screen is beyond question. That said, no war in history has been as instantly and vividly viewable as the Bosnian disaster that raged from spring 1992 to fall 1995. Thanks to the presence of satellite television in the war zone, graphic images of violence, much of it against the unarmed, were a daily feature of life in the so-called global village. In all corners of the world, it was impossible to escape the Bosnian catastrophe.

While the media was capable of reporting facts, albeit in a frequently one-sided fashion, conveying truths was another matter. Deceptively selfexplanatory images crowded out efforts at serious news analysis. Worse, media bias was rarely more in evidence, or more decisive, than among the journalists who made Bosnia their beat. Many leading reporters became strident and unapologetic advocates of the Muslim cause, ignoring and suppressing evidence that contradicted their viewpoint. The impact of what was soon termed "advocacy journalism" was astonishing in many Western countries, and none more so than the United States. Due to barrages of such propaganda masquerading as reportage, the Bosnian conflict became for many progressives a noble cause of a kind not seen since the Spanish Civil War. Here the "CNN effect" was breathtaking, assisted in no small measure by the Izetbegovic government's savvy use of the global media to politically win a war it was too inept to win militarily.

Nowhere was the baleful impact of such willful blindness on the part of the Fourth Estate more evident than in the non-reporting of the unpleasant side of Bosnian Islam at war. That the government headed by Alija Izetbegovic and fellow Muslims was anything but a democratic, peace-loving, and secular regime was an unwanted fact that Western reporters and "experts," aided by more than a few functionaries in Washington, DC, did their best to suppress. It was unacceptable to point out that the SDA represented a radical clique whose criminality, cynicism, and brutality were every bit as appalling as the misdeeds perpetrated by Bosnia's Christians. Here, journalists got their "first draft of history" pitifully wrong, and they were aided in their blindness by scholars and politicians who should have known better, but didn't want to. Worst of all, such careful avoidance of difficult truths opened the door for the growth of radical Islam in Bosnia, and with it the bringing of the global jihad into the heart of Europe.

DISCOVERING "ETHNIC CLEANSING"

As commonly presented, the story of how war actually arrived in Bosnia in April 1992 -the origins were very complex but the direct causes of the war were straightforward-is the converse of the truth. As illustrated in the last chapter, there were many opportunities to avoid war, and all were squandered, most by Izetbegovic and the SDA, who played a fool's game of bluff and deceit that eventually ran out. Although most Western, and especially American, commentators on the conflict tried at all costs to discredit the "ancient ethnic hatreds" explanation of the Bosnian civil war as too neat, that mantra was essentially accurate. The Ottoman legacy, when praised by Muslims in combination with ill-concealed affection for Islamic radicalism, was an incitement to Christian fears, and ultimately action. In any event, it would have taken the best of intentions and actors on all sides to overcome what has been termed Bosnia's "structure of reciprocal fears" left over from the fratricidal nightmare of 1941-1945.'

To Muslims, the opening act of the war was the attack on Bijeljina, a town in northeastern Bosnia near the border with Serbia, on April 1. This was carried out not by Bosnian Serbs, but by a band of irregulars from Belgrade, the so-called Serbian Volunteer Guard, led by the notorious gangster Zeljko Raznatovic, known as Arkan (Wildcat). His fashionably blackclad legion of thugs, looking like nothing so much as an exceptionally well armed Balkan heavy metal band, was controlled by Serbian State Security.2 Arkan's irregulars shot several Muslims and expelled more from this mixed Muslim-Serb town. To Muslims, this was the war's real beginning.

For their part, Bosnian Serbs considered that the war was already underway, citing attacks on Serb civilians by Muslim paramilitaries as far back as the winter-the 1 March "Bloody Wedding" in Bascarsija was for most Serbs a point of no return-and Bosnian Croats considered themselves at war with the Serbs and the JNA since 1991. At that point, the Croats regarded the Serbs as the greater foe, and their views of the Muslims included more suspicion than hostility as yet.

The role of the Yugoslav military in the opening stage of the Bosnian war was complicated, even contradictory, and has been widely misrepresented. By early April, it was obvious that General Kukanjac and the JNA had failed to prevent a civil war. When hostilities broke out, many JNA soldiers wished to cross the Drina to safety in Yugoslavia, wanting no part in the fighting. The situation was different for the large numbers of troops who were Bosnian Serbs. For months, the General Staff, planning for the worst, had been sending Bosnian Serbs to serve with JNA units in Bosnia and Hercegovina. There were a considerable number of Bosnian Serb career officers in the JNA; an impoverished people with a martial tradition, their sons chose military careers out of all proportion to their numbers. Thus, when war came in April, something like three-quarters of Yugoslav soldiers in Bosnia were serving in their home republic and didn't need to go anywhere.

On April 14, the Federal Defense Ministry in Belgrade decided to shift JNA troops who hailed from Serbia and Montenegro-what was now termed "rump Yugoslavia"-back across the Drina; in effect, the JNA in Bosnia was disbanded, and confusion reigned. In most cases, units and headquarters located in areas under Bosnian Serb control simply stayed in place. On 1 May, those units were renamed the Bosnian Serb Army (Vojska Republike Srpske-VRS), and in many places, JNA staffs became VRS without interruption; for instance, the JNA's 5th Corps, located in Banja Luka, the largest Serb-held city in Bosnia, was redesignated the VRS 1st Krajina Corps, without major changes in personnel.

The situation was more complicated for JNA units that found themselves in SDA-controlled territory. They were regarded as enemy forces by the Patriotic League, but in most cases the blockaded JNA units simply wanted to get out of the budding war zone. Izetbegovic expected the JNA to hand its equipment and garrisons over to the Muslims, something that the Serbs would never let happen. Chaos and violence were the result. SDA paramilitaries staged attacks on JNA garrisons across Bosnia, especially in the Sarajevo area, throughout April, with casualties on both sides. No longer could the JNA see itself as impartial: its largely Serbian soldiery either wanted to fight the Muslims or retreat across the Drina. The month of May would see two unprovoked Muslim attacks on the JNA that fatally poisoned relations between the army and the SDA.

On May 2, Izetbegovic returned to Bosnia from yet another failed effort by the Europeans to calm the conflict. His flight landed at Sarajevo airport, which was under JNA control, despite several attempts by the Patriotic League to seize it. Izetbegovic seems not to have considered that the JNA might not greet him with open arms. The outcome was an hours-long standoff-to Muslims, it was a kidnapping-with surreal moments when Izetbegovic called Sarajevo TV during a live broadcast to plead for his release. Although the SDA maintained that the JNA, meaning KOS, had hatched a nefarious plot to kidnap and replace Izetbegovic with a more pliant Muslim leader-some said Fikret Abdic-there is no evidence this was the case; the truth, the JNAs response to Izetbegovic landing in their midst was confused and chaotic.3

What the JNA wanted was to get its troops out of Sarajevo. The headquarters of the 2nd Military District, Kukanjac's ill-fated command, was holed up in Marshal Tito barracks in downtown, surrounded by Muslim paramilitaries. The army agreed to release Izetbegovic in exchange for letting the JNA garrison leave the city in peace. While the JNA kept its word, the Muslims did not. Patriotic League gunmen opened fire on the convoy as it drove through Sarajevo on May 3, seizing thirty-two military vehicles and killing seven JNA soldiers, and wounding many more. It was an example of bad faith that outraged the UN command in Sarajevo and caused lasting bitterness among the Serbs.4

Considerably worse was the Muslim attack on the Yugoslav convoy that attempted to depart Tuzla, deep in SDA-held territory, on May 15. After an agreement between the army, Tuzla's mayor, and the Patriotic League, a large column composed of JNA troops and civilians, including families of soldiers, departed its barracks. The JNA followed instructions and disarmed all vehicles; soldiers were only permitted to carry sidearms. Yet the first effort to leave Tuzla at 2 p.m. was turned back by Muslim paramilitaries, citing a technicality over alleged excess equipment. At 7 p.m., the convoy tried again, driving into a well-planned ambush, complete with snipers and mines, at a major intersection east of the city. JNA troops, many of them teenage conscripts, were slaughtered, with little chance to fight back. Few survived the attack, and most of those who did were wounded; survivors recounted murders of wounded JNA soldiers, shot execution-style, with Muslim civilians joining in the killing spree. How many died in the massacre was never established-the Muslims admitted the deaths of fifty-one JNA personnel, while Serbs claimed the number was much higher, between two hundred and three hundred-but it was impossible to ascertain because the Muslims have refused to open their files on the incident, allowing only the burial of thirty victims ten years after the killings. The bodies were so badly burned as to be unidentifiable.5

The Tuzla massacre made no impression on the Western media, setting the pattern that killings of Muslims were newsworthy, while the deaths of non-Muslims were not. For the JNA, it was a tragic and humiliating finish to its doomed role in Bosnia. May 1992 saw the end of Tito's army, and a purge of the senior officers whom Milosevic held responsible for the Bosnian debacle. Thirty-eight generals were cashiered, essentially the entire General Staff, among them Milutin Kukanjac and Aleksandar Vasiljevic. The KOS chief was accorded special punishment, and faced a court martial on trumped-up charges, including collusion with the Muslims and passing information and weapons to the Patriotic League! It was a scandal murky even by Balkan standards, and after a thirty-five-day trial that became a public spectacle and serving 110 days in prison for crimes he never committed, Vasiljevic was released when the verdicts were overturned.6

Throughout the war, the non-Muslim side received inadequate coverage in the Western media. There were many causes for this imbalance. Sarajevo was the only place in Bosnia where journalists felt safe and were able to find decent hotels, food, and liquor-factors never to be underestimated when evaluating the international press-plus the Muslims courted journalists, while the Serbs and Croats usually kept them as far away as possible, seeing them, not unreasonably, as biased against them. The war therefore was covered mainly from Sarajevo-in the case of Western TV, almost exclusively so. The result was that the Bosnian war as witnessed in the West was but a small corner of a much wider conflict, where Muslims were easily portrayed as helpless victims. What happened in the rest of Bosnia-or even behind the scenes in Sarajevo-was simply not news.

It is important to understand such factors when examining the strange media frenzy in the summer of 1992 that irrevocably converted a somewhat obscure regional conflict of a traditional if nasty kind into a global front-page, 24/7 phenomenon that was to be regarded as uniquely awful by all decent people.

The phrase that changed everything was "ethnic cleansing" (etnicko ciscenje in Serbo-Croatian) and it instantly defined the Bosnian civil war. The origins of the term are obscure, though it had been cited on occasion by more than one faction in Yugoslavia in World War II. Commonly portrayed in the West as genocide-lite, etnicko ciscenje in fact implied the removal of unwanted ethnic groups from a piece of terrain in the context of a military operation. Killing was not its primary intent. "Cleansing the terrain" (ciscenje terena), a related term, was a normal part of Yugoslav military doctrine, and was practiced by Tito's Partisans on a considerable scale in 1945, when enemy noncombatants, including prisoners of war and civilians, were executed in the tens of thousands.? Ethnic cleansing, though unpleasant, was no more than the counterinsurgency doctrine learned by three generations of JNA officers, who were trained in hunting down "fifth columnists" and "terrorists" by expelling sympathizers as well as fighters. The CIA's assessment of Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansing in northwest Bosnia in the spring of 1992, which received considerable media attention, is analytical and balanced:

The Bosnian Serb Army undertook these ethnic cleansing operations because it believed the Muslim population posed an armed threat or could act as a "Fifth Column" during the war with the Bosnian Government. The VRS focus on seizing weapons from the population and on detaining military-age males supports this analysis. That the Bosnian Serbs' paranoia greatly exaggerated this supposed threat does not mean that the VRS did not believe it. The few armed Muslim groups that managed to form and survive the Serb assaults and make sporadic guerrilla attacks on VRS and MUP [i.e., police] forces in the region inflamed this paranoia still further.8

Moreover, fighting to achieve population shifts had been commonplace in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 as well as World War II. The ethnic cleansing of important terrain was an unstated objective of all sides in the Bosnian war-Muslims, Serbs, and Croats-though the term was used much more by Western journalists and scholars than by anyone who was fighting in Bosnia.

The problem was that Bosnia was a multinational state down to the local level. There were few areas that had a strong ethnic majority: a rare exception was the Bihac region in the far northwest of Bosnia, which was over 80 percent Muslim, but it too had plenty of non-Muslims. In most parts of the country, municipalities were very mixed. Drawing coherent ethnic boundaries-which all three warring factions planned from the start, despite their public statements-required population shifts. There is no doubt that the Bosnian Serbs did more ethnic cleansing in 1992 than the Croats or Muslims, but this was because they had more firepower and better military organization. In addition, the Serbs had a bigger task before them, as they made up most of the agricultural population in Bosnia, and therefore controlled a disproportionate share of the land to be cleared of non-Serbs. Nevertheless, by the time the guns fell silent in fall 1995, all three ethnic groups had established quite homogeneous statelets, thanks to the ethnic cleansing practiced by Muslims and Christians alike.

Most of the fighting in 1992 was low-level, and population shifts occurred in every part of Bosnia. The only place where sustained, force-onforce combat happened was in the north, around Brcko, where the Bosnian Serbs battled for control of the Posavina corridor against the Bosnian Croat military, the Croatian Defense Council (Hrvatsko vijece odbrane-HVO), which was supported by forces from neighboring Croatia. The campaign, a strategic necessity for the Bosnian Serbs as the narrow corridor linked the western and eastern halves of their mini-state, raged through the spring and summer, ending in a VRS victory that kept open the lifeline of the Republika Srpska.I()

Across Bosnia, civilians fled from opposing armies and became refugees. The amount of actual killing was relatively small. On May 10, after more than forty days of fighting, the Bosnian public health service reported a total of 1,320 deaths from all causes, plus 6,700 wounded and 1,900 missing, as well as 320,000 internal refugees and 350,000 refugees who had fled the country.I I In the opening months of the war, all sides traded accusations of crimes against civilians, but they were not reputed to be on a grand scale. Everything changed in late July when reports appeared in Western newspapers about alleged Serb "concentration camps." Roy Gutman of Newsday broke the story on July 19, about camps at Manjaca and Omarska where Muslims were being held in bad conditions. The story exploded in the first week of August with multiple reports claiming that the Bosnian Serbs were interning and killing large numbers of Muslim civilians; again the term "concentration camp" was cited.

All the stories were poorly sourced and based on second- and thirdhand information, much of which was flat wrong, but the impact was immediate, and no Western journalists were willing to dig deeper to find the truth. When the British TV network ITN broadcast footage of undernourished prisoners held by the Bosnian Serbs at Trnopolje, the image was indelible, and the Muslims won the propaganda war in the first round. The U.S. State Department, which had cited Serb ethnic cleansing on occasion since mid-May, now used the term regularly, and Congress demanded action. The question was no longer whether the United States should take sides and intervene, but how and when could the Muslims be helped. 12

The State Department's desk officer for Bosnia, a forceful young diplomat named George Kenney, pushed an aggressive response to the humanitarian crisis. He was pleased when the United Nations took quick action, with the Security Council passing Resolutions 770 and 771 on August 13, which authorized the use of force in Bosnia and promised to punish war criminals. The next day, the UN Human Rights Commission appointed exPolish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki as Special Rapporteur for the Former Yugoslavia; a devout Roman Catholic, Mazowiecki from the start "tended to target only Bosnian Serbs," Kenney later conceded.13

Sensing an opportunity, Bosnia's Muslim government jumped on the bandwagon started by the Western media. Although Sarajevo had made no claims of mass killings before these accounts appeared in the international press, the SDA made them constantly once the story had been advanced. On August 6, Muhamed Sacirbey, the Bosnian Ambassador to the UN, submitted a report to the Security Council asserting that 17,100 Muslims had been killed in Bosnian Serb camps, without any supporting evidence; nevertheless, the charge was accepted at face value by Western journalists. Before long, Muslim authorities asserted that 260,000 Muslim civilians were in or had passed through Serb "concentration camps"-again, without evidence to back the claim; and again, the media reported this as fact.

In August, a leaked CIA assessment on the coming Bosnian winter appeared in the American press, including the assertion that up to 150,000 might die due to poor weather and the humanitarian crisis. Not to be out done, Jose-Maria Mendiluce, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Special Envoy for Bosnia, with his customary flair for the dramatic, predicted 400,000 winter deaths. On cue, the media went into hysterics and charged Western governments with near-criminal inaction. By December, Sarajevo's Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic was telling journalists, who by now had a Pavlovian reaction to the SDA version of events, that the Muslim side had 128,444 dead, a strangely precise figure that became dogma until the next summer. On June 28, 1993, Senada Kreso, Sarajevo's deputy minister for information, pushed the figure higher-again, no evidence was offered-by asserting that 200,000 had been killed, nearly all of them Muslims; this became the new gospel, never to be questioned by the faithful.14

Before long, officials of the new Clinton administration were citing the "200,000 dead" statistic, though the claim had never been investigated; by the time the war ended, the death toll was said to be a quarter-million, with the vast majority of the victims being civilian and Muslim. In the West, there were few public dissenters. Behind the scenes, several Western governments had looked into the matter and determined that the number of killed was actually vastly smaller. The International Committee of the Red Cross, experts in such matters, likewise investigated and concluded that probably no more than 30,000 Bosnians, military and civilian, were killed in the war's first year; and the actual number was perhaps under 20,000. It made no difference. The ethnic cleansing juggernaut proved unstoppable, and before long references to genocide and "another Holocaust" could be heard in influential circles in Western capitals.

Nearly a decade after the war's end, two separate independent investigations concluded that the true number of war dead, from all causes, was much smaller than believed. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, located in the Hague and no friend of the Bosnian Serbs, examined the matter over years and determined that 102,000 Bosnians lost their lives in the civil war: 55,261 civilians and 47,360 military personnel. The ethnic breakdown was more balanced than was thought: approximately 60,000 Muslims, 31,000 Serbs, and 12,000 Croats.15 A similar figure was the conclusion of a multiethnic team of Bosnians that closely examined missing persons claims using multiple computer databases, an analysis that revealed that far less than 150,000 Bosnians, and probably more like 100,000, actually died; the team could verify only 80,000 deaths.16 Roughly 100,000 dead, military and civil, while a significant figure, was less than 2.4 percent of Bosnia's prewar population; by way of comparison, Bosnia's death toll in World War II was 382,000, well over 15 percent of the population.17

George Kenney, frustrated by what he considered the U.S. government's inaction over Bosnia, resigned from the State Department in August 1992 in protest. For a time, his message was well received in the media and on the lecture circuit. However, he made the mistake of looking closely into the Bosnia story, and he changed his view; then no one wanted to hear what he had to say. Kenney's retrospective conclusion on the media's performance in that decisive summer of 1992 is telling: "Defying reason and logic, a myth of a Serb-perpetrated Holocaust, coupled with the refusal to even acknowledge atrocities against Serbs, became conventional

From the beginning, it was grossly politically incorrect to point out that atrocities were being perpetrated by all sides, and that the conflict was actually rather less unpleasant than the last war fought in Bosnia had been. But such a historically balanced perspective never stood a chance, and those who presented it-such as the senior U.S. general who observed about atrocities, having seen the Bosnian war close-up, "that behavior is not unprecedented in Balkan conflicts, and to say that it is peculiarly Serb behavior says more about the observer than the Balkans"-removed themselves from polite society.19

The received wisdom as portrayed by the media, and especially by TV, neglected atrocities committed against Serbs altogether. This was particularly true about the more lurid accusations surrounding the Bosnian war. Allegations of mass rapes-or in its extreme form, "rape warfare"-perpetrated by Serbs against Muslim women garnered huge media attention; such stories, usually unsubstantiated, received enthusiastic coverage from Western journalists and feminists, some of whom declared this an entirely new event in world history, indeed a "hidden genocide." While there is no doubt that female noncombatants were raped during the Bosnian war, this was hardly a new low in the annals of warfare. Moreover, there was never any evidence that this was an especially Serb crime; there were plenty of Bosnian Serb women ready to testify about their criminal mistreatment at the hands of Muslim rapists, but they had no Western audience, and certainly no doctoral students in women's studies eager to record and publish their stories.20

Indeed, one could have watched CNN and read major American newspapers religiously between 1992 and 1995 and hardly known that Christians had been victimized by Muslims. Although the Bosnian Serbs meticulously documented and investigated allegations of war crimes perpetrated against their people, efforts to gain the attention of the Western media consistently failed.

A telling case is Srebrenica, the location of Bosnia's best-known war crime in July 1995. That ethnically divided town and its environs, with a mixed Muslim-Serb population, saw atrocities committed by both sides during the war. But only Serb crimes made the news. Between May and December 1992, Muslim forces repeatedly attacked Serb villages around Srebrenica, killing and torturing civilians; some were mutilated and burned alive. Even pro-Sarajevo accounts concede that Muslim forces in Srebrenica, led by the thuggish Naser Oric, murdered over 1,300 Serbs-more were expelled and placed in what the SDA politely termed "isolation centers"and by the end of 1992 the Muslims had "ethnically cleansed a vast area," controlling 95 percent of Srebrenica municipality and half of the neighboring municipality of Bratunac.21

In December 1992, in nearby Goradze, a municipality that saw its share of atrocities perpetrated by Muslims and Serbs in the war's first months, Muslim forces led by Hadzo Efendic, the local SDA boss, murdered dozens of Serb civilians, and possibly as many as a hundred, on St. Nicholas Day. Efendic exhorted his troops to be brutal: "We are waging a holy war and the only good Serbs are dead Serbs."'Z On Orthodox Christmas, January 7, 1993, Muslim forces led by Naser Oric launched a surprise attack against several Serb villages near Srebrenica, killing and burning all the way. In a revealing example of the kind of war the Muslims were fighting, when the VRS counterattacked, Oric called in UN peacekeepers to protect the Muslim gains. An international crisis resulted, with the commander of UN forces in Bosnia, General Philippe Morillon, visiting Srebrenica in March and finding a bad situation; the town was crowded with Muslim refugees who had fled there to escape the Bosnian Serb counterattacks caused by Oric's offensive. This was a chance too good for the Muslims to let pass, and Efendic sent One a revealing message: "Whatever happens, prevent Morillon from leaving Srebrenica until he provides security for the people there. Do it in a civilized way. Use women and

The ploy worked, and the expected all-out counterattack didn't materialize. Fearing international repercussions, Milosevic in Belgrade apparently told Ratko Mladic, the VRS commander, to back off. Therefore the Bosnian Serbs did, reluctantly. Yet they did not forget about Srebrenica, as they were deeply embittered by the butchering of so many Serbs by Oric's forces, crimes that guaranteed that Mladic's revenge would be terrible when it came.

SPAIN OR AFGHANISTAN?

For Western liberals and progressives, the Bosnian war became the issue of the decade, thanks largely to misrepresentative media coverage. Though this was the first major foreign policy debate of the post-Cold War era, in truth there was very little debate about essential issues. Given the intellectual climate that dominated right-thinking circles-an amalgam of trendy multicultural views that considered nationalism to be the worst of all indecencies-they had no resistance to the view of the war peddled by Sarajevo and disseminated by print and TV journalists. The chattering classes saw the war in stark terms: a straightforward battle between good and evil, between medievalism and postmodernism, in which there could be no middle ground. Those in the academy and the media who dissented from this view were wise to keep quiet, knowing the desperate fear of appearing insufficiently progressive.

To many, this was the Spanish Civil War all over again. That conflict, misremembered by the Left as a simple, romantic struggle between democracy and Fascism, had an enduring appeal. David Rieff, one of the Western journalists who camped out in Sarajevo, explained the views of his profession simply: "Bosnia became our Spain." That perspective gained currency, and was encouraged by the Muslims. Izetbegovic himself called for the formation of new "international brigades" to fight for Sarajevo, just as they had battled for Madrid. None cared to comment that Izetbegovic already had his international brigades of foreign volunteers, but they were made up of Islamic holy warriors, not Western progressives.

The SDA made the most of the gullibility and wishful thinking of Western liberals, making them a cornerstone of the Muslim war strategy. The conflict gave journalists and others a sense of purpose, a rallying point for all like-minded people; and it was fun. At the end of the day, noted George Kenney, "Bosnia made good sport." Reporters who came to Sarajevo on what the locals derisively called "Balkan safaris" were courted by the SDA, who showed them what they wanted the West to see. "The trick," recalled one Muslim who saw through this deception, "was to ignore the facts."24

Sarajevo's manipulation of the media was based on the crucial claim of multiculturalism. The SDA presented the civil war not as a struggle between three warring factions, all of which were fighting for their ethnic and religious interests and frequently used unpleasant methods to do so, but rather as the stand of a democratic and multicultural Bosnian state against barbarian hordes of murderous Christians who were objectively Fascists.25 Such a bold claim on public virtue set the SDA's cause apart in the minds of Westerners-it was undeniably a "brilliant tactical move"-but few bothered to ask the crucial question if Sarajevo's claims were actually true.26

Among Western intellectuals, the pro-Sarajevo rhetoric became heated and lost any historical perspective. Soon, prominent American Jews were citing "Never Again," asserting alleged similarities between the fate of Bosnia's Muslims and that of European Jews during the Holocaust; this was puzzling to the Serbs, who wondered how Jews managed to overlook the SDA's unconcealed support for radical Islam, and in particular the party's pro-Palestinian views, to say nothing of the fact that in the last war, most Serbs had fought against the Nazis, while the Muslims had fought for them. Even respected commentators seemed to lose their heads. Leslie Gelb, one of America's distinguished foreign policy mavens, claimed that, "Bosnian Muslims will pay with their lives, and Americans with their faith," while the esteemed Albert Wohlstetter denounced Western inaction as "the worst performance of the democracies since World War Two-and the most dangerous."27

Less exalted thinkers proved even less balanced. Journalists, especially those who spent time in Bosnia and sensed that things were not as neat as they would have liked, jumped through considerable hoops to remove any stain from Izetbegovic and his party. Hence David Rieff, one of the better reporters, nevertheless refused to mention any viewpoint on the Muslim side other than the SDA's, and conceded that although some of Sarajevo's behavior before the war had been less than helpful, "In any case, the mistakes Izetbegovic and (Foreign Minister] Silajdzic had made before the war were not what caused the war."28 Many went to great lengths to deny that this was a civil war at all, citing the April 1992 "Serbian invasion of Bosnia," conveniently overlooking that it was Serbs from Bosnia who were doing nearly all the fighting on behalf of the Republika Srpska.29

Some of this was merely silly. Desperate to bring Western intervention on the Muslim side, one journalist observed acidly, "If Sarajevo had fur, there would be an international campaign to save it." No Western intellectual went further overboard than Susan Sontag, who made multiple trips to Sarajevo and offered increasingly hysterical pronouncements, denouncing Europe as "worthless" for not fighting on behalf of the Muslims. Though she had no detectable insight into the problems of the Balkans, as part of a family pro-SDA effort-she was Rieff's mother-Sontag carried considerable cachet. She was an icon to the Left for her trenchantly trendy literary criticism during the 1960s and 1970s, though by the time the doyenne of radical chic rolled into Sarajevo she was mostly famous for being famous. The Izetbegovic government was glad to have her propaganda help, though one wonders what the Islamist leaders of the SDA actually thought of the secular Jewish feminist lesbian. Her contribution to the Muslim war effort was staging a production of "Waiting for Godot" as a "searing indictment of the West" for not bombing the Bosnian Serbs, though exactly how this helped the Muslim forces was never altogether clear.30

From the war's start there were plenty of Balkan commentators who could hardly be accused of Serb nationalism yet had grave doubts about the SDA and what the Muslims were fighting for. Even those who placed blame on all sides considered Izetbegovic to be dishonest and delusional. As explained by Milovan Djilas, Yugoslavia's most famous dissident under Communism and a revered figure to many on the Left, "My opinion is that Alija Izetbegovic privately thinks he is an emissary from God sent to earth to do something great."31 Djilas, too, made no impression on rampant pro-SDA sentiments in the West.

The problem was that journalists, with very few exceptions, had no interest in the real story. Hardly any of them knew anything about the region, its history, its peoples, and its problems. They saw their mission as forcing Western intervention, and to do that they had to be advocates, not reporters. Ed Vulliamy, one of the most prolific journalists covering the war, later admitted, "You cannot expect people not to take sides.... If the professional ethics say I can't take sides, screw the ethics." He added, "This notion of neutrality is ridiculous. You have to engage.... We have to take sides."32

The damage wrought by the simultaneous abandonment of journalistic ethics and any desire to get to the real story was obvious from the spring of 1992. Martin Bell, an award-winning British journalist, had been more honest than most, noting then that "All the reporters who work regularly on the Bosnian beat are at least privately interventionist," and many were quite openly so. Roy Gutman, whose summer 1992 reportage of alleged Serb "concentration camps" won him the Pulitzer Prize and started the media frenzy, stated, "I do not believe the fairness doctrine applies equally to victims and perpetrators." Yet the most alarming admission came from Christiane Amanpour, the CNN correspondent whose face was indelibly associated with "Live from Sarajevo," and whose advocacy for the Muslims was unsurpassed. In 1996, she revealed how she approached Bosnia: "Objectivity, that great journalistic buzzword, means giving all sides a fair hearing-not treating all sides the same-particularly when all sides are not the same. When you are in a situation like Bosnia, you are an accomplicean accomplice to genocide."33

Such attitudes led to a depressing string of avoiding certain stories, and changing others to suit agendas. As the number of actual Serb crimes was deemed insufficient, more were invented by Western reporters. To cite only a handful of examples from the war's opening phase:34

• The August 13, 1992, sniper shot that killed ABC TV producer David Kaplan at Sarajevo airport, a major news story in America, was reported as a Serb crime, although UN observers determined that it came from Muslim positions, and could not have been fired by the Serbs.

• On several occasions in August 1992, photos published in the Western media, including a TIME cover shot, that were said to depict Muslim victims in "concentration camps," actually showed Bosnian Serbs; there were no corrections.

• August 1992 TV coverage of wounded "Muslim toddlers and infants," victims of sniper fire against a Sarajevo bus, included dead Serb children, an unreported fact.

• CNN repeatedly showed images of "dead Muslims" killed by Serbs that were actually Serbs murdered by Muslims (e.g., incidents March and May 1993).

• Newsweek on January 4, 1993, quoted an unsubstantiated figure of 50,000 Muslim women raped by Serbs; the UN's actual investigation actually revealed 2,400 victims, with only 119 documented cases.

• In February 1993, French TV journalist Jerome Bony attempted to verify claims of mass rapes at a Bosnian Serb camp; although the Muslims asserted 4,000 women had been victimized there, Bony uncovered only four women willing to back up the story.

All this led to anger on the part of UN officials, who were saddled with providing humanitarian aid in the war zone, and were well aware that all sides committed crimes against civilians. As one of them observed, "The American press has become very partisan and anti-Serbian. They are very selective and manipulate the information they use." Another stated, "I've worked with the press for a long time, and I have never seen so much lack of professionalism and ethics in the press," adding that, "A kind of nihilism has been established."35 Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie, the first UN commander in Sarajevo, was openly loathed by Muslims and Western reporters for his efforts to portray the conflict fairly, and the SDA tried to smear the general's reputation.36 General Philippe Morillon, his French successor, wound up just as disappointed with the Muslims, who, he stated after his tour of duty, broke more UN cease-fires than the Serbs, and were cynically exploiting the siege of Sarajevo for political effect.

What the UN knew, and reporters kept secret, was the ugly reality that Sarajevo sometimes resorted to killing its own citizens to win international sympathy and drum up hatred of the Serbs. As early as July 1992, some Western diplomats were on record stating that the Muslims were provoking VRS shelling for political advantage, something reporters didn't want known. Thus, despite many hours of TV coverage of Serb shells landing around Kosevo Hospital, Sarajevo's largest, no journalist pointed out the Muslim mortar position next to the building, the reason the hospital was in the firing line. By August, UN officials and several Western intelligence agencies concluded that some of the worst atrocities in Sarajevo had actually been staged by the Muslims to blame on the Serbs. One of the worst incidents was the May 27 "breadline massacre," in which sixteen civilians were killed by a reputed Serb mortar shell. The attack generated international outrage, but a senior UN officer explained that, after an investigation of the blast pattern, it appeared likely that the explosion was caused by a set charge, which could only have been placed by fellow Muslims: "We believe it was a command-detonated explosion, probably in a can." The same happened on July 17, when a mortar salvo that the UN determined was "choreographed" landed outside the building where British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd was meeting with President Izetbegovic. The explosions, which happened just thirty seconds after Hurd entered the building, caused ten civilian casualties. Observers noted that the Bosnian honor guard had mysteriously taken cover before the detonations. These and several other incidents of alleged atrocities were evaluated as likely Muslim crimes by the UN, an important fact that went almost entirely unreported in the global media.37

A related blind spot for Western journalists and commentators was the role of Islam in the fighting. Taking their cue from the SDA, they repeated the mantra that Izetbegovic was a thoroughly European Muslim and no sort of radical. In a failure with long consequences, the key question that was never asked was a basic one: Was Bosnia a new Spanish Civil War or the Afghanistan of the 1990s?38 Thus the important role of Islamism in the conflict, and the emergence of a European jihad in the mountains of Bosnia, remained a nonstory.

Western scholarship on radical Islam, which might have assisted in the public debate over Bosnia, was misguidedly weak in any event, with academic specialists on Islam and the Middle East seemingly interested in any topic but the worldwide jihad movement. The largely secular academy had managed to ignore the rise of the Islamist International, so much so that the president of the influential Middle Eastern Studies Association conceded that the field mistakenly considered Islam as "something of residual cultural importance and declining political salience," while Edward Said, the godfather of the discipline, insisted on writing about "Islam," as if the ancient faith were something imagined by ill-intentioned Westerners he denounced as "orientalists."39 Said's masterwork, Orientalism, was rarely criticized, though one who did, Malcolm Kerr of the American University of Beirut, observed, "What does he suppose the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Muslim Brotherhood are all about?"-a critique made poignant by Kerr's murder at the hands of Islamist terrorists in 1984. Ten years later, France's Olivier Roy, a respected expert who actually did bother to discuss Islamism, published a revealing title, The Failure of Political Islam, which concluded that the postIslamism phase had begun. Roy thus managed to describe Algeria's especially violent Islamist terrorist movement as "more nationalist than Islamist."+0

America possessed an even more dubious academician, John Esposito of Georgetown University, a favorite of the Clinton administration. Esposito followed the scholarly trend and completely ignored the impact of bin Laden and his ilk; in 1998, he helpfully explained that "Focusing on bin Laden risk[s] catapulting one of many sources of terrorism to center stage, distorting both the diverse international sources (state and nonstate, non-Muslim and Muslim) of terrorism as well as the significance of a single individual."41 Indeed, Esposito saw global Islamism as fundamentally democratic, stating that "most" such movements saw violence as "counterproductive." In a related vein, his book that discussed "terror in the name of Islam," published hastily after 9/11, argued that terrorism and Islam were only tangentially related; naturally, in his discussion of the Bosnian war, Esposito denounced the Serbs as "terrorists," not showing any hint that Muslims had committed terrorist or criminal acts.42

During the Bosnian war, Western views of the conflict became so monolithic, seeing nothing but virtue in the Muslims and nothing but evil in the Serbs, that even the Vatican's pronouncements on the fighting condemned the Serbs far more than the Muslims, paying little attention to Islamic crimes against Christians. Rome even made relatively little fuss about Muslim misdeeds against Catholic Croats, who otherwise received rhetorical support from the Vatican. While this was in part due to the Roman Catholic Church's efforts to establish dialogue and reach out to Islam, culminating in Pope John Paul II publicly kissing a Koran in May 1999 during an audience with Muslim leaders, it also had something to do with the effectiveness of the Western media offensive on Sarajevo's behalf. Certainly it seemed an abrupt about-face for the organization that launched the Crusades and which for over 1,300 years, into the second half of the twentieth century, had considered Islam to be a foe and rival.43 In comparison with the Holy See, with its long sense of history, uninformed journalists perhaps can be forgiven for seeing a conflict they didn't understand in black-and-white terms.

A BALKAN ISLAMISTAN

What Western journalists and scholars should not be easily forgiven is failing to uncover stories that were anything but hidden. There is no doubt that the urban Muslims encountered by most reporters were rather secular people to whom the call of Allah had scant appeal, but the same wasn't true of the less educated and less urban Muslims who formed the base of SDA support, and filled the ranks of the Muslim military. In addition, the war brought a wave of religious fervor among Muslims, some of whom rediscovered a faith they had never actually practiced. The position of the Islamic Community was laid out at the beginning of the fighting. Preporod, the IZ journal, published "Brief Instructions to Our Warriors," under the headline "For you there is no fear." It was a how-to guide for holy warriors, including:

"Go into battle with pure intentions and with complete faith in Allah; if you survive, you will be ghazis [fighters for Islam], and if you perish, you will be martyrs."

"If possible, go into battle with ablutions and, as an obligation, with God's name in your heart and on your lips."

"During your attack against the enemy or struggle with him, say the tekbir (Allahu akbar!). If possible take the Koran with you."44

Even more revealing was the SDA's manifesto, "Virtuous Muslim State," written by Adrian Jahic, the SDA party boss in Tuzla, the second-largest Muslim city. The article was published on September 17, 1993 in Zmaj od Bosne (Bosnian Dragon), a pro-SDA newspaper in Tuzla. It stated at the outset that "the essential question for a citizen of Tuzla today is not when the war will end, but how will we, Bosnian Muslims, act in the political and moral sense after the war, when we are in our own state." Furthermore, "Truth and justice belong only to those who fight for the survival and long-term goals of the Muslim people." Jahic then elaborated what those SDA-approved goals were, under the heading of "Objectives":45

• The territory controlled by the Bosnian Army after the war will be a Muslim state. This is the desire of the Muslim people and, after all, our secular leader Alija Izetbegovic and our religious leader Mustafa Ceric (the latter in a private conversation with me confirmed that the old dream of Alija Izetbegovic, a member of the Young Muslims, has been and remains the establishment of a Muslim state in Bosnia-Hercegovina; finally, his dream is close to realization and `he is not terribly upset about it.')

• The Muslim state will be the national state of Bosniaks, or Muslims, [with civil rights for minorities:] All citizens will be guaranteed equality before the law, while the level of personal prosperity, besides individual initiative, will especially depend on the degree to which the individual accepts and applies the principles and spirit of the Islamic ideology.

• The Muslim state will have an Islamic ideology, based on Islam, Islamic religious, legal, ethical and social principles.

• No state has ever assisted its opposition, nor has it deliberately offered the possibility for the promotion of opposing ideas and political interests.

• People who prove to be true Muslims, aware nationalists and good believers, will naturally have higher social privileges than those who persist in their opposition.

• [Islam will not be imposed, per Koranic teaching,] but the spirit of the ideology will be systematically promoted and will infuse the society in all possible ways ... non-Muslim material will be on the margins of production and broadcasting.

• The Islamic ideology will aim to gradually abolish the duality between sacred and secular, religious and political, which has been imposed on us by secularized Christian Europe against our will.

• In its nature, Islam does not recognize the difference between religious and social. After all, Islam is not a "religion" but a religious-political ideology, an all-encompassing approach to living. . . . True Islam always aims to encompass the society in which it exists, and with it its political and state structures.

• [Developing the] virtuous Muslim state [will take decades, under a dictatorship of the virtuous and wise,] and democratization of the state can only occur after that.

Such pronouncements, which confirmed all the warnings uttered about the SDA before the war, terrified Bosnian Christians, and worried secular Muslims only slightly less. Opposition from Muslim intellectuals who dissented from the SDA program grew louder, though unfortunately they received little attention in the West. They pronounced warnings about Izetbegovic's Islamization of Bosnia, which they termed his "hidden agenda," what the SDA discussed when reporters weren't around. They loathed his retrograde views and his cynical and ruthless acquisition of power behind a cloak of feigned democracy and multiethnicity. Izetbegovic, noted Mustafa Sehovic, a prominent secular Muslim politician and writer, "wants the whole of Bosnia. And don't pay much attention to his multiculturalism." The same conclusion was reached by Musadik Borogovac and Sven Rustempasic, whose 1993 White Paper on Izetbegovic concluded that the SDA leader "is not interested in becoming part of Bosnia's history, but a part of the history of Islam-the man who established a Muslim state on European soil in the style of one-man-against-the-world." Following the customary pattern, this critique was reported in the Balkans but nowhere else.46

That Izetbegovic had no identity outside his fervent faith was the conclusion reached by many close to him. As a Muslim associate stated after long observation, "Alija was nationally unconscious. He actually had no nationality."47 This was hardly the image the SDA wanted the world to see. Early in the war, the Islamists in power in Sarajevo perfected the schizophrenic pattern of telling the West what it wanted to hear, while actually doing the opposite. It paid off because no Western journalists seemed willing to point out the contradiction.

Izetbegovic thereby managed to win kudos from Western liberals for his stated multiculturalism while accepting an award from the Saudi government for his contributions to Islam and the jihad.48 Although the SDA professed a deep desire to join Europe and create a secular, civil society on the Western European model, this was actually the opposite of what the party wanted. As Izetbegovic had explained his views, "My tolerance is not of European but of Muslim origin. I am tolerant first because I am a Muslim, only secondly as a European." Indeed, becoming like Europe was a great fear, according to Dzemaludin Latic, one of the SDA's leading ideologists, who issued a warning: "My God, the Bosnian Muslims will, as a large, ugly copy, become a European nation culturally as well, with a European lifestyle, a European abandonment of God, and thus moral indifference too."49

One of the SDA's most important victories early in the war was capturing the Islamic Community, top to bottom. The party's support among local imams was strong, but the Reis ul-ulema, Jakub Selimoski, proved insufficiently pliant. No radical, Selimoski opposed political Islam and therefore had to be deposed, which he was in April 1993, after being in office for only two years. The new leader of the IZ was Mustafa Ceric, whose Islamism and close ties to the SDA leadership were well known. Although he was immersed in Western culture, thanks to an advanced degree from the University of Chicago, the new Reis loathed the secular, materialist West; Ceric's study at Cairo's al-Azhar was more important to his development. He had been imam of the Zagreb mosque since 1986 and joined the SDA shortly after the party was established; he began serving as Izetbegovic's special envoy to Muslims abroad in 1991.

Ceric's views were combative-he infamously requested during the worst of the Sarajevo siege that Western aid donors be sure to not include any pork products in the food packages being sent to starving Sarajevans-and he was a strong influence on the radical wing of the SDA. Ceric was a valuable tool in the party's Islamization efforts, the behindthe-lines struggle to undermine and demolish any secular Muslim identity. He was a Young Muslim in spirit, though he was born too late to have been a member of that secret organization. He advocated that the Islamic tradition was "the basis of the identity of the Bosnian Muslim nation," and, "without Islam, without Islamic civilization, without Islamic culture, we are no one and nothing."50 With such attitudes in the highest places in Sarajevo, it was inevitable that an already unpleasant civil war would grow even more so.

For the first several months of the war, Bosnia's Muslims and Croats were de facto allies, as both considered the Serbs to be the greater threat; a somewhat reluctant cooperation resulted. However, this alliance began to fray early in 1993 in central Bosnia, where the Muslim-Croat population was mixed down to the village level, and mutual suspicions ran deep. Witnessing the SDA's rising policy of Islamization in the regions under its control, Bosnian Croats came to view Izetbegovic as a threat equal to Karadzic, and small-scale skirmishes occurred with increasing frequency until there was a full-scale war for territory in central Bosnia between the HVO and Muslim forces.51

The nasty conflict between Muslims and Croats captured much media attention, and there was plenty of blame to go around. Neither Sarajevo nor Zagreb, which controlled the Bosnian Croats much more than Belgrade directed the Bosnian Serbs, behaved honestly towards its pseudo-ally, and both sides committed atrocities against civilians; this was the "war for more," as in 1992, but between new foes. (It should be noted that this was not an all-out war between the Muslims and Croats, and outside the decisive front in central Bosnia, the HVO alliance with the Muslims more or less held.) It was one of the leading Bosnian stories of 1993, and it dragged on, painfully, through the year.

What was new, however, was the appearance of a new, aggressive, and detectably Islamic army. Observers noted Muslim units carrying not just the green standard of Islam, but Iranian flags, too. Chants of "Allahu akbar!" were heard with mounting frequency on the battlefield, and ever more Islamic dress and salutations were seen among soldiers and civilians alike.52 The Muslim-Croat war also witnessed the grand debut of special units of Islamic volunteers that would change the face, and tenor, of the fighting; these would be responsible for a disproportionate share of the atrocities committed against Croats. It was no longer possible to portray the SDA and its armed forces as mere victims, as their army was on the attack, and behaving every bit as criminally as the Croats. Yet the Sarajevo cheering section that dominated the press and academia did its best to deny Muslim crimes, and when that was no longer possible, to dismiss them as "retaliation by the victims," an overly kind justification never bestowed on Bosnian Christians.53

While the conduct of the Muslim forces wasn't worse than the Croatsexcepting the savagery of certain units filled with specially trained "holy warriors"-neither was it any better. The list of crimes perpetrated against Croatian noncombatants makes for depressing reading. At least 1,500 Croatian civilians were killed in the fighting, many being massacred intentionally, and over 500 HVO prisoners of war were executed by the Muslims. Bosnian Croat analysis after the fighting revealed that the Croats of central Bosnia on a per capita basis were the "biggest victims of the war." Some 140,000 Croats were forced out or fled from their homes, which was presumably the objective of the Muslim campaign plan.

Croatian children died in disproportionate numbers. The Franciscan hospital in Nova Bila, located in the thick of the fighting, noted that of the 126 children confirmed killed, 60 percent had been felled by snipers. Croatian opinion was outraged by the Muslim shelling of a playground near Vitez on June 10, 1993, which killed eight children and wounded six.54 Muslim units of jihadi volunteers killed the unarmed in a particularly vicious fashion. In the village of Miletici, the massacre of five civilians was videotaped, while the slaughter of thirty-six Croats in Majine a few weeks later by "holy warriors" killed women and the elderly as well as disarmed HVO prisoners. A grave of nine victims of the Majine massacre discovered later revealed that seven had been decapitated. One of the imported Arab fighters later admitted his unit had murdered twenty or more Croats with knives and chainsaws, customarily to decapitate victims.55 Shortly before Christmas 1993, at Krizanicevo Selo and Buhina Kuca, the "holy warriors" butchered sixty-four unarmed Croats, then returned two weeks later to kill thirty-six more.

The Muslims' religious-cum-ideological agenda was apparent in their frequent desecration of Catholic churches during the fighting. Many were burned, while others were defaced in a grotesque fashion. Images of Jesus Christ, who is supposedly revered by Muslims, were regularly "modified" with pro-SDA graffiti ("Jesus for SDA") and campaign stickers, and some even had sexual organs artfully painted onto Jesus.56 Muslim forces detained Croatian prisoners, including civilians, in mass camps of the sort the media called "concentration camps" when run by non-Muslims. The ethnically mixed town of Bugojno hosted a notorious SDA-run camp in the town soccer stadium, where some eight hundred Croats were held for months in deplorable conditions. Unlucky inmates who had survived a stint in the Serbrun camp at Manjaca-one of those featured in the August 1992 media hysteria-said that Manjaca was a "hotel" compared to Bugojno's camp, where the sadistic commandant was running his own "private Auschwitz."57

Sarajevo at first denied that Muslim forces were committing any crimes. When even sympathetic Western reporters couldn't fail to notice the chilling accounts emanating from central Bosnia-though they seldom reported Muslim crimes in any detail-the SDA did its best to play it all down. Izetbegovic eventually conceded that "up to a hundred" Croatian noncombatants had been killed by the Muslims, then reestablished the moral superiority of his cause with, "When you add it all up, it is a hundred times less than what has been done to the Muslim people. Some would say a thousand times less."58

The number of civilians killed by each side in the Muslim-Croat war was in the low thousands. While the conduct of the HVO had been noncompliant with what the UN, NGOs, and human rights lawyers considered moral, neither did the Croats have units of religious fanatics decapitating noncombatants. Even the worst Croatian crime, the massacre at the village of Ahmici on April 16, 1993, which took the lives of 116 Muslims, turned out to have been allowed to happen by Sarajevo, which wanted more publicity of Christian atrocities. High-ranking officials of the Muslim secret police later admitted that Sarajevo knew that Ahmici was going to be assaulted, but declined to act, following orders from "the top." (In typical fashion, the Ahmici massacre received a great deal of Western media coverage, while the killing of twenty Croatian civilians on the same day went unnoted.) According to the top Muslim general, Izetbegovic was also behind the bestknown Muslim crimes, the underreported Grabovica massacres of September 8-9 and November 9-10, 1993, which left dozens butchered, and had been ordered by the SDA leadership to stoke the fires of interethnic hatred, a story line that was gaining the Muslims good publicity as victims.59

The Bosnian Croats discovered what their Serbian neighbors had learned the previous year. The double standards of Western journalists, expertly manipulated by Izetbegovic and his government, caused lasting political damage to anyone who dared to resist Sarajevo's "multicultural" juggernaut. Suddenly, Western capitals remembered that the Bosnian Croats had been Ustashas only fifty years before. Though all sides were committing war crimes-in fairness, it ought to be noted that none of the massacres perpetrated by either side in central Bosnia came close to the death toll of the U.S. Army's My Lai massacre in 1968-only the Muslims claimed to be morally above such conduct. By contrast, Radovan Karadzic and his followers never pretended to be anything but the Serbian nationalists that they were. The Bosnian Croats similarly found that religious nationalism wasn't an issue when practiced by the Muslims. Thanks to such double standards, radical Islam proved to be the only winner in the MuslimCroat war of 1993.

MARTYRS OR CRIMINALS?

Western reporters sometimes excused their noncoverage of the seamy side of the central Bosnian front by explaining that it was difficult and dangerous to operate anywhere but Sarajevo. Yet there was no excuse for failing to report appalling crimes that were happening before their eyes. Even in Sarajevo, the SDA showcase for its alleged multiculturalism, Muslim thugs beat, drove out, and killed Christians on a large scale, with thousands of murders perpetrated by the SDA's military and paramilitary forces, with hardly any whiff of these crimes in the international media.

Sarajevo, after all, was the one place in Bosnia where Izetbegovic's claim of supporting a secular civil society initially had some plausibility. With its mixed population, and few unmixed neighborhoods (only the Old City of Bascarsija was overwhelmingly Muslim), Sarajevo was the urban and secular oasis beloved by Westerners. While it was a charming city, an alluring mix of East and West, it was very unrepresentative of Bosnia, a point lost on most outsiders. In the spring of 1992, although the Bosnian military-officially the Army of Bosnia and Hercegovina (Armija Bosne i Hercegovine-ABiH)- was overwhelmingly Muslim, thanks to its origins as the SDA's Patriotic League, a third of Sarajevo's defenders were non-Muslims. The top general was always Muslim, but his two deputies at first were the Serb Jovan Divjak and the Croat Stjepan Siber. Divjak soon became a media star. Handsome and possessing natural dignity, he was a career JNA officer who believed in Tito's ideal of "brotherhood and unity," loathed Serbian nationalism, and therefore sided with Izetbegovic and the SDA when war broke out. It was a decision he would regret.

The siege of Sarajevo, depicted by the media as a David-versus-Goliath struggle, was actually an extended exercise in military incompetence on the part of the Muslims. The problem wasn't a lack of men-by mid-1993, the ABiH had 75,000 troops defending the city, significantly more than were besieging Sarajevo-but a shortage of heavy weapons and, even more, of detectable military skills. There was a lack of trained officers, a dearth worsened by the SDA's practice of promoting politically dependable hacks over JNA-trained veterans, whom they considered suspect, especially if they weren't Muslim. The Sarajevo siege was a case of static warfare, approaching an almost Great War-style of opposing trenches that rarely shifted, but this immobility was due less to Bosnian Serb strengths than to the SDAs incompetence and valuing of political over military factors.60

If the conduct of Izetbegovic and his government in the defense of Sarajevo was incompetent, its behavior behind the lines was nothing short of criminal. Behind a facade of tolerance, SDA thugs carried out a campaign of quiet "cleansing" of the city that had the same outcome as the better known crimes committed elsewhere in Bosnia. While the origins of this Muslim dirty war waged in Sarajevo exist in the SDAs seldom reported polices that favored an ethnically and religiously pure Islamic state, the practical beginnings came with the regime's heavy reliance on the city's criminal element to fight the "fifth column" that SDA hard-liners insisted lurked in Sarajevo.

At the war's beginning, the Patriotic League turned to the Sarajevo mafia for assistance in helping defend the city and procure weapons and munitions. Muslim organized crime was a core element of Izetbegovic's forces from the start. Some of the "heroes" who emerged were trademark gangsters. One of the best known was Jusuf Prazina, known as Juka, who before the war was a major league mafioso, with a force of three hundred debt collectors under him, and a reputation considered unsavory even by the standards of his profession. At the SDA's request, Juka's private army helped defend the city, though the gangster spent more time on commercial than on military matters. "Juka's army," which rose to four thousand in a short time, leading to Prazina's appointment as chief of Muslim special forces in June 1992, was heavily involved in organized crime, finding the "requisitioning" of expensive cars "for the city's defense" to be an especially profitable line of work. At the war's start, Juka was rushed to Kosevo Hospital, wounded not in combat but in a fight over a pit bull; his toughs forced the surgeons, who felt war wounded ought to take priority, to operate on Prazina. Although the Sarajevo media cultivated Juka's image as Robin Hood, he was loathed by most residents, who knew what he and his "soldiers" represented; their washing luxury cars in front of thirsty Sarajevans during the worst of the siege won Juka no fans. There was relief when Prazina fled the city and the country a few months later. His lucrative trading with the Croats and Serbs-business, after all, was business-had become too obvious for SDA comfort.6'

Although Juka's forces committed crimes against Serb civilians in Sarajevo-if killing Serbs was the point of the war, wasn't it easier to kill unarmed ones?-they had far from the worst reputation in the city. That dubious honor goes to the murderous gang run by Musan Topalovic, known as Caco. Another prewar gangster, Caco's only distinction was membership in a mediocre rock band; for him, the war was an opportunity to make money and act on his basest instincts. When the war started, he founded a special-assault company, consisting of eighty of his gangsters, as part of the 10th Mountain Brigade, which was raised in the Old City. Soon Topalovic commanded the brigade.

While he had strong business interests, and he saw the brigade as a profitmaking enterprise, Caco's real mission was eliminating Sarajevo's "fifth column." To him, as to many SDA hard-liners, all non-Muslims were potential enemies; Sarajevo, and Bosnia, would be better off without them. Of the thousands of Serbs in Sarajevo, probably a third were active supporters of the SDA government, another third were pro-SDS but were trapped on the wrong side of the fighting line, while the remaining third wanted nothing to do with politics or the war. In the eyes of Caco and other SDA-sponsored gangsters, they were all enemies to be eliminated.

As soon as the war began, Sarajevo's Serbs, even those loyal to Izetbegovic, were subjected to discrimination, firing from jobs as "Chetniks," physical harassment, and worse. A dozen unarmed Serbs were gunned down in front of police headquarters in the first month of the war, a premeditated mass killing that brought no arrests. Seemingly random violence killed dozens more Serbs, as the spring became summer. Many killings were cold-blooded and intended to scare Serbs out of the city. In a typical case, Dusan Djukic was knifed by Muslim neighbors in May 1992; his wife was called a "Chetnik bitch" by neighbors she had liked and trusted as her husband lay dying. She and other Serbs in the neighborhood sensibly got out of town before they, too, were killed.62

Evidence mounted that these "random crimes" were in fact part of a calculated SDA plan to drive non-Muslims away. The classic case was the murder of the Ristovic family on July 8, 1992, in Gornji Velesici, an ethnically mixed Sarajevo suburb. Six family members were gunned down by automatic-weapons fire while they gathered to eat lunch, a gruesome scene: among the dead were the family's sixty-one-year-old mother, two sons, and a daughter. The gunmen, clad in Patriotic League uniforms, were seen driving away in a car belonging to the Muslim police. General Divjak admitted that the ABiH identified the killers within hours, but the police blocked the investigation. The survivors of the Ristovic family, which had lived in Gornji Velesici for over three hundred years, evacuated, and by the war's end there were almost no Serbs left in the village.63

SDA gangs did the lion's share of the work-killing, raping, robbing, and looting-designed to produce an all-Muslim Sarajevo, and Caco's brigade was the most energetic. Considered a psychopath, Caco had a pathological hatred of non-Muslims that was expressed in barbaric torturing and killing. His thugs grabbed Serbs off the streets; most were never heard from again, and families were unable to gain information about their loved ones from the Muslim police or military. In some cases, whole families disappeared overnight, without a hint as to their fate. Caco and other SDA gangs ran over seventy small camps around the city where Serbs and Croats were held for "questioning," meaning torture. Among the worst crimes committed by Caco's private army was the kidnapping of young Serbs for "service" on the front line clearing mines in clear view of the enemy; families were sometimes given the option of paying a "blood tax" to save those selected for this unique death sentence. Caco's gang was so out of control that General Divjak's son was among those press-ganged into mine-clearing duties.

How many Serbs were murdered by Caco and his henchmen has never been firmly established, thanks to a large-scale cover-up by the Muslim police and security services. Many of the victims were buried in mass graves at Kazani, but reburials by the SDA prevented an accurate count of those murdered. By the war's end, it was clear that at least two thousand Sarajevo Serbs had fallen victim to Caco's gang, though the civic association representing the city's Serbs claimed the true figure was closer to five thousand.64

A year into the war, the extent of the SDA reign of terror had become impossible to hide. On May 27, 1993, General Divjak sent Izetbegovic a five-page letter that detailed the crimes committed by Caco and other gangs in uniform, submitting his resignation if the barbarism didn't cease. Worse for Sarajevo, the Western press began to notice that non-Muslims were disappearing and fleeing the city, contrary to the SDA's carefully cultivated multicultural image. The story, though considerably less reported than crimes committed by Serbs and Croats, was nevertheless becoming a nuisance. Therefore in October 1993, in the tightly controlled Operation Trebevic, special units of the Muslim police and army shut down Caco and attacked the headquarters of the 10th Mountain Brigade and the almost equally rogue 9th Mountain Brigade. Many of Caco's subordinates were captured, but none were surprised when Musan Topalovic wasn't among them; he died under unclear circumstances. The SDA couldn't risk a trial for the number-one Muslim killer.65

Nevertheless, the Muslim gangs serving in the police and military had done their work. They had destroyed the multiethnic cooperation that had been a hallmark of Sarajevo's defense at the war's start. By 1994, only 3 percent of ABiH soldiers were Serbs, and most of those were unwilling conscripts; soon there would be none.66

The culpability of the SDA leadership in such crimes, long denied by Izetbegovic's defenders, is no longer in doubt. It is impossible to believe that the government was unaware of the killing spree happening in front of them; besieged Sarajevo was a very small place, and the few reporters who cared to know had no trouble discovering the outlines of the story. Moreover, it took Izetbegovic a full half-year to shut down Caco's gang after Jovan Divjak sent his protest letter that detailed the nightmare. The president had direct knowledge of what was happening. The existence of Muslim "concentration camps" was discussed in an April 1994 meeting of the Bosnian presidency, six months after Operation Trebevic halted only the most odious SDA crimes in the capital. A transcript of the meeting, since authenticated, includes Izetbegovic's mentioning of "concentration camps" run by the Muslim army around Sarajevo; a high-ranking official informed Izetbegovic that the camps held persons who were being detained illegally without proof of any crimes for as long as two years, yet the camps weren't shut down, nor did Izetbegovic seem disturbed by what could not have been news to him.67

As awful as the "ethnic cleansing" perpetrated against the Serbs of Sarajevo was, it was less severe than the orgies of violence visited on Serbs outside the city. Under the eyes of the international media, the overt massacring and burning of non-Muslim areas would have been unwise even for Caco, but rural Bosnia, safe from cameras, was another matter. Thus the people known as "Alija's Serbs" received a slow-motion "cleansing" and were spared the mass horrors inflicted on Serbs of the nearby Drina valley, where Muslim forces under Naser One waged a campaign of terror. This appalling story, already cited, included religiously motivated massacres like those inflicted on the Croats of central Bosnia throughout 1993. Sarajevo mercifully saw nothing like the July 5, 1992, attack on the village of Knjici, which led to the death of 182 Serb noncombatants, including the killing of the Orthodox priest Slobodan Bohan during a church service, and the burning of thirty-three houses, many with elderly people still inside. Bosnia's capital likewise was spared crimes like the January 7, 1993, attacks on several Serb villages on Orthodox Christmas, including the massacre at Kravica, which left fifty-two civilians dead. The oldest victim was eighty-eight, the youngest four, and fourteen families lost two or more members; the Muslims also decapitated victims for Koranic effect.6s

In retrospect, it seems astonishing that Izetbegovic and the SDA managed to conceal such crimes and successfully portray themselves in the West as victims. How the Muslims succeeded in demonizing their foes and winning the support of the Christian West, especially the United States, in their war for Islam is perhaps the most remarkable and depressing saga of Bosnia's civil war.

SARAJEVO'S BELTWAY BOYS

Muslim success in shaping and manipulating Western opinions about the war was no accident. It was the outcome of a clever and calculated strategy to use the Muslims' victim status as a key tool of war, which was implemented by what one of the few Americans to see through this ploy termed a "prolific propaganda machine."69 The preexisting sentiments in America's media and academic circles made Sarajevo's job easier, but the SDA left nothing to chance. They established a public relations office to deal with the media long before they had any coherent military forces. Unlike the Bosnian Serbs and Croats, the Muslims courted journalists and gave them access to their officials. The resulting coverage was very satisfying to Sarajevo, even though it often bore no resemblance to the actual situation. For instance, Haris Silajdzic, the Muslim foreign minister and later prime minister, was a media darling, noted for his "Western" ways and sympathetic views. Yet it was rarely mentioned that he was the son of a Muslim cleric and hafzz (one who has memorized the Koran) who had been the imam of Sarajevo's leading mosque, and that Silajdzic was himself a graduate of a medresa with a major in Arabic.

No matter how much they trusted in Allah, they couldn't leave relations with Washington to chance, so the SDA hired leading American public relations firms to do their bidding. Sarajevo selected Hill & Knowlton, which had a background in Yugoslav matters; it was better known as the PR firm behind the infamous phony testimonies before Congress in 1990 about alleged Iraqi slaughter of infants in Kuwait. Until mid-1993, Sarajevo also engaged Ruder Finn, which helped score a big diplomatic success at the June 1993 Conference on Human Rights in Vienna; PR assistance led to Muslim dominance of the event, culminating in an eighty-eight to one vote deploring UN inaction in Bosnia and demanding the lifting of the UN arms embargo on the former Yugoslavia.70

Another significant help was the Bosnian ambassador to the UN, Muhamed Sacirbey. Mo, as he liked to be called, was a fixture on American television during the conflict; with his unaccented American English, Sacirbey was a powerful weapon in Sarajevo's PR arsenal. The new ambassador had in fact spent most of his life in the United States and was a U.S. citizen. Few mentioned that he was the son of Nedzib Sacirbegovic (Mo used the Turkish version of the family name), a member of the SDA inner circle and Izetbegovic's partner in Islam for a half-century. And no American reporters mentioned that Sacirbegovic Senior was a convicted terrorist in Yugoslavia for his activities with the Young Muslims, and had been a cofounder and editor of the extremist journal E!-Mudiahid with Alija Izetbegovic; Sacirbegovic's close ties with the conservative imam Mehmed Handzic, a wartime Ustasha collaborator, similarly went unnoted. The elder Sacirbegovic also served the cause as a diplomat, acting as ambassador-at-large for the Muslims, mainly to Islamic countries where he was well received.

Sending Sacirbey to the UN was "a supreme show of nepotism," noted a dissenting Bosnian Muslim, but it was part of a thought-out plan. His service to the Muslim cause was vital to winning the propaganda war, and Bosnian Serb and Croat counterefforts in the Western media were weak and insubstantial: they didn't have a Mo. By the time Sacirbey became a complete embarrassment, the war was over and the Western media had moved on.

What reporters didn't mention, but those who spent time with him knew, was that Mo was a big-time gambler and thief. He left the UN to become foreign minister-it was the first time in his life he had actually lived in Bosnia-a scandal-ridden tenure that resulted in international warrants for inquiries into missing foreign ministry funds, a half-million dollars purloined in the last year of the war alone. This probably had something to do with Mo's gambling habits. He was arrested in a Bosnian raid on an illegal gambling parlor, a charge he tried to dodge by claiming immunity as a cabinet member. It was the same story in Louisiana in April 2000, when he was arrested at a New Orleans casino under suspicion of using sticky dice. Mo, again the ambassador to the UN, protested violently and faced charges of disturbing the peace as well. His effort at asserting diplomatic immunity was invalidated by his American citizenship, but the ploy got him out of jail long enough to become a fugitive again. It was a bizarre end to the public career of a onetime media fixture, whose scandals went unnoted by the journalists who had known Mo well.71

How official Washington reacted to Sarajevo's charm offensive is a complex tale. Finding a coherent story line is no small challenge, thanks to the twists and turns of U.S. policy in reaction to media-driven events. Indeed, the phrase "U.S. policy towards Yugoslavia" between 1991 and 1995 is itself an "oxymoron," noted one student of the topic, so convoluted is the saga.72 What is not in dispute is that American policy towards the Balkans went from supporting Yugoslav unity as late as mid-1991 to outright backing of the Bosnian Muslims two years later. What happened?

Washington was not surprised by the collapse of the Titoist edifice, though it did not anticipate the level of violence and destruction that the sinking of Yugoslavia would bring to the Balkans. An October 1990 CIA assessment concluded that Yugoslavia's days were numbered, thanks to the reemergence of nationalism in place of the moribund ideology of Titoism, and that a civil war was a distinct possibility. This was not seen as Washington's problem, however, a view expressed clearly in late May 1991, on the eve of the breakup, by General John Galvin, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who explained that as Yugoslavia was not inside the NATO defense perimeter, events there would not bring NATO or U.S. intervention.73

The George H. W. Bush administration appeared to have little interest in Yugoslavia-in fairness, far weightier issues such as the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, as well as the unsatisfactory end of the Iraq war, dominated Washington's foreign policy apparatus-and as late as June 1992, two months into Bosnia's civil war, President Bush continued to advocate isolationism towards the Yugoslav disaster, stating, "I'm not committed to use U.S. troops there."74

The State Department followed Bosnia and Yugoslavia more closely than the administration, not least because the deputy secretary, Lawrence Eagleburger, had been ambassador to Belgrade and took a personal interest in Balkan affairs. Neither was Warren Zimmermann, the current envoy to Belgrade, a neophyte at Balkan mysteries. Unlike the Pentagon, which wanted to stay far, far away from the Balkans, a view encapsulated by Joint Chiefs Chairman General Colin Powell, who saw in Bosnia nothing but a European Vietnam waiting to happen, the diplomats didn't shy away from Bosnian problems. Yet here was another case when the "experts" got more wrong than right; neither Eagleburger nor Zimmermann seems to have believed that the Titoist state would really disappear, and they also read Bosnia wrong. They inadvertently pushed Bosnia closer to civil war, believing that U.S. recognition of Bosnian independence would help stave off attacks by the Bosnian Serbs and Belgrade.

Zimmermann's mistakes at Lisbon have already been noted. Despite the ambassador's persistent denials that he encouraged Izetbegovic to turn down the last chance at peace, it is now widely believed that he indeed did so.75 Zimmermann's role in Belgrade in retrospect seems to have been far from helpful to the interests of peace or the United States. Though he asserted that the secession of Slovenia and Croatia in June 1991 had been "illegal," the ambassador then backed Bosnian independence, adding three years after Lisbon his view that Izetbegovic's "rushing towards independence" had been "a big mistake" with fateful consequences. Like many others, Zimmermann fell for Izetbegovic's self-portrayal of moderation. When asked about the Islamic Declaration, the ambassador replied that Izetbegovic "never mentioned an Islamic state in it." When the questioner countered that Izetbegovic certainly had called for one in his book, Zimmermann replied, "He did. But that is not his formula for Yugoslavia."76

Although the State Department by late 1992 was dominated by interventionists who wanted U.S. military action to defend the Bosnian Muslims, theirs was the minority view in the Bush administration. The Defense Department and the intelligence community remained decidedly anti-interventionist: the former feared a ground war in the Balkans, while the latter was skeptical about finding any "good guys" in Bosnia to back.77 Yet thanks to the political demise of George H. W. Bush in November 1992, the State Department's anti-Serbian view would soon become the dominant one. The GOP's loss would be Sarajevo's gain.

What happened to Bosnia was Bill Clinton. Candidate Clinton was known to have scant interest in foreign and defense policy, indeed he seemed almost allergic to such matters, but the governor took an early interest in Bosnia. When the media frenzy of August 1992 hit, beating up President Bush for not doing enough to stop what the press termed "genocide," Clinton helped fan the flames. As early as August 5, he called for bombing the Bosnian Serbs to help the Muslims. His strident advocacy of Sarajevo's cause was identical to that voiced by the liberal media. Clinton mostly followed the lead of progressive opinion on Bosnia, as the poll-driven politician did on so many matters, but his early pro-Muslim statements were more than anything a convenient way to score points against the Republicans.

Clinton's Balkan hawkishness continued after his inauguration, and only a few weeks after taking office he promised to bring "the full weight of American diplomacy to bear" on the Bosnian crisis. Vice President Al Gore was known to be an even more strident supporter of the Muslim cause than Clinton. As official Washington was now overtly pro-Sarajevo, the military dimension to the problem now came to the fore. In late February 1993, a twenty-six-person team of American experts headed to Bosnia on a three-week fact-finding mission to lay the groundwork for shifts in U.S. policy. The agenda was assessing options for military action, and the likely impact of direct intervention on behalf of the Muslims. The Pentagon experts concluded that the Bosnian Serbs could do little to resist a U.S. air campaign against them. It is important to note that U.S. policy was already pro-Muslim-there was never any possibility of military intervention to merely halt the fighting, the point was to help one side in the civil war-and the increasingly militant and Islamic nature of the SDA government was no concern of the Clintonistas.78

Key European allies were worried by the new, openly pro-Izetbegovic tenor of U.S. policy. London and Paris, in their skepticism about the Muslims, would not support more aggressive American intervention in Bosnia; it was soon fashionable in Western Europe to deride American "Rambos" who wanted to bomb the Bosnian Serbs back into the stone age, while many wondered what had transpired to make so many dovish Democrats turn so militant.

Echoes of this debate were heard in Washington. Clinton himself quietly backed away from some of the Islamophilic zeal of his administration by the summer of 1993. He and Hillary Rodham Clinton had read and been impressed by a current best seller, Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts. Though more travelogue than history, the book took a skeptical view of the Balkans and emphasized its long traditions of violence and ethno-religious hatreds; loathed by progressives, Kaplan's work was balanced and therefore unacceptable. Balkan Ghosts did, however, cause the new president to question the wisdom of U.S. intervention in such an intractable region, and encouraged caution over rapid action by Washington.79

Official Washington was divided over Bosnia. The State Department and the Clinton White House were in the grip of what a NATO intelligence official with experience in the Balkans termed the "good guy, bad guy" mindset. The administration's foreign policy apparatus was controlled by strident advocates of U.S. intervention, who accepted the media's proMuslim reporting without qualifications.

The intelligence community's record was better. More willing to examine the facts, intelligence analysts generally did not give undue weight to atrocity claims, and were skeptical about the veracity of anything coming out of the Balkans, where no one was to be trusted. In 1993, the intelligence community assessed that "the Bosnian Serbs until then were the best at observing the agreement on ceasefires and humanitarian relief," a view that won no friends at the White House.80

Good work by the intelligence community was undercut by the low status accorded the national security agencies by the Clinton White House. James Woolsey, Clinton's first director of Central Intelligence-who only met once with the president during his tenure-recalled that the CIA and the intelligence community were fair in their assessments and steered clear of interfering in policy matters, "Indeed, we were giving no policy advice at all," but unbiased assessments interested the Clintonistas not in the slight1 est: "it was all swimming against the stream."'

The truth was that the friends-of-Sarajevo lobby in Washington, which included nearly all the bureaucrats who mattered in the Clinton administration, was badly informed, and ignored news they didn't want to hear. Even when U.S. intelligence was able to demonstrate that much of the media reporting coming out of Bosnia was little more than SDA-approved propaganda, White House officials were more likely to believe press reports than classified assessments made by the Defense Department or even the UN. The intelligence community was simply not being listened to, for ideological reasons. Clear evidence from the CIA and the Pentagon revealing that the Muslims, too, were committing atrocities was dismissed by the White House and the State Department, while carefully argued assessments predicting the impossibility of a multiethnic Bosnia emerging from the war were likewise ignored. By the time Clinton was finishing his first year in office, the CIA had grown nearly as pessimistic about Bosnia as the Pentagon, which repeatedly expressed the view that America was not able to repair that country's "hundred-year-old conflict." A silent war between the spies and the diplomats, with the latter doing the administration's bidding, was about to break out over how much Washington should help the Bosnian Muslims.82

In the debate over Bosnia, reality stood no more chance in the Clinton White House than it did in the media or academia. American policy towards Yugoslavia reacted poorly to the dissolution of the country. Although Bosnian succession was dubiously legal under international law, Washington supported it wholeheartedly, leading some to wonder if "international law is whatever the United States and the UN Security Council say it is." Furthermore, U.S. policy had always blamed the Serbs disproportionately for the crisis, operating under the critical yet unspoken assumption that "Serbs had no reason to fear living in a state dominated by the Muslims." a3 Yet whatever the shortcomings of the Bush presidency's policies towards the Balkans, they paled in comparison with the pro-Muslim activism of the Clinton administration, which parroted the fashionable assumptions and conclusions of the journalists who presented the Bosnian civil war to the world.

Islamophilic viewpoints were so entrenched by mid-1993 that support for Sarajevo cannot be placed solely at the Democrats' feet. Though the few skeptics about the Muslims tended to be on the Right, there were influential Republicans who favored intervening on behalf of Sarajevo. Republican Senate minority leader Bob Dole was a strident advocate of direct military intervention to "save" the Muslims, and there was no detectable difference between Dole's views and those of George Mitchell, the Senate's Democratic minority leader. Clinton's preferred policy, known as "lift and strike"meaning allowing the Muslims to obtain arms in violation of the UN embargo, coupled with air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs-had significant support on both sides of the congressional aisle.

That such policies might actually make the war worse, and assist those who were far from friends of Western ways, didn't matter to those who had become partisans of Izetbegovic and the SDA. As the dissident diplomat George Kenney observed of lift and strike: "The emotional resonance of Genocide obscured the dismal possibility that arming the Muslims could inflame the war, killing far more than had already been killed: after a supposed two hundred thousand deaths, it didn't matter if additional tens of thousands died so long as we did what was `right.' Like the cruel Balkan leaders themselves, advocates of arming the Muslims became strikingly callous."84

In retrospect, perhaps the worst effect of the endless and largely sterile debates about Bosnia during 1992 and 1993 was that they distracted attention away from more important issues. Although supporters of the SDA emphasized that the real issue was human rights, and nothing about national interest or other old-think things, that postmodern view was far from the truth, though few saw this clearly at the time. While wonks and politicians in Western capitals-none more than Washington-debated how much to assist the Muslims, on the other side of the globe hard men were doing more concrete things to aid their coreligionists in Bosnia and spread the global jihad in the hopes of winning a strategic victory for the forces of radical Islam.

CHAPTER 4

With Koran and
Kalashnikov

The impact of the Bosnian war on the Islamic world was a factor seldom considered by Western journalists, scholars, and politicians. It seems to have occurred to few of them that the conflict played differently in the Third World than in their own countries. Yet the agony of their Bosnian coreligionists was felt acutely by Muslims worldwide, thanks to effective propaganda work by Sarajevo and numerous Islamic organizations. For Muslims, the Bosnian civil war they saw-with barbaric crimes perpetrated by Christians against innocent Muslims, who were being persecuted and killed for their religion-confirmed all their worst prejudices about the West. Over months and years, a nightly barrage of shocking TV images had a decisive effect. Outrage and fury were the result across the Muslim world.

The Muslim propagandists for whom the war was a blessing, thanks to its effectiveness at stirring up anti-Western hatred, had much of their work done for them by Westerners. After all, the coverage of the Bosnian conflict seen across the Islamic world was only somewhat more biased, lurid, and moralizing than what was seen in living rooms across Europe and North America. On the essential outlines of the war, Muslims and Western progressives agreed, and even hard-bitten opponents of the Serbs and Croats in Islamic countries would have found little if anything objectionable in CNN's coverage of the conflict.

There was therefore some irony in the fact that the ultimate beneficiaries of all that propaganda work, Muslim and Western alike, would not be the beleaguered Muslims of Bosnia, but the members of the worldwide radical Islamist infrastructure that after victory in Afghanistan was searching for a new war and a new cause. For those holy warriors, the Bosnian civil war represented a new front in the global jihad, in Europe, that offered new opportunities for spreading their extremist faith through preaching and combat. As in Afghanistan, the imported fighters were received by local Muslims with open arms, and the militants were fighting on the "right" side of the struggle, as far as most Europeans and Americans were concerned. Once again, as in Afghanistan, the seamy side of the holy warriors' role in the war was something few Westerners, in governments or in the media, were eager to publicize.

PARADISE IS IN THE SHADOW OF SWORDS

Alija Izetbegovic and his Party of Democratic Action had long been infatuated with holy war. The pronouncements of the Young Muslims had featured prominent references to the jihad since that organization's founding in 1941. For all Bosnian Muslims of a radical bent, the war that broke out in April 1992 was unquestionably a jihad, a struggle for the Muslim faith.

Although jihad, meaning struggle, has many shades of meaning, that the primary one involves waging war for Islam cannot be in doubt. Noting the different interpretations of jihad, "one of the basic commandments of the faith," Bernard Lewis has explained simply, "The overwhelming majority of classical theologians, jurists, and traditionalists, however, understood the obligation of jihad in a military sense, and have examined and expounded it accordingly."I As to the meaning of jihad, it was explained even more simply by a Bosnian Muslim veteran of the 1992-1995 war: "No child above the age of twelve has any doubt." Criticizing efforts to obfuscate the meaning of the word, he added, "these mainstream Muslims-I consider myself one, by the way-are betraying themselves. Moderate Muslims I have met do not use the word `jihad' to mean they are going to partake in a nonviolent struggle. They do not say, for instance, that they are holding a jihad when they sell their cars to put their son through school." He noted of his youth in prewar Bosnia and later service in the Muslim military, "Not once in my life did I hear the word `jihad' spoken in a mosque, until we found ourselves in a war in Bosnia. Then I heard it very often."2

Muhammad himself endorsed, and practiced, the violent spreading of the faith and considered it the obligation of every Muslim. As expressed plainly in one of the most famous hadiths (the oral traditions of the Prophet), "Paradise is in the shadow of swords."3 The Ayatollah Khomeini expanded on this in the twentieth century: "Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war.... The sword is the key to paradise."`'

As devout traditionalist Muslims, Izetbegovic and the SDA leadership adhered to the ideology of jihad that stands at the center of their faith, though they were careful to not utter a whiff of this in front of Westerners. During his frequent travels to Western capitals to win diplomatic and military support, the Muslim president spoke of multiculturalism, minority rights, and democracy; during his no-less-frequent visits to Islamic capitals, he made references to the jihad, stating that Sarajevo's victory "will come from Allah," and that the Muslims would use their fighting faith to overcome "the forces of evil."5

It would be wrong to describe Muslim radicals, in Bosnia or elsewhere, as "fundamentalists," a term without meaning in an Islamic context. Fundamentalism refers to a style of American Protestantism and has no direct equivalent in Islam. All truly believing Muslims are, from a Western viewpoint, "fundamentalists," as "The literal divinity and inerrancy of the Koran is a basic dogma of Islam, and although some may doubt it, none challenge it," to again cite Bernard Lewis.'

The main theological movement behind the upsurge of twentieth-century radicalism in the Muslim world has been Salafism (salafiyya in Arabic), a neo-orthodox variant of Islam that appeared in North Africa in the late nineteenth century. The aim of the Salafi movement has been to reform Islam in line with the teaching of early Muslims, particularly the "pious forefathers" (al-salaf al-salih); it always had a distinct anti-Western bias and a dislike of "official" Islam, which it saw as decadent and compromised. Salafi ideas had a major impact in Egypt, principally through the Muslim Brotherhood, and played a significant role in the Algerian liberation war against the French from 1954 to 1962. With its fusion of radical Islam and aggressive nationalism, Salafism proved a potent ideology. Its influence on Bosnia's Muslims was strong beginning in the 1940s, thanks to ties to Egyptian Islamists. Salafism would be the dominant ideology among the thousands of Muslims who came from across the Islamic world to fight for the SDA and their coreligionists in Bosnia.?

For the Islamist International, fresh from victory in Afghanistan, the Bosnian war was perfectly timed. When the Soviets withdrew ignominiously from Afghanistan at the beginning of 1989, it was assumed that the puppet regime in Kabul couldn't hold out for more than a few months. However, the Najibullah-led government managed to delay its demise for three years, thanks mainly to strategic missteps by the Islamists, and the jihad against the Soviets that began at the end of 1979 didn't end in total victory until the late winter of 1992, just in time for the holy warriors of Allah, the triumphant mujahidin, to move on to the next battle.

Thousands of Muslims, mainly but not exclusively Arabs, emerged from the Afghan crucible with invaluable combat experience and an indelible sense that they were unstoppable. After all, they had forced the retreat of the mighty Soviet Union, a defeat viewed by devout Muslims as having had decisive import in the collapse of the Soviet empire that followed. Among the fighters known throughout the Islamic world as "Afghans," the largest contingent, like Osama bin Laden, were Saudis-some 5,000 in all-followed by 3,000 Yemenis, 2,800 Algerians, 2,000 Egyptians, 400 Tunisians, 370 Iraqis, 200 Libyans, dozens of Jordanians, plus a fair number of Pakistanis, and small contingents from Indonesia to Bosnia.8

Many had nowhere to go. Heading home after the Afghan victory wasn't an option for thousands of jihad veterans. Egypt's Islamic Group (al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya), a violent offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that participated heavily in the Afghan war, was also at war with the Egyptian state. Cairo periodically cracked down on the radicals, arresting tens of thousands of suspected Islamists in sweeps every few years, and home was not a safe place for an Egyptian "Afghan" to be in 1992.9 Algerian "Afghans," some of the most die-hard Salafists, likewise looked homeward and saw an unfavorable political climate. Therefore many chose to continue the jihad in Bosnia, where they were told Muslims were threatened with genocide at the hands of bloodthirsty Christians. For mujahidin, it was an irresistible script.

The arrival of the mujahidin in Bosnia in the summer of 1992 was no spontaneous event. It was part of a campaign plan executed by leading Islamists who wanted to keep the jihad alive and move the struggle into the West. Osama bin Laden, as yet virtually unknown in the outside jihadi circles, was lionized by the holy warriors thanks to his reputation won on the battlefields of Afghanistan, and he and his organization, known as al-Qa'ida, played the dominant role in getting the international component of the Bosnian jihad off the ground in 1992. The core of al-Qa'ida was comprised of "Afghans" who were trusted by bin Laden. It had its origins in the socalled Service Bureau (Makhtab al-Khidamat-MAK) that got volunteers to Afghanistan and kept them supplied with weapons and munitions that were funded largely by donations from across the Islamic world. The genius behind MAK had been Abdullah Azzam, whose reputation overshadowed that of bin Laden. But after Azzam's mysterious death in 1989, the Saudi businessman and jihadi entrepreneur came into his own. By the time Bosnia went to war, bin Laden was the unchallenged leader of the international Islamist organization known as "the Base"-al-Qa'ida.10

The leadership of the probably four thousand foreign Islamists who fought for Sarajevo during the civil war came mostly from al-Qa'ida; they were bin Laden's men. But the rank-and-file was an amalgam of mujahidin from many countries and groups, the two largest being Egypt's Islamic Group and Algeria's Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Arme-GIA). Many of the most esteemed holy warriors in Bosnia were well known alQa'ida veterans of Afghanistan, and several of bin Laden's superstars became martyrs in Bosnia, including al-Moataz, who was the heroic commander of the defense of Jalalabad, killed in action near Zavidovici; his deputy at Jalalabad, Abu Thabit al-Masri, was also martyred; and another hero of the Afghan jihad, Abu Abdallah Lili, known as Mountain Lion, also died near

Although bin Laden controlled a large part of the jihad movement that moved into Bosnia in 1992, and benefited enormously from the conflict, the term al-Qa'ida was seldom heard in the Balkans. Only senior leaders knew the details of the organization; conspiratorial methods kept lower-ranking mujahidin in the dark about who was really in charge of operations and logistics. The holy warriors called themselves mujahidin or "soldiers of Islam." The name bin Laden would have meant little to the average member of the Islamist International in Bosnia, especially in the war's opening phase.12

While al-Qa'ida's role was the dominant one, many radical Islamist groups participated in the struggle in Bosnia. As one Arab "Afghan" recalled, when he arrived in Bosnia in mid-1992, he was appointed commander of a company of 107 mujahidin, thanks to his battle experience in Afghanistan, and while most of his troops were Arabs, about twenty-five were Turks and a dozen were locals who joined out of religious fervor. Not all the mujahidin were members of al-Qa'ida, however, with many belonging to Lebanese Hizballah.13 That organization, which possessed ample experience from its decade-long struggle against the Israelis, gave both fighters and trainers to the mujahidin in Bosnia, and a separate detachment of fifty instructors arrived from Lebanon in November 1992.14

Getting to Bosnia was not straightforward due to the siege of Sarajevo and a lack of safe routes into the country. Zagreb quickly became the "main Muslim supply center" where within a year twenty Islamic organizations, including MAK, established offices to support the jihad by getting men and munitions into Bosnia through Croatia. How this worked was explained by Rabi Id Abd al-Ghani, a mujahidin veteran of Afghanistan, who, rather than return to Egypt in 1992, was sent to Bosnia "to continue the jihad," as many holy warriors were ordered to do. With the assistance of the Islamic Group, al-Ghani eventually made it to Bosnia, where the Egyptian radicals had several detachments fighting, via a circuitous route that took him to a safe house in Sudan and an extended stay in Khartoum for additional combat training. The orders to head to Bosnia were given by al-Qa'ida, as indicated by the stop in Khartoum, where bin Laden and his organization were headquartered from 1991 to 1996.15

Volunteers were coming from every corner of the Muslim world. While most were Arabs, others were not; some, mostly fanatical converts, came from Western countries. They admitted they had fighters as young as fifteen in their ranks. Many nationalities were represented among the fifteen mujahidin captured by the Bosnian Croats in the opening months of the war (the HVO captured thirty-two more in the first months of 1993), while two British citizens were confirmed killed in action with the Muslim army in 1992. It was customary among the holy warriors to be vague about their origins: "My nationality is Islam," was how Abu Abd-al-Aziz, the first leader of the Arab mujahidin in Bosnia in the summer of 1992, explained the matter. The charismatic Aziz, a leading "Afghan," elaborated what he and his men were doing in Bosnia: "As in Afghanistan, we don't want any leadership or position for ourselves. We have only one goal we are committed to-either victory or death."16

Aziz was a rarity among the mujahidin as he gave interviews to journalists. Although most Western reporters didn't want to know about the Islamic volunteers, a few found the sudden appearance of militants in desert garb too strange to ignore. By the early fall of 1992, it was clear that two hundred to three hundred mujahidin were located in the Travnik area of central Bosnia, and another two hundred or so were nearby. Aziz, their leader, drove around in a new black Nissan SUV and made no effort to conceal his presence or position: "We are not here to bring supplies like food or medicine ... we bring men," was how he characterized his mission. It was clear that although the native Muslims respected their courage and skills and greeted them warmly-"They have no fear for their lives.... They came here to be killed," as one Bosnian observed-they found their rigid mores less attractive. Once the story broke and it was no longer possible to deny their presence, the SDA spun it successfully: there are hardly any mujahidin in Bosnia, they are just for show, and it's all the West's fault anyway. "We feel betrayed by Europe," was the rationale offered by Mustafa Ceric, Izetbegovic's favorite imam, as the reason why the holy warriors had been invited to come to Bosnia. The dilemma presented by their appearance was summed up by a Bosnian Muslim officer: "It's good for us that they're here. But after the war, who

The mujahidin relied on an intricate support web that spread across countries and continents, using clerics and fund-raisers to keep the holy war going. That structure, parts of which were left over from the Afghan jihad, included supporters in the United States. One of the most important pieces was the al-Kifah ("Fight") Relief Organization, located in Brooklyn and managed by Omar Abdel-Rahman, the infamous "blind sheikh" who played a key role in the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. A wanted man in his native Egypt, Rahman was the "spiritual leader" of the Islamic Group, and was considered by Cairo to be running a jihadi government-in-exile from the safety of New York. Rahman and his staff had learned how to support a far-flung jihad during the 1980s, when al-Kifah dispatched men, guns, and funds to Afghanistan; now that apparatus was aimed at the Balkans. Rahman, who was closely linked to Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the leaders of the Islamic Group and bin Laden's factotum, preached regularly about the need for Muslims to support their brethren in Bosnia. He did more than talk, however, and his support was crucial in using American sanctuary to rally Islamic volunteers from around the globe.18

Rahman had many helpers in the United States, among them Clement Rodney Hampton-El, a master bomb maker and veteran of the Afghan jihad, who had worked with MAK and in 1992 was a key figure at al-Kifah; he had longstanding links to the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), the most important religious-cum-terrorist support agency in Bosnia and across the globe. Hampton-El was convicted of conspiracy for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and at his 1995 trial he admitted his role in the Bosnian jihad.

In December 1992, he was summoned to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, DC, where he was told that wealthy Saudis were sponsoring the holy war in the Balkans. Hampton-El was given a budget of $150,000 to recruit and train mujahidin for Bosnia, and was put in touch with a radical cleric named Abu Ameenah Bilal Phillips. Born Dennis Bradley Phillips in Jamaica, this fervent convert from Communism to Islam was a Canadian citizen and full-time jihad logistician, a job he obscured by working as a prolific author on Islamic topics. Phillips, the head of Riyadh's "Project Bosnia" in America, had been in the employ of the Saudi government since early 1991, when he proselytized among U.S. military personnel serving in Saudi Arabia, a task he continued until 1994; with the help of Saudi psychologists who identified soldiers who were susceptible to conversion, Phillips claimed to have brought three thousand Americans in uniform to Islam. Phillips used his contacts and gave Hampton-El a list of U.S. military personnel who looked like good candidates for service as mujahidin in Bosnia. Phillips gave him the names near Washington, DC, after a conference for Muslims in the U.S. Armed Forces. Al-Kifah targeted converts among currently serving soldiers and those who had recently left the military.19

That wasn't the only connection between al-Kifah and the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War. The organization maintained an office in Zagreb, which it used as a forward logistics base to assist holy warriors headed to Bosnia. Croatian investigators determined that al-Kifah was funding some of its operations with large quantities of Kuwaiti dinars that had been stolen by Iraqi authorities during their brief occupation. The Croats concluded that al-Kifah had obtained the purloined currency through al-Qa'ida channels, and its Zagreb office was funded by bin Laden.20

Islamist radicals played an important role in Sarajevo's public relations campaign in America. The most important bin Laden front working Washington on the SDAs behalf was the American Task Force for Bosnia, a registered charity that lobbied Congress and the Clinton White House. This organization, considered by Americans to be a group of moderate Muslims whose sole interest was helping innocent Bosnians, was headed by Khaled Saffuri, a Palestinian immigrant who cultivated links across the American political spectrum and proved an effective advocate of the Muslim cause in Bosnia. Saffuri worked directly with the White House on Balkan issues. The task force shared offices with the American Muslim Council, headed by Abdurahman Alamoudi, who was also the task force's treasurer. Saffuri made several suspicious month-long trips to Bosnia, while Alamoudi was the deputy director of Taibah International Aid Association, which had offices in Bosnia and had been founded by Abdullah bin Laden, Osama's cousin.21

The leadership of al-Qa'ida took a direct interest in the Bosnian war; for them, it was the new Afghanistan, an opening front for the jihad that would bring the holy warriors into Europe. Bin Laden's deputy, Ayman alZawahiri, made multiple trips to Bosnia to assist the cause. Dzevad Galijasevic, a Muslim politician and head of the Maglaj municipal council, stated that Zawahiri appeared in the Maglaj area in central Bosnia as early as September 1992 to visit mujahidin camps. Zawahiri, who spent a great deal of time in Khartoum with the al-Qa'ida leadership, was assessed by Egyptian authorities-who considered the physician to be public enemy number one-to be running several operations in Bosnia though humanitarian organizations serving as fronts. Cairo's state-run media pronounced that Zawahiri made regular trips to Sarajevo for high-level meetings with local officials as well as mujahidin.22

Zawahiri dispatched his brother Muhammad, another full-time mujahid, to the Balkans to serve as an al-Qa'ida representative during the civil war. An expert logistician known as "the Engineer," Muhammad worked in several countries during the 1990s as an IIRO official, including Croatia and Albania as well as Bosnia; the charity cover was an effective method of allowing him to support the mujahidin with minimum hassle from unfriendly governments. In central Bosnia, Muhammad al-Zawahiri was well received, and he made an extended stay there in 1993 under the alias Muhammad Ibrahim.23

Osama bin Laden himself spent time in Bosnia during the war. In the early I 990s, the terror master was nothing like the international celebrity he became later in the decade, particularly after the August 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa, but as early as mid-1993 he was cited by Egyptian security officials as an especially toxic holy warrior who was playing a substantial role in the Bosnian jihad. They singled out the wanted "Saudi businessman" as one of the key players behind the Islamic war effort in the Balkans.24

Bin Laden's presence in Bosnia, and his connections to the top leadership in Sarajevo, were something the SDA later went to great lengths to deny, for obvious reasons. But multiple sources attest to his visits to Sarajevo to arrange Islamist support for the Muslim cause. The most interesting, and most credible, witness to place bin Laden in Bosnia is Renate Flottau, a respected journalist, who in the early 1990s was the Belgrade-based Balkan correspondent for Der Spiegel, Germany's leading newsmagazine. She encountered the tall, soft-spoken Arab in 1994-she didn't recall the exact date, as she made many trips to Sarajevo that year-and the reporter thought little of it; she ran into many odd characters in wartime Bosnia, and the significance of the meeting only became apparent years later.

Flottau noticed many mujahidin on the streets of Sarajevo that season; they made no effort to mask their presence, though most presented themselves as humanitarian aid workers, not soldiers. She encountered "a tall, striking Arab with piercing eyes, a long, black beard" in the foyer of the office of President Alija Izetbegovic; Flottau was waiting for an interview, while the Arab wanted an audience. He presented her with a business card saying Osama bin Laden but, Flottau conceded, "the name meant nothing to me." The two had a pleasant conversation for about ten minutes during which bin Laden espoused his Islamist views in excellent English but with a fervor "both impressive and startling," she recalled. He talked at length, asking her no questions but revealing that he was in Bosnia helping bring holy warriors into the country, and he had a Bosnian passport issued to him by the Vienna embassy.

Bin Laden's demeanor was unwarlike, more like a preacher, as he spoke in a "quiet voice, impressively, confidently." The scene was, she recalled, "incredibly bizarre." Izetbegovic's staff was visibly displeased that the mystery man was speaking to a Western journalist. They informed Flottau that bin Laden was "here every day and we don't know how to make him go away." Though staffers treated bin Laden like a dignitary, neither did they want him hanging around the front office.

That was not the last time the German reporter saw the Saudi fighter. She encountered him again at Izetbegovic's office later the same week, this time accompanied by several SDA senior officials Flottau knew; included in the entourage were multiple men from the Muslim secret police. Bin Laden's visits to Sarajevo, she learned, were kept secret but were in fact known to many.25

The open secret was known to more than a few Muslim politicians. Sejfudin Tokic, a senior Social Democrat and speaker of the upper house of the Bosnian parliament, explained that the stories about bin Laden's local visits were "not a fabrication," as they were part of the lethal embrace between the SDA and radical Islamists which "no doubt existed," and attested that photos exist of Izetbegovic and bin Laden together.26 Sarajevo's leading muckraking journalist, Senad Avdic, a vociferous critic of the Islamists, added about bin Laden's visit (or visits) to see Izetbegovic, "everything indicates that he could have indeed been at that place without a problem."27

Bin Laden's close links with the SDA and Izetbegovic seem to have been well known in jihadi circles worldwide. The relationship was explained by Salman Raduyev, the Islamist leader of the Chechen terrorists who battled against Russia in the 1994-1996 war: "The president saw him in Bosnia.... He has met with Alija Izetbegovic."28

ALLAH'S NGOS

The Bosnian jihad was made possible by a diverse array of Islamic humanitarian organizations, many of them Saudi-directed and funded. In ideological as well as practical terms, the impact of Saudi Arabia on the Bosnian conflict was decisive. Here Wahhabism, the official state religion-cum-ideology of the Saudi kingdom, was critical. Bin Laden was a prime example of Wahhabism (wahhabiyya in Arabic) at work. Named for the Arabian warrior-revivalist Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792), Wahhabi beliefs are especially strict and puritanical, though they are hardly new in Islam. They don't call themselves Wahhabis, but a!-Muwahhidun-roughly unitarians ("those who profess the unity of God"), and they are an example of virulently radical Sunni Islam par excellence. Obsessive about the rigid distinction between correct belief in Allah and unbelief-meaning in practice any other kind of Islam, to say nothing of other religions-Wahhabis have earned a bad reputation for strong proselytism of their faith and even stronger intolerance of everyone else's.

This militantly neo-traditionalist form of Islam is important mostly because it's been the official faith of oil-rich Saudi Arabia since the House of Saud conquered the Hidjaz in the mid-1920s. Saudi oil wealth would make Wahhabism a major force in Islam worldwide.29 Its advocates are rigid and violent, although since its emergence in the early nineteenth century most of their intolerance has been visited on fellow Muslims, Sunni and especially Shia, who espouse the wrong version of Islam. Even in Arabia, the home of Muhammad and the faith, Wahhabi violence against "heresy" has been legendary. When they first ruled over Mecca and Medina, Islam's revered Holy Places, from 1812 to 1813, Wahhabis destroyed offensive religious monuments-in practice, nearly all of them-including those commemorating the birth of the Prophet. To Wahhabis, this was idolatry and had to be annihilated. They demolished all the domes over the graves of the leading figures of early Islam. When they invaded Karbala (in today's Iraq), they destroyed the shrine of the great Imam Ali and ordered all the inhabitants killed as apostates.

Like all radical forms of Islam, Wahhabism places great importance on the du'a (calling) approach, meaning an encompassing emphasis on proselytizing the true faith everywhere, usually among Muslims who belong to the "wrong" Islam. All Islamists can be broadly divided between those who advocate a du'a approach to social transformation, and those who support the violent, or jihadi approach. However, it would be wrong to imply that the division is always clear or firm. Many advocates of du'a Islamism are at best conditional in their condemnations of jihadi violence and terror, while many who begin with du'a move into more aggressive forms of Islamism. Hence efforts by Western scholars to present the Muslim Brotherhood-the classic case of a du'a Islamist movement-as a nonviolent, even progressive organization because it doesn't directly advocate terror to advance its cause, are misguided and betray a miscomprehension of the essentials of radical Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood has begotten countless terrorists who have perpetrated terrorist crimes around the world, killing thousands of innocents. Among them was Ayman al-Zawahiri, who, his biographer observed, "influenced bin Laden in the sense that he was able to sell bin Laden his 'revolutionary jihadi ideology' which changed bin Laden from a Salafi preacher doing charity work to a jihadi fighter immersed in finding legal rulings to fight against the Americans and Zionists."30

Those who fought on the front lines for radical Islam in Bosnia combined both the du'a and jihadi approaches in a manner that Westerners, conditioned to see preachers and warriors as opposite social types, found difficult to comprehend. Abu Abd al-Aziz, the first mujahidin chieftain in Bosnia, explained that he left Kabul and headed to the Balkans with four veterans of the Afghan jihad upon hearing of the "horror" of the "infringement of chastity" of Muslim women by Christian men in Bosnia. Aziz's greatest source of pride was teaching the misguided Bosnian Muslims true Islam, something that must not be undone: "The worst scenario," he explained, "is to have a mixed state or a mixed parliament or a mixed government between Muslims and Christians." Aziz made numerous trips around the world after his Balkan tour of duty ended, spreading word of the good works-on the field of battle and off-done by mujahidin in Bosnia, including several trips to the United States, where he was received as a hero by Islamic organizations (his last trip to America was in late December 1995, when he attended the third annual meeting of the Islamic Assembly of North America in Dearborn, Michigan). Aziz regularly mentioned that he had met Alija Izetbegovic.31

How the mujahidin saw their role, and combined religious and military duties, is exemplified by the Bosnian experience of Sheikh Imad el-Misri, a key Islamic missionary with a reputation as a holy warrior of the first rank. He came to Bosnia in 1992, abandoning his well-paying job as an economist in Saudi Arabia to wage holy war, which he viewed as "a religious duty against infidels and heathen." El-Misri was a strident Wahhabi, noting that his faith was "a Salafi movement that demands that people return to the tradition of the true forefathers of salafwho were the best generation." He considered the lapsed and semi-secular Bosnians to be under the sway of evil and hardly Muslims at all: they needed to be taught the true Islam, which was where the mujahidin came in; their faith, boasted el-Misri, "only needs the blood of martyrs to take root."

He did more than his share to make that happen. In addition to fighting against Bosnian Christians, el-Misr] served with mujahidin units of the Bosnian Army as a religious teacher and hafiz, running a field medresa that provided Wahhabi instruction to recruits; he ran the forty-day session, which was required for those who volunteered for the leading unit of holy warriors, nineteen times during the war.32

From the beginning, many Bosnian Muslims, including some clerics, were deeply suspicious of the real agenda of the mujahidin appearing in their midst. No Muslim was willing to reject help from fellow Muslims, especially when Sarajevo's war effort was visibly inept, but the Wahhabi need to denounce and tear down every other variant of Islam won the holy warriors few friends among average Bosnians. Especially offensive was the forceful manner in which mujahidin tried to impose Saudi ways on the locals. As one imam explained, "we have the Wahhabis who want to photocopy onto Bosnia a system and order that geopolitically is not suitable or applicable to these parts." Imam Senad Agic, perhaps the most eloquent spokesman of moderate Islam in Bosnia, denounced "those who would like to impose Islam by force," adding that many muajhidin "came just in order to preach this Islam of theirs." Agic's condemnation cut to the point: "Wahhabis fight against everything that has enriched Islamic culture and Islamic tradition throughout history."33

Such objections unfortunately mattered little, as the government in Sarajevo wholeheartedly welcomed and supported the imported members of the Islamist International. Moreover, they were backed by a well-funded and organized collection of global organizations that can best be seen as "Allah's NGOs."34 Many weren't nongovernmental organizations at all, but statesupported NGOs, to allow an oxymoron. The most important of these was IIRO, also known as Igatha.35 This organization served as "the linchpin" of al-Qa'ida funding, and its links to the international jihad movement ran so deep that the humanitarian organization and the jihadi network could not be functionally untangled. IIRO and the Muslim World League (MWL), its parent organization, were both created and funded by the Saudi government to spread Wahhabism worldwide through charitable works and proselytism-and, it turned out, through terrorism. MWL also supervised two other Wahhabi groups that operated in Bosnia, al-Haramayn Islamic Foundation and the closely related al-Haramayn al-Masjid al-Aqsa Charity ("al-Haramayn" means the Holy Places, i.e., Mecca and Medina). Mufawaq (Blessed Relief) Foundation, another state-funded Saudi NGO publicly supported by bin Laden, was also active in Bosnia. Just how close IIRO, MWL, and related groups were to Riyadh was clarified by the testimony of an MWL senior official in a 1999 Canadian court case: "The Muslim World League ... is a fully government-funded organization. In other words, I work for the Government of Saudi Arabia."36

At every level, the Saudi state encouraged jihad-minded young men to wage holy war in Europe. "All of Saudi Arabia, starting with the government, the religious scholars, and ordinary people, was on the side of driving youths towards jihad in Bosnia-Hercegovina," recalled Nasir Ahmad Nasir Abdallah al-Bahri, who began his career as a mujahid in 1992, at the age of twenty, in Bosnia; he eventually became Osama bin Laden's bodyguard. "We set out for that country"-Bosnia, he said-"because there was no religious sheik or preacher who did not talk about jihad in Bosnia and about the suffering of Muslims." The money to equip the young man, who fought in Bosnia under the nom de guerre Abu Jandal, was provided by a female schoolteacher in Saudi Arabia who was motivated to offer a month's salary, about $2,000, by stories of Muslim suffering in Bosnia. Although some mujahidin warned the would-be fighter about going to the Balkans ("They said: We will facilitate your trip to any arena of jihad other than Bosnia because there is moral corruption in Bosnia, and many temptations and European women. Also, the blond girls might influence you."), he went to holy war, finding the Bosnians to be welcoming but "completely ignorant of Islam."37

Bosnia was only one front in the generously funded worldwide Wahhabi campaign. Between 1975 and 2002, the CIA determined that Saudi Arabia spent $70 billion on foreign aid, two-thirds of which went to "Islamic activities" such as IIRO and MWL. Saudi donors sent $150 million to the Bosnian Muslims in 1994 alone. By the mid-1990s, the MWL/IIRO empire, which was overseen by the Saudi grand mufti, included thirty MWL branches across the globe and IIRO offices in over ninety countries, including six camps in Afghanistan for training terrorists. There were numerous links between IIRO and international terrorism: for instance, in 1999 the police in India detained Sayed Abu Nasir, a longtime IIRO staffer, for plotting to bomb U.S. consulates.

Saudi links to terror discovered in Bosnia were even more chilling. CIA analysis concluded that a third of the Islamic charities operating in Bosnia, with IIRO in first place, had "facilitated the activities of Islamic groups that engage in terrorism," including plots to kidnap American personnel. The report named Hamas, Hizballah, Algerian GIA and the Egyptian Islamic Group among the terrorist organizations assisted by Allah's NGOs in Bosnia.

Just as insidious was the role played by the Saudi High Commission for Relief for Bosnia, established in 1993. It had a large office in Sarajevo, was supposed to coordinate the activities of Saudi charities in Bosnia, and admitted to distributing $400 million in aid (the actual figure was at least $500 million). Where that money went was an open question after 9/11, when long-overdue raids on the Saudi High Commission's Sarajevo office revealed before-and-after pictures of the World Trade Center, files on pesticides and crop dusters, and information on how to counterfeit U.S. State Department ID badges. Also of interest were the seized documents, including handwritten minutes, on MWL and IIRO letterhead, of meetings with Osama bin Laden.38

From the beginning, these organizations enjoyed an exceptionally close and friendly relationship with the SDA and the Muslim government. Sarajevo appreciated the help-ideological as well as financial and military-and supported the work of the Islamic organizations by providing them with political protection and in many cases military cover. In December 1992, the Bosnian Croats arrested two IIRO workers, who were discovered to possess not only ID cards from the Muslim military, but from the Black Swans, Sarajevo's leading special operations unit. They were set free after Izetbegovic personally appealed to Croatian President Franjo Tudjman for their release.39

How these incestuous relationships functioned was explained by Mustafa Kamel Suleiman, a veteran of both the Afghan and Bosnian jihads. In mid1992, he was ordered to leave Afghanistan for the new jihad front in the Balkans, and went first to Saudi Arabia. Suleiman proceeded to Croatia with a group of Bosnia-bound mujahidin who arrived in Zagreb under cover as employees of al-Haramayn. They were met at Zagreb airport by a Bosnian military delegation that was charged with getting the fighters to Bosnia. Sarajevo's representatives arranged for them to obtain accreditation as Islamic relief workers from the Croatian Foreign Ministry, the needed ticket-punch to get to the war zone. They arrived on the central Bosnian front after a long journey overland via Split, Mostar, and Sarajevo. In addition to the Islamic NGO cover, other mujahidin posed as UN workers-complete with fake credentials-and even journalists.40

The SDA did all it could to recruit mujahidin and get them to Bosnia. The universal condemnation of the Bosnian "genocide" across the Muslim world made obtaining funds and fighters relatively straightforward.41 In the fall of 1992, Mustafa Ceric, the SDA's favorite imam, acted as special envoy for Islamist affairs by rallying support abroad for the Bosnian jihad. In midSeptember, he attended the International Conference for the Protection of Human Rights in Bosnia, which turned into an Islamic-centered event and an excellent platform for the propaganda that Sarajevo aimed directly at the Muslim world. Unlike what they told the West, this version of the aid appeal mentioned nothing about a multinational democratic state, instead addressing only sectarian concerns and the necessity of assisting Bosnia's Muslims to build and protect an Islamic homeland: the exact opposite of what the SDA was selling to the guilt-addled West. Ceric's appeal gained money and men for the jihad, while his visit to Saudi Arabia the following month was considered a success, resulting as it did in increased aid, military as well as material, for Sarajevo's war effort.42

Thus did the radicalization-one might call it the Afghanization-of the Bosnian civil war move forward with speed. Osama bin Laden rose to prominence during the Afghan jihad, but his role in that conflict seems larger in hindsight than it actually was; he was always overshadowed by Abdullah Azzam. If the foundation of al-Qa'ida was laid in Afghanistan, the major construction took place in the Balkans. It was only in the 1990s, in Bosnia, that "the Che Guevara of Islam"43 really came into his own, developing al-Qa'ida into the flexible, well-funded multinational jihadi organization it became. It was the Bosnian civil war that transformed bin Laden and his cadres into the backbone of the mujahidin worldwide. Thanks to the help of Alija Izetbegovic and the SDA, bin Laden's legions found their niche in exporting their radical faith and the terrorism that went hand-in-hand with it into Europe, building a model for jihad that could be exported anywhere in the Muslim world.

VEVAK AND PASDARAN

The Saudis were not the sole patron of the Bosnian jihad. Revolutionary Iran was every bit as strong a supporter of the cause of Islam in Bosnia as Riyadh, and Iranian support included substantial military assistancesomething the Saudis were happy to outsource to bin Laden and his ilk. Although the Iranians were Shia, their Islamic revolutionary state was more ideologically congenial to the Sunni SDA than Wahhabism, and Iran was considered the ideal by key members of Izetbegovic's inner circle, including the logistics boss, Hasan Cengic, and Omer Behmen, the onetime Young Muslim, who spent much of the civil war in Tehran as the Bosnian ambassador. 44

Saudi-Iranian rivalry was no small factor behind Tehran's actions. Like the Saudis, the Iranians were eager to gain a base and foothold in Europe, something the grateful Bosnians were happy to provide. No less, there was deep ideological dislike between the Saudis and Iranians. The latter were well aware that the Wahhabis considered the Iranian regime to be heretical, and Iranians also nursed grievances such as the July 1987 incident at Mecca, where a stampede killed 402 pilgrims, among them 275 Iranians. Tehran blamed Riyadh for the tragedy and proclaimed the desire to "free the holy shrines from the mischievous and wicked Wahhabis."45 The outcome of this mutual bitterness was what some termed an "Islamic cold war" waged on Bosnian soil.

Bosnia offered Tehran payback for Afghanistan. Iranian support for the Afghan resistance resulted in few concrete benefits for Iran; it was the Saudi backed mujahidin who emerged as the political winners when the Soviets left. Iran's fears of a Wahhabi regime in Kabul were a cause for concern in Tehran. After the Soviet withdrawal, the Iranian regime warned, "Afghanistan shall not become another Saudi Arabia." The Islamic Republic criticized the impact of Saudi "political transgressions" on Afghanistan, and described Wahhabism as "a fetid and putrefied tumor in the world of Islam."46

Eager to settle scores with Riyadh, the Iranians gave vociferous rhetorical support to the Izetbegovic government, which it liked and respected. Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini appointed Ayatollah Ali Ahmed Jannati his special representative for Bosnian matters, and he proved to be a fireeater. Jannati twice visited Bosnia and denounced the war as "the biggest scandal of the twentieth century" and invoked heated Islamic themes, calling the issue "a second Palestine" and "one more Andalusia," citing Islam's loss of southern Spain in 1492, still a carping point among Islamists.47

Iran's agitprop campaign on behalf of Bosnian Islam was ferocious. Tehran regularly attacked the "megalomanic and racist Serbs" in speeches and in print, and made the most of allegations of rapes of Muslim women. Indeed, Iran's emphasis on alleged war crimes against Muslims, the more lurid the better, coupled with frequent denunciations of Bosnia's evil Christians, bore more than a passing resemblance to Western media accounts of the conflict. The difference was that Iran was looking to do something about it. Ayatollah Jannati explained his country's position concisely: "If the Islamic Republic could, it would provide unlimited weapons and ammunition to the Bosnian people." Furthermore, he blamed Europeans for the war because "they cannot tolerate the existence of an Islamic republic in Europe."48

Bosnia was Iran's first foray into a European conflict, and Tehran, armed with the revolutionary zeal that had always characterized the Islamic Republic, expected to decisively influence the war's outcome. Throughout the war, the Iranians and Saudis waged a covert struggle for greater influence in Sarajevo, a rivalry that the SDA understood and exploited to maximum effect.49

Although the Clinton administration seemed unconcerned about Iran's diplomatic and intelligence offensive into Europe-an odd position given Tehran's implacable hostility to the United States since 1979-the Europeans viewed the situation differently. They feared the rise of an Iranian-backed regime in Sarajevo; given their proximity to the Balkans, the Europeans can hardly be faulted for their concern. Moreover, the appalling trail of international violence and terrorism left behind by revolutionary Iran ought to have given even Balkan optimists, that rare breed, reason to doubt that anything good could come of Iran's intervention in the Bosnian civil war.

Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (VEVAK in Persian) was large and competent, and had a significant presence outside Iran. It was known as an aggressive agency whose experienced staffers included some old veterans of the Shah's feared SAVAK, bolstered by younger revolutionary firebrands. VEVAK operated extensively in Europe, and Germany was its main base. A detailed June 1993 report by the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the domestic intelligence agency, revealed that Iran's embassy possessed an enormous VEVAK contingent and served as "the headquarters of the Iranian intelligence service in Europe." There were twenty VEVAK officers serving at the embassy under various covers, supplemented by seventy embassy staffers who were VEVAK co-optees. The building's secure third floor was devoted to intelligence operations. The main mission for VEVAK in Germany was monitoring and intimidating the one hundred thousand Iranian nationals living in Germany, a population that included many dissidents-traitors in Tehran's view. VEVAK earned a fearsome reputation for conducting anti-emigre operations abroad, including assassination. 50

Iran's other secret service enjoyed an even more unsavory reputation for fanaticism and violence. The Revolutionary Guard Corps (Pasdaran in Persian),51 established in 1979 to export the revolution abroad, was both a paramilitary service, with large conventional forces, and an intelligence-cumterrorist agency charged with using violence to silence enemies of Tehran. Most of its estimated 175,000 personnel served in regular armed units, with only the handpicked being sent into clandestine work outside Iran. The Islamic Republic was remarkably open about its use of terror against its opponents abroad. As stated publicly by Intelligence Minister Fallahian, "We track them outside the country, too. We have them under surveillance.... We have succeeded in dealing blows to many of these groups outside the country."''

The minister did not exaggerate. The U.S. State Department concluded that in the first eighteen years of its existence, revolutionary Iran had killed at least a thousand "enemies of the state" abroad, including some eighty dissident killings in Europe.53 Many of these assassinations were the work of Pasdaran's elite Qods (Jerusalem) Force, a special cadre charged with murdering and kidnapping opponents of Tehran-mainly troublesome emigres. Pasdaran was very effective at covering its tracks, and relied heavily on fronts and cutouts to mask its external operations.

Nevertheless, a number of high-profile killings in Europe were plainly the work of Pasdaran. In July 1980, hardly a year after the revolution, a fiveman team of assassins wounded but failed to kill ex-Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar in Paris; eleven years later, in August 1991, Pasdaran succeeded in stabbing Bakhtiar and an aide to death. In July 1989, Pasdaran assassins killed Abderrahman Qassemlou, an Iranian Kurdish exile leader, along with two other Kurds in Vienna; the one person wounded in the exchange of gunfire was an Iranian "diplomat" who turned out to be a Pasdaran officer. (One of those responsible for this triple killing is reputedly Pasdaran Colonel Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elected Iran's president in June 2005.) Multiple gunmen killed Kazem Rajavi, a representative of the National Council of Resistance, outside his Geneva home in April 1990. In September 1992, Tehran's killers caught up with Sadegh Sharafkandi, Qassemlou's successor as head of the Kurdistan Democratic party of Iran. In a particularly brazen hit, assassins gunned down Sharafkandi and three other Kurds at a Berlin restaurant, spraying them with machine-gun fire. The publicity surrounding the mass killing was sufficient to force the German authorities to act, and arrests and a trial resulted; this rare event revealed that the operation had been handled mainly by VEVAK and not Pasdaran, which was perhaps why it hadn't gone quite as planned.54 There has only been one confirmed Iranian assassination in the United States, the July 1980 killing of All Tabatabai, a former Iranian diplomat in Washington. Tabatabai was gunned down outside his Bethesda, Maryland, home by David Belfield, a Black Muslim radical who volunteered to perform the hit, offering his services to Tehran on religious grounds.55

Dissidents and emigres weren't Tehran's only targets for lethal attention. Journalists deemed too critical of Tehran were murdered in Turkey in 1990 and Beirut in 1992, while in January 1993 the Turkish journalist Ugur Mumcu, a strong critic of the Iranian mullahs, was killed by a car bomb in Istanbul that was attributed to Pasdaran. The Islamic Republic's death sentence on the British author Salman Rushdie for his 1989 novel The Satanic Verses, denounced by Tehran as heresy for its unfavorable view of the Prophet, has never been carried out, thanks to London's protection of Rushdie. But the long arm of Tehran caught up with the Japanese translator of the book in 1990, and the Italian translator in 1991: the latter survived the attack, while the former did not.56

Yet Iran's state terrorism had-and still has-an even deadlier side, namely the strong support given by Tehran to several Islamist terrorist groups over decades. The key Iranian front has been Hizballah, the Lebanese Shia group born in 1982 to confront the Israeli invasion. From its establishment, Hizballah has been the extended arm of Pasdaran, receiving a stipend from Tehran estimated in the mid-1990s at $100 million annually.57

Although its main target is Israel, Hizballah has killed more Americans than any terrorist organization save al-Qa'ida, and stands behind the worst terrorist outrages of the bloody 1980s. Its bombers, with Iranian help, were responsible for two highly lethal attacks on American interests in Beirut in 1983: the destruction of the U.S. Embassy in April and the leveling of the marine barracks in October, which together killed over 300. Iran applauded these attacks, and the regime's leadership openly admitted Tehran's involvement in the murder of 241 marines.

The mastermind of both Beirut mega-attacks was Imad Mughniyah, Hizballah's chief of special operations and one of the world's undisputed terror masters. Many experts have long considered the mysterious Mughniyah to be more dangerous than bin Laden. Only in his early twenties when he became Hizballah's leading operator, Mughniyah for more than two decades has been at the forefront of Islamist terror, and the Lebanese Shia has always been regarded as Tehran's man. Several intelligence agencies, including Israel's, believe that Mughniyah has had a close and continuing relationship with al-Qa'ida. Hamid Reza Zakeri, a senior Pasdaran official who defected to the West, confirmed that Mughniyah had served for several years as Hizballah's liaison to Ayman al-Zawahiri. Through Mughniyah, Pasdaran had regular contact with Zawahiri and al-Qa'ida.58

Mughniyah made his reputation on the Hizballah terror spree of the mid-1980s, which included multiple airline hijackings, resulting in the murder of two U.S. diplomats and one U.S. Navy sailor, as well as the infamous wave of kidnappings in Beirut, which took dozens of foreigners hostage and killed thirteen of them. Only rarely did Mughniyah slip up. One operation that didn't go according to plan was the October 1985 kidnapping of four Soviet diplomats in Beirut-a political attache, the embassy's doctor, and two KGB officers. Mughniyah miscalculated, as the Soviets weren't inclined to use wait-and-see tactics when its representatives were taken hostage. After one Soviet was executed, the KGB retaliated in Beirut and reportedly threatened that a nuclear bomb would be dropped on the Iranian holy city of Qom if the remaining hostages weren't released at once. Israeli intelligence intercepted encrypted messages between Hizballah and Tehran that revealed Iranian control of the operation-and that Moscow's threat worked. The Soviet officials were released without further harm.59

Mughniyah's Iran-backed terror spree continued into the next decade. He is believed to be responsible for the murder of three Saudi Embassy employees in Bangkok in 1990-a hot part of the Islamic Cold War-and he traveled regularly on Iranian diplomatic passports to enable his movements. He reportedly had a hand in a botched hit in October 1994 in which a Hizballah assassination team was arrested by Turkish police, an embarrassing outcome that exposed the group's links to Iran.

One of Mughniyah's worst outrages came in Argentina in July 1994, with the bombing of the Argentine Hebrew Mutual Association (AMIA) in Buenos Aires, killing eighty-five. This wasn't the first act of terror from Tehran in Buenos Aires. In March 1992, a car bomb struck the Israeli Embassy, killing twenty-nine and wounding two hundred; this was an Iranian operation carried out by Hizballah. The 1994 atrocity was the same kind of joint Hizballah-Pasdaran activity, carried out on a larger scale.

An extensive Argentine investigation, which named Mughniyah as the crime's mastermind, revealed that a "complex intelligence network" stood behind the AMIA bombing. The top secret Argentine report asserted that Tehran ordered the attack and "recruited Hizballah as subcontractors." The operation was locally supported by five VEVAK officers serving in Buenos Aires under cover as diplomats. Tehran's spies arranged for the large quantity of explosives needed for the operation to reach Argentina via complicated channels that used fronts and cutouts. The explosives were smuggled by Colombian narco-traffickers, then handled by a Brazilian front company working for VEVAK that moved the bomb materials through the so-called tri-border area where Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina converge. The explosives were clandestinely routed through the tri-border town of Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, home to some thirty thousand Arabs and considered a "de facto Hizballah resort" since the 1980s by Israeli intelligence. Disturbingly, a VEVAK defector later revealed that Argentine President Carlos Menem, himself of Arab origin, accepted a $10-million payoff from Tehran to draw blame for the AMIA bombing away from Iran.60

By the time the Iranian intelligence services intervened in Bosnia in 1992, they had a long history of participation in international terrorism in the service of radical Islam. Pasdaran was operating at least a dozen training camps that were estimated to graduate between four thousand and five thousand newly minted terrorists annually. Iranian training techniques emphasized realism, so much so that a high-level Pasdaran defector revealed that terrorist preparation included the use of condemned men to test the effects of truck bombs.61 Iranian spies and terrorists were active worldwide, supporting the jihad wherever Tehran felt its holy warriors were required. In a typical case, Iran's diplomatic relations with Algeria were severed in late March 1992 when Algerian authorities discovered that the Iranian Embassy was holding regular meetings with senior members of GIA, a highly lethal local Islamist terrorist organization. Further investigation revealed that Pasdaran was helping veterans of the Afghan struggle return to Algeria to wage the jihad at home, backed by Iranian money and training. Emir Gousmi, a GIA leader, turned out to have an Iranian passport. Here was the Iranian model for exporting Tehran's Islamic revolution.62 Bosnia would be next.

FRIENDS FROM TEHRAN

Iranian intelligence had a relationship with the SDA leadership that predated the Bosnian conflict, but once the civil war began in earnest the ties between Tehran's espionage apparatus and the Muslim secret police grew closer. VEVAK assisted the SDA with espionage training and support for Sarajevo's state security organs, which were the prewar Bosnian SDB minus the non-Muslims, while Pasdaran brought its black arts to the table. Although terrorist-like special missions were the hallmark of the Iranians in Bosnia, they also undertook numerous old-fashioned espionage operations in Europe to assist their Bosnian brethren. For instance, in the spring of 1994, the British Foreign Office discovered a letter, purportedly from Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, explaining that London's Balkan policy was motivated by Islamophobia. It was a crude forgery, a clear case of what the KGB termed "active measures" during the Cold War, and it had the mark of VEVAK. In late May, the British expelled Vahid Belourchi, the first secretary of the Iranian Embassy in London, who was the VEVAK officer behind the operation.63

Like the Saudis, the Iranians employed fronts, usually Islamic humanitarian organizations, to mask their support of the mujahidin in Bosnia. The Iranian Red Crescent was a popular VEVAK cover, as were Iranian media organizations, while Tehran also had close ties to NGOs operating in Bosnia such as the International Humanitarian Aid Organization, known by its German name, Hil-Organization. Much of the coordination of these Iranlinked NGOs was handled by Mehran Shafi, a senior VEVAK agent based in Sarajevo. Shaft served as the intermediary between NGOs in Tehran's service and the SDA officials who benefited from this arrangement. Bosnia became the center of Iranian intelligence operations in southern Europe, thanks to the support offered by the SDA.64

Although Pasdaran trainers were greeted eagerly in Sarajevo-by 1995, there would be some two thousand of them serving in Bosnia-the main issue as far as the SDA was concerned was war materiel. The first meeting on arms was in early March 1992, before the war started, when Omer Behmen and Hasan Cengic secured secret shipments of weapons and munitions from Iran. Mohammed Yevad Azajesm, a senior diplomat at the Iranian Embassy in Zagreb, presumably an intelligence official, was placed in charge of smuggling weapons overland into Bosnia. This was the opening of a massive arms pipeline that by the war's end would bring fourteen thousand tons of Iranian weapons to the Bosnian Muslims, as well as over threequarters of a million pounds of TNT and seven tons of plastic explosive$200 million worth of war materiel in all.65

This was a risky business due to the UN arms embargo, and the Iranians constructed elaborate schemes to get guns and munitions to the Muslim forces. Although weapons could be smuggled into Bosnia from Croatia, the operation depended on Zagreb's tacit approval of Iran's arms ring. From the start, the issue was controversial in the Croatian government, with Defense Minister Gojko Susak favoring allowing the Iranians to use Croatian airports and roads, mainly because he liked the lucrative kickbacks involved, while Miro Tudjman, the intelligence chief and the president's son, was opposed, fearing the long-term consequences of arming Bosnia's Islamists.

Beginning in the summer of 1992, Zagreb could be sometimes persuaded to look the other way. There were nevertheless embarrassing incidents such as the September 4, 1992, Croatian seizure of an Iranian Boeing 747, filled with Sarajevo-bound weapons, at Zagreb airport, but the political impact was nil. Western reporters had no interest in what was happening; a Dutch journalist who witnessed Iranian arms being unloaded in Zagreb for the Bosnian Muslims sat on the story rather than besmirch Sarajevo's image.66 Soon the Croats dropped their objections, presumably because the cash was irresistible, and Iranian aircraft were landing in Croatia weekly-by early 1995 there would be three Iranian arms flights into Zagreb every week. The UN Security Council's No Fly Zone resolution of early October 1992, which banished unapproved aircraft from Bosnian airspace, was supported in part due to fears that Iranian arms-bearing aircraft would otherwise begin landing in Tuzla, causing severe political ramifications.67

Izetbegovic visited Iran again in late October to secure more weapons from Tehran, resulting in an increased tempo of arms shipments. Saudi Arabia and Turkey offered the SDA weapons too, but the Bosnians preferred dealing with the Iranians, for reasons of ideological affinity. Izetbegovic "played his cards on the Iranian connection," was how a Sarajevo journalist sympathetic to the president explained the situation; it was a simple arms-forideology deal. The SDA's long-standing admiration for the Islamic Republic dictated logistics, though Izetbegovic, true to form, was careful to obscure his real agenda. He lied to the Saudis and Turks, accepting some weapons from them on the condition that Sarajevo cease accepting Iran war materiel. By the fall of 1992, Zagreb's objections had been overcome, and on November 1 another Iranian 747 landed there, carrying sixty tons of "humanitarian goods" headed for the Bosnian military. A few days later, Iran's religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei donated $3.3 million to Sarajevo, while at the end of November, Iran's Foreign Minister All Akbar Velayati visited Croatia to sort out the details of the Tehran-Zagreb-Sarajevo connection.68

Iranian arms shipments were a poorly guarded secret from the outset. It was impossible to keep stories of suspicious heavily laden flights from Tehran out of the local media, though they were seldom picked up by Western reporters.69 The Iranian pipeline continued all the same, increasing in the spring of 1993, and that April. Izetbegovic and Iranian President Rafsanjani met, with the latter offering Sarajevo its full stock of Soviet and Warsaw Pact weapons. The Croats were now formally involved, taking a third to a half of the weapons as a transit tax, and Zagreb purchased ex-Soviet helicopters for the Muslim forces, which used them to bring the arms and munitions into Bosnia from Croatia. Izetbegovic visited Iran again in mid-September 1993 to further strengthen Iran's support for his cause.7°

The Bosnian Croats were less pleased with the trilateral arms trafficking conspiracy, since the weapons reaching the Muslims in 1993 were often being used against them. For several months when the Muslim-Croat war in central Bosnia was at its worst, the Tudjman government was less than cooperative, while Zagreb's Bosnian surrogates were overtly hostile, resenting the Iranian presence in their country. In June, HVO soldiers killed Majid Montezeri, an Iranian diplomat and head of the Iranian Humanitarian Center-an Iranian intelligence front-on the road between Sarajevo and Zenica, to register their displeasure.

Zagreb remained concerned about American reactions to Iran's new role, especially because Tehran's arms pipeline was hardly the best-kept secret in the Balkans, but the Clinton administration never made a fuss. "The Americans never protested," recalled Defense Minister Susak, who described all those Iranian flights into Zagreb: "When they asked, we would say that our original weapons were simply hatching babies." There the matter rested as far as Washington was concerned.71

The Iranians sent many of their best intelligence personnel to Bosnia, for instance, Mohammed Taherian, who arrived in Sarajevo later in the war. He was the senior Pasdaran expert who helped wage the Afghan jihad and had armed the Taliban. By late 1993, the Iranians were frustrated by the lack of an airport in SDA-controlled Bosnia; Sarajevo's airport was under siege, and without it the Iranians had to use helicopters, which was time-consuming and logistically challenging. Therefore the Iranians decided to build their own large and modern airport at Visoko, west of Sarajevo in Muslim-held territory.72

The SDA's intelligence structures were so heavily penetrated by Iranian advisers as to cause discomfort among Muslim officers who came from the prewar Yugoslav police. In early 1994, the SDA sought even closer ties with VEVAK, leading to protests by Munir Alibabic, the gifted counterintelligence specialist who was the real talent behind the Muslim secret police; Alibabic eventually resigned in protest, while the senior officers who remained left for extended visits to Tehran to receive training in Iranian methods.73

Even in the ranks of the Muslim military, which respected the Iranians for their combat skills and willingness to help, there were doubts about their views. Many Pasdaran advisers displayed a degree of fanaticism that Bosnians found strange, even discomforting. A well-regarded Bosnian imam who served with mujahidin units recalled his strained relations with one of the top Iranian helpers, Colonel Mirhasan Sejidan, who posed as a senior NGO official with the Iranian Office for Aid to Bosnia, but was actually a Pasdaran veteran of many campaigns. Sejidan was a multilingual expert in the religious aspects of the jihad who wanted to turn the Bosnians into fanatical fighters for Islam, which few wished to become; even among local radicals, the Iranian's calls for as many martyrs as possible struck the wrong note.74

Some officers of the Muslim military wondered about the wisdom of allowing Iranian-backed terrorists into Bosnia. With Iranian help, Hizballah assisted the SDA throughout the conflict. "We considered it an issue requiring the participation of Muslims everywhere," explained Na'im Qasim, the organization's deputy secretary general, who clarified Hizballah's relationship with Tehran: "We committed ourselves to the leadership of Imam Khomeini."75 Ayman al-Zawahiri, acting on behalf of his own Egyptian Islamic Group and al-Qa'ida, reportedly met with Iranian representatives to discuss the Bosnian jihad on several occasions. With Imad Mughniyah and other Tehran-backed Islamists, he agreed to form a united front in support of the SDA. This group held several meetings on Bosnia, in Khartoum in April 1995 and in Cyprus the following month, to coordinate increased support to Sarajevo's mujahidin.76

Muslim officers and functionaries who possessed doubts about the Iranian connection were wise to keep them to themselves, as the SDA's affection for the Iranians and their revolution was well known. By the war's end, their indebtedness to Tehran would be just as noteworthy. Izetbegovic's inner circle made few efforts to seriously hide its pro-Tehran views-anyone who wanted to know about them did-and SDA leaders made public pronouncements about the glories of the Islamic Republic. One of the most notorious incidents came in early June 1993 when SDA representatives gathered at the Zagreb mosque, which was closely linked to Izetbegovic, for a fete to honor the Ayatollah Khomeini. The mosque was adorned with numerous posters of the late Iranian leader, including an oversized one with his saying, "Who is with almighty Allah has no fear of anyone but Allah."

Izetbegovic himself did not attend-that might have been a bit much, even for the SDA-but much of the parry's leadership was present and accounted for. Salim Sabic, SDA vice president and Izetbegovic's personal representative at the event, stated, "Bosnian Muslims are the best example of the imam's [i.e., Khomeini's] prophetic words, that if they are not united, Muslims worldwide will be suffering under American and Zionist regimes." No less memorable was the statement made by Ahmed Ikanovic, a top official of Bosnia's Islamic Community: "The imam's idea is a magnificent inspiration for the entire Islamic world.... We Bosnian Muslims, victims of war imposed on us, as well as of aggression and genocide, are more aware of the imam's words than ever before."

But the prize was taken by Dzemaludin Latic, the SDA's leading ideologist, who lashed out at "the apostate Salman Rushdie," describing his writings as the "moral assassination" of the Koran, adding, "Imam Khomeini's fatwa [the death sentence against Rushdie] is a must for every Muslim to carry out."

"We Bosnian Muslims were very wrong for believing that the great Islamic revolution was too radical," Latic elaborated wistfully, "Now we pay for our doubts."77

THE OTHER AXIS

Among the most brazen mujahidin crimes were wanton attacks on "infidel" aid workers who had come to Bosnia to assist refugees and war victimswho were disproportionately Muslim, as Sarajevo frequently liked to point out. Some Western aid workers were murdered by Muslim fighters out of greed. On May 29, 1993, three Italian humanitarian aid workers were shot down in cold blood by Muslim troops in central Bosnia. The victims, Guido Puletti, Fabio Moreni, and Sergio Lana, were part of an Italian team that was carrying food to the Muslim town of Zavidovici; on the way back, they planned to take sixty-seven widows to safety in Italy. They were traveling on the road between Gornji Vakuf and Novi Travnik, known to the locals as "Salvation Road" since it was used by NGOs and was a lifeline for the desperate civilians of central Bosnia.

The Italians were stopped by a Muslim military patrol, abducted, robbed of over twenty million lire in aid money for Muslim refugees, and taken to a forest where they were lined up and machine-gunned. Two aid workers survived the massacre despite grave wounds, recalling that their abductors were a Bosnian Army patrol led by an officer wearing a green beret with an insignia of a crescent moon and star, the symbols of Islam. Local authorities in Travnik identified Hanefija Prijic Paraga, a Bosnian Army officer, as the leader of the military gang, but when the Muslim military's security service took over the investigation, all documentation on the case mysteriously disappeared. No arrests were ever made.78

An even more shocking crime was the mujahidin assault on three British aid workers on the night of January 27, 1994. Paul Goodall, Simon King, and David Court, convoy drivers with the British government's Overseas Development Administration, were traveling in a UN Land Rover, headed to a hotel for some much-needed rest. They were at Perin Han, near Zenica, which was ground zero for Islamist radicalism in Bosnia, when a vehicle came up behind them suddenly and threateningly. The vehicle was a Volkswagen Golf, the most common car in Bosnia, but they were seldom seen due to the dangers of being in a war zone, plus a fuel shortage; most vehicles on the roads belonged to relief agencies or one of the warring factions.

The Land Rover let the VW pass, but it pulled into the middle of the road and stopped abruptly. Five bearded men jumped out, brandishing automatic weapons. The ODA drivers were kidnapped and shot. King and Court escaped in the darkness and confusion and survived, but Goodall, a thirty-five-year-old father of four and a popular relief worker who took the most dangerous assignments out of a desire to do something for Bosnia's refugees, was killed execution-style by multiple shots to the back of the head.

Although the UN's Land Rover was stolen, there was no apparent motive for the crime except fanaticism and bloodthirstiness. What happened next was murky even by Balkan standards. The official story presented by the Muslim police was tidy and, even more convenient, closed. Three mujahidin, two Arabs and an Iranian, were arrested in Zenica: Abu Muaz, Abu Abdullah, and Abu Salih. They had identification that linked them to Islamic relief organizations, and reportedly were driving the missing Land Rover when arrested.

But no trial resulted because the three holy warriors managed a mysterious jailbreak and headed for Sarajevo in the purloined Land Rover. They took a hostage, Imam Abdullah Kubat, on the outskirts of Sarajevo and ran into a Bosnian Army checkpoint near Mt. Igman; after a standoff, the mujahidin were said to have opened fire on the ABiH troops, and fire "had to be returned," according to the police, who added that the vehicle "failed to stop despite repeated warnings." There ended the case as far as the SDA was concerned.

Solidly identifying the dead fighters was impossible, and their identities were never determined. Among their possessions were found one British passport-it belonged to a thirty-one-year-old man who disappeared months before near Zenica-and a Pakistani passport judged by the police to be an "obvious forgery." The passports had Croatian transit visas stamped in them; somebody had used them to reach Bosnia via the customary mujahidin route. While the dead men were clearly imported jihadis, many wondered if they had any involvement in the Goodall murder.

Things grew more mysterious that same day, when Zenica police arrested three other Islamist fighters: two Yemenis, Abu Enes and Abu Hulud, and a Saudi, Abdul Hadi al-Gahtani. These men were said to be behind the crime. This case was registered as file K-159/94 of the Zenica high court and would remain one of the many enigmas of the Bosnian civil war.

Al-Gahtani was the ringleader, a well known mujahid in the Zenica area, and he admitted that the Kalashnikov assault rifle used to kill Goodall was his. Moreover, he was an employee of the Saudi High Commission, which was reputedly a humanitarian organization. What al-Gahtani-and by extension his employer-were really doing in Bosnia was a question neither Riyadh nor Sarajevo had any interest seeing exposed to public inquiry.

Efforts to bring al-Gahtani and his co-conspirators to justice never got off the ground. The SDA placed pressure on the local authorities to not press the matter, and the Saudi High Commission was never investigated to determine its role behind the kidnappings and murder. No questions were posed to the Muslim military or the local SDA either. Bakir Alispahic, the Muslim interior minister, requested that al-Gahtani and the two Yemenis be transported to Sarajevo. They were released on March 1, after the leading mujahidin unit, the infamous el-Mujahid Detachment, promised the men would appear in court at a later date for trial. The judge didn't even ask for an extension of their custody. AI-Gahtani and the others promptly disappeared and fled Bosnia. Interior Minister Alispahic refused to answer the questions posed by local journalists. Al-Gahtani was an important holy warrior, and it was suspected that Saudi officials got him out of the country to avoid further embarrassment. But his ultimate fate was not known for almost eight years, when he was reported dead in Afghanistan, having met a martyr's end under American bombs in late 2001, alongside the Taliban and al-Qa'ida.79

The Goodall murder, and the unflattering saga of foreign-funded mayhem behind the crime, attracted little attention in the West, and none of the outrage it should have. Saudi Arabia continued its policy of supporting jihad and spreading Wahhabism with Koran and Kalashnikov to the war's end and beyond. By the time the guns fell silent, Riyadh had lavished the Bosnian jihad with well over a billion dollars in aid, much of which went to fund the holy warriors. In August 1995, King Fahd sponsored a telethon that raised $100 million for Bosnia, a testimony to the Saudis' deep pockets, and how emotive the issue of Bosnia was to Muslims everywhere.80 Bosnian Muslims who found the ways of the imported radicals foreign and sinister wondered why the West allowed the Saudis and Iranians, no friends of democracy and human rights, to establish SDA-sponsored redoubts in Europe. They misunderstood that the West, and especially the United States, thought the mujahidin were on the side of the angels in Bosnia.

CHAPTER 5

MOS and
Mujahidin

The Bosnian war of 1992-1995 has more than its share of hidden history. Although each of the warring factions had ample dirty laundry-in most cases revolving around war crimes and profiteering-Alija Izetbegovic's government had its own share of sordid unmentionables standing in stark contrast with the public image of civic virtue carefully cultivated by the SDA. The unpleasant truth was that the Bosnian Muslim war effort was tainted by ugly deeds that few in the West wished to acknowledge, much less discuss.

How the mujahidin, bin Laden's holy warriors, came to Bosnia, were funded by corrupt Islamic financiers, and left their unfortunate mark on Europe is a tale of fanaticism, criminality, and violence that must be explained to understand the actual course of events in Bosnia during the war and after. How the supposedly secular and democratic forces fighting on behalf of Bosnia's Muslims came to include large numbers of imported Islamists is a complicated saga, and one that is not edifying for anyone who puts any faith in the global media, but that nevertheless is long overdue for explanation. Sarajevo's special brand of cynicism and corruption deserves an airing, for the SDA's behind-the-lines struggle for supremacy in the Muslim state they were confident would emerge from the war constitutes the least understood aspect of the jihad waged in Bosnia.

FROM SUDAN TO SARAJEVO

No person can claim greater responsibility for the achievements of the Bosnian jihad than Dr. Fatih al-Hasanayn, a career holy warrior from Sudan whose services to radical Islam have been underreported-precisely as he wished. While Alija Izetbegovic laid the groundwork for Bosnia's Islamic resurgence, and Osama bin Laden brought the mujahidin to the struggle, it was al-Hasanayn who handled the Muslim money that was the lifeblood of Sarajevo's war effort.

Born in 1946 in a poor village north of Khartoum, al-Hasanayn had been a close friend since childhood of Hasan al-Zurabi, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan and a descendant of Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad, the legendary mujahid who led the Islamic revolt against the British and "Chinese" Gordon in 1882. Al-Hasanayn had spent much of his life in Europe, particularly Yugoslavia. As a medical student in Belgrade and Sarajevo, he developed close ties with leading Bosnian Islamists, especially Izetbegovic, whom he met in 1970, serving as a link between the Muslim Brotherhood and Bosnian radicals. Yet it was as a clandestine financier rather than a physician that the Sudanese would make his mark.

By the mid-1980s, al-Hasanayn was living in Vienna as a specialist in internal medicine, devoting himself to Muslim causes in his off hours, but in February 1987 he became a full-time activist as the founder of the Third World Relief Agency, an international fund to spread radical Islam, particularly in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Sensing an opportunity with the impending demise of Communism in the region, the Islamists were ready to fill the void with money, men, and guns, coming to the aid of fellow Muslims, above all in Bosnia. TWRA derived its considerable funding from various sources, including Islamic governments who wished to mask their support for radicalism, and it enjoyed ties to terrorism from the start. Subsequent investigations by the United States and other governments would reveal direct links between TWRA and jihadi notables such as Sheikh Omar Abd el-Rahman and Osama bin Laden.I

By the time Yugoslavia began to crumble in mid-1991, TWRA had a robust relationship with the new SDA government in Sarajevo, although alHasanayn's branch office in Zagreb actually ran many of the agency's Bosnian operations. As with other Islamist activities, the Croatian capital offered al-Hasanayn's machinations a safe haven close to the war zone. Beginning in 1991, TWRA's Zagreb office was run by two top SDA officials: Salim Sabic, the party vice president, and Mustafa Ceric, Izetbegovic's favorite imam. Sabic's close ties with Croatia's ruling clique were valuablehe called President Franjo Tudjman stari (old man) when they met, as they did frequently-while Ceric's clerical connections were no less helpful. From the beginning, the relationship between TWRA and the SDA was so incestuous, with numerous Bosnian officials simultaneously holding top positions in al-Hasanayn's organization and the Sarajevo government, that making a distinction between them is meaningless as well as impossible. Illustrating the case, in mid-1992 al-Hasanayn was appointed secretary of the Conference on Protection of Human Rights in Bosnia-one of several TWRA fronts-which held a major meeting in October, on Mustafa Ceric's initiative, with representatives from over thirty Islamic countries, and the aim of raising a billion dollars for Sarajevo. Whether the Sudanese and the radical cleric were representing TWRA, the SDA, or the Bosnian government-or perhaps all three-was never clear.2

While Zagreb was an invaluable forward operating base, Vienna was the ideal place to locate the TWRA's home office. Long a spy's paradise, Vienna offered welcoming banks, strong financial secrecy laws, and a police force that rarely asked too many questions. Austria's State Police (Staatspolizei or STAPO), had a well-deserved reputation as a security service that looked the other way, particularly if the questionable activities were aimed outside Austria.

Al-Hasanayn confidently opened an account at Die Erste Bank in Vienna, at a branch located on the Graben, in the heart of the tourist-filled Old City, and months before the war broke out began sending large sums of cash in Sarajevo's direction. Eventually there were seven accounts with the bank, to say nothing of other banks, but the main one with Die Erste (number 51364470) was overseen by a five-man committee that had access to it: al-Hasanayn and four SDA stalwarts-Hasan Cengic, Irfan Ljevakovic, Husein Zivalj, and Dervis Djurdjevic. All but Ljevakovic had been codefendants with Izetbegovic in the 1983 trial, while the younger man, known as "the Beard" for his Islamist appearance, served at the Bosnian Embassy in Vienna as a diplomat, but in fact as the liaison for Sarajevo's secret police with TWRA and Islamic intelligence services active in Austria, preeminently Iran's and Sudan's.3

How much money passed through TWRA channels to assist the jihad in Bosnia wasn't clear until after the war. A decade after al-Hasanayn's covert operation commenced, a thorough investigation by the Bosnian government, assisted by several Western police and intelligence agencies, determined that $2.5 billion in Islamic aid had been laundered by TWRA and sent to the SDA between 1992 and 1995. The fifty-four-page report was devastating, detailing how the network functioned, and leaving no doubt that terrorist money was involved, nor that the SDA was in charge of the operation. It explained that the $2.5 billion had been laundered and distributed by "a group of Bosnian Muslim wartime leaders who formed an illegal, isolated ruling oligarchy, comprising three to four hundred 'reliable' people in the military commands, the diplomatic service, and government agencies, the SDA, a private party intelligence service, and a number of religious dignitaries," while Bosnian embassies abroad, particularly those in Vienna and Zagreb, "were under the control of a highly restricted circle of individuals who, governed by their own interests, made the decisions on how the collected financial resources were to be distributed." Moreover, the report assessed regarding TWRA, "It was this organization, not the Government of the Republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina, that controlled all aid that Islamic countries donated to the Bosnian Muslims throughout the war." This amalgam of collusion, corruption, and non-transparency in finances, including the closest links between politicians, financiers, and Islamic holy warriors-the report explicitly named bin Laden as a member of the extended TWRA network-constituted the "Bosnian model" of how to use NGOs and aid money to pay for the jihad and terrorism, Bosnia's unique gift to radical Islam and al-Qa'ida.4

While some have compared Fatih al-Hasanayn's role in the Bosnian jihad to the dubious part played by Ha)* Amin, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, in the Balkans during World War II, it's probably most accurate to give the Sudanese the name bestowed on him by Western investigators- "Alija's bagman." Izetbegovic was kept fully abreast of TWRA activities, while documents have come to light that demonstrate that the Bosnian president had direct access to whatever Islamic funds he wanted: for instance, an apparently authentic January 1, 1994, TWRA letter explains that payments under $1,000 could be disbursed locally, without higher approval, while payments of up to $500,000 required the approval of three of the five members of the TWRA board (at the time, al-Hasanayn, Cengic, Ljevakovic, Zivalj, and Djurdjevic), while payments in excess of $500,000 required go-ahead from Izetbegovic himself.5

By the mid-1990s, al-Hasanayn's jihadi funding network included satellite offices in Sarajevo, Moscow, Budapest, Istanbul, and Prague, as well as the established bases in Vienna and Zagreb. The new offices were established with SDA approval, to better support the Bosnian jihad. The office in the Czech Republic, headed by Mohammad Abbas al-Mutasim, the son of a former Sudanese ambassador to Prague, was "a humanitarian organization," the local TWRA boss explained, though the Czech security service concluded that it was a transparent al-Qa'ida affiliate.

Al-Hasanayn skillfully used his ties to Sarajevo and Khartoum to support the Balkan jihad. He had a Bosnian diplomatic passport, and Izetbegovic requested that foreign governments treat the Sudanese minister as a senior official of the Sarajevo government, but al-Hasanayn also carried a Sudanese diplomatic passport; in March 1992 he was credentialed as a cultural attache in Vienna, per the request of the Islamist regime in Khartoum led by his close friend Hasan al-Turabi. Every week during the war, TWRA passed between $3 and $5 million, usually in cash, to SDA officials in Vienna and Zagreb. Most weeks, al-Hasanayn drove from Vienna to Zagreb with suitcases of cash, stowed in the trunk of his car bearing Sudanese diplomatic tags, to give to Sarajevo's representatives. The amounts of cash passing through TWRA were enormous. In 1994, an entire pallet of U.S. dollars marked TWRA arrived at Vienna airport; weighing over two hundred pounds, the funds, amounting to almost $50 million gathered as part of a special Ramadan collection for Bosnia, were deposited in TWRA's account with Die Erste and were then dispatched to the SDA.7

Given the large quantities of cash at TWRAs disposal, it was inevitable that graft and corruption would come to the fore. For all their rabid faith and posturing about the humanitarian crisis in Bosnia, the TWRA and SDA leadership made the most of the Muslim manna at their disposal. That there was hardly any bookkeeping helped graft and fraud; extensive investigations by numerous police and intelligence agencies uncovered a shocking lack of accounting, and Hasan Cengic, who was the key Bosnian in the alHasanayn network, left hardly any paperwork behind, a good way to cover tracks about where money was really going-whether for the benefit of the mujahidin or corrupt SDA officials, or both, it was difficult to determine.8

Fatih al-Hasanayn set the tone by living in a fashion not routinely associated with jihadi otherworldliness. The Sudanese occupied a lavish apartment on Praterstrasse in downtown Vienna, funded by TWRA, one of several residences and offices owned or rented by the agency in the Austrian capital. When Izetbegovic visited Vienna during the war, as he regularly did-ostensibly for diplomatic purposes-he always stayed at the swank Marriott Hotel on the Ringstrasse, occupying the presidential suite that went for $3,000 a night. Although his visits were covered by the Western press, no reporters cared to note that this Izetbegovic was rather different from the pious, even saintly, figure who spoke eloquently about his starving people.

More shocking was the outright theft by SDA higher-ups that plagued the TWRA operation from beginning to end. For many of the trusted Muslims who laundered and dispensed Islamic funds, the al-Hasanayn network was above all an opportunity to cash in. This was a simple matter as most of the money was carried in diplomatic pouches that were off-limits to customs inspectors. In a typical case, TWRA fund-raising procured $100 million for weapons in the Zima (Winter) operation of winter 1994, but only $60 million was actually spent on armaments and munitions for the Muslim military. Where the rest went no one claimed to know, though suspicion surrounded Hasan Cengic, whose wartime actions with TWRA were later categorized by Bosnian authorities as a jihad-fueled organized crime ring that devoted more energy to profiteering than supporting the war effort. In 1994, when Austrian authorities began to ask questions about some of the more flagrant violations of international banking laws being perpetrated by al-Hasanayn, the Bosnian Embassy in Vienna wasted no time and cleared $60 million from TWRA accounts within twenty-four hours to prevent their seizure. The cash was distributed among SDA bigwigs, including Cengic, Zivalj, Ljevakovic, Djurdjevic, and Sarajevo's foreign minister, Ejup Ganic, but several million dollars disappeared, and some of the SDA's inner circle refused to return the funds.1°

Senad Sahinpasic, known as Saja, was another ranking SDA official who helped smuggle funds for the jihad while taking a substantial cut for himself. During the war, Saja operated in Germany and Austria, raising cash for the Muslim cause, and was in regular telephone contact with Izetbegovic. When European investigators, noting ominous ties between Sarajevo officials, radical clerics, and organized crime bosses, inquired where the money was going, he explained, "It is with pride that I accept that I was involved in the chain of `international crime' that permitted the arms embargo against the Bosnian Army to be broken." Saja's close ties to the SDA inner circle protected him from prosecution, and he was considered a war hero despite his barely concealed theft of several million dollars in Islamic aid, thereby establishing himself as a successful entrepreneur in postwar

Al-Qa'ida found this complete lack of transparency in finances just as attractive as the SDA bureaucrats-cum-criminals did. Bin Laden appeared in TWRA paperwork, as did Sheikh Omar Abd el-Rahman, and al-Qa'ida employed financial fronts-for instance, Vakufska Banka, a Sarajevo bank that served as a cutout for terrorist financing-that formed part of alHasanayn's extended network. Relations between bin Laden and TWRA were close, not least because during the Bosnian war the al-Qa'ida leadership was based in Khartoum, under the protection of the Sudanese Islamist regime that was the ultimate backer of al-Hasanayn and his firm. TWRA also worked closely with IIRO, the leading Saudi front for bin Laden's activities; the relationship between TWRA and IIRO in Bosnia can be broadly summarized as al-Hasanayn's men handled the funds for weapons while the Saudis distributed the money for almost everything else jihad-related. TWRA documents, including ID cards, were found on the bodies of many dead mujahidin in Bosnia, while several terrorist incidents could be traced to Vienna-for instance, the 1995 plot by Hizballah terrorists to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Zagreb, which was linked to the al-Hasanayn network. Holy warriors bound for Bosnia reported being met by TWRA representatives in Zagreb who assisted them with funds, guns, and getting them to the war zone. TWRA did business with nearly all of Allah's NGOs operating in the Balkans, including the Iranian Red Crescent, a front for Tehran's intelligence services. Ever an opportunist, al-Hasanayn was very flexible, placing support to the jihad over matters of ideology or nationality-what mattered was backing the SDA and radical Islam in Bosnia. The TWRA founder explained his view plainly in 1994: "Bosnia must be Muslim in the end since, if that does not happen, the whole war will make no sense and will have been waged for nothing."12

As the Bosnian war dragged on, however, al-Hasanayn grew overconfident. He purchased a building in Vienna's 5th District to house the first Bosnian financial institution abroad, the International Relief Bank of Austria. That TWRA was establishing its own bank was a bit much even for Viennese officials, and the STAPO began investigating al-Hasanayn's dealings, with assistance from German authorities, who were troubled by TWRA activities on their soil, including ones that involved the "Blind Sheikh" el-Rahman, who had gained notoriety for his key role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. After months of investigation, the Austrian police acted on September 5, 1995, in a series of coordinated raids on TWRA facilities in the Vienna area. The agency's two Vienna offices, on Prinzeugengasse and Karolinengasse, were raided, along with a warehouse near the city, and dozens of apartments in Vienna and Salzburg occupied by TWRA associates, mainly Bosnians. The STAPO seized computers and papers, enough to fill three police vans. The evidence laid bare the extent of the organization's criminality, including ties to terrorism, but there was little public fanfare; the Austrian authorities merely wanted the Islamists to move elsewhere, which they did. Al-Hasanayn had already left Vienna, after STAPO chief Oswald Kessler made it clear that his presence in Austria was no longer desirable. The Sudanese headed for Istanbul, where he relocated TWRA headquarters, leaving the remnants of the Vienna operation in the hands of his brother, Sukarno. TWRA continued to support the Bosnian jihad, and remained close to the SDA, but after the 1995 raids Fatih alHasanayn took greater care to hide his activities from European authorities. After 9/11, he fled Turkey to parts unknown, while his brother remained in Vienna, ostensibly running a snack bar.13

By any standards, al-Hasanayn's operation was a great success, providing Muslim forces in Bosnia with the weapons and munitions needed to stay in the war; for mujahidin, TWRA assistance was particularly helpful, and it is difficult to see how the jihad could have been waged in Bosnia at all without the agency's support. Sarajevo's need for weapons was pressing. Although Bosnia had been the cornerstone of Communist Yugoslavia's impressive arms industry, the SDA inherited few functioning factories. Many were located in areas controlled by the Bosnian Serbs and Croats, and the JNA made a concerted effort when it left Bosnia in spring 1992 to move valuable arms plants-for instance, those that produced jet engines, advanced electronics, tank components, and many calibers of artillery shells-to Serbia. As a result, the SDA started the war virtually without any arms production, and had to improvise where it could, and buy abroad what it couldn't make.14

Pakistan's notorious Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, the supporters of the Afghan mujahidin in the 1980s and the Taliban in the 1990s, violated the UN embargo and provided the Bosnian Muslims with sophisticated antitank guided missiles. According to General Javed Nasir, ISID director from 1992 to 1993, Sarajevo received quiet assistance from certain Islamic countries whose troops were serving with UN forces in Bosnia, ostensibly to keep the peace. Turkey, Malaysia, and Bangladesh were known to send excessive amounts of ammunition to their units serving in Bosnia, and the surplus was sold to Bosnian Muslim forces. The SDA dispatched numerous spy-entrepreneurs abroad to buy whatever weapons and munitions they could to smuggle back to Bosnia. One of the top Muslim logisticians was Mustafa Hajrulahovic, a prewar KOS officer, who was based in Italy and used his own network of informants and partners to purchase war materiel from several European countries.15

With TWRA assistance, Sarajevo was involved in many shady deals designed to procure weapons and munitions for the jihad. Hasan Cengic spent a great deal of time in Slovenia, arranging shipments of war materiel with the covert assistance of Slovene authorities. With help from Ljubljana's defense minister, Janez Jansa, the architect of Slovenia's brief, successful struggle against the JNA in summer 1991, tons of weapons and munitions, and some mujahidin, reached Bosnia via Slovenia, which from late 1991 until mid-1993 was something of a Mecca for Balkans arms smuggling.16 Cengic and Jansa established a mutually beneficial relationship in late 1991, cemented by an agreement in early April 1992 on $30 million worth of Slovene arms for Cengic. By the summer of 1992, Sarajevo had opened an arms corridor through Slovenia, using ex-Soviet Bloc aircraft, 11-76 transports and Mi-26 helicopters, to ferry Warsaw Pact weapons from Hungary to Bosnia through Slovenian airports. (TWRA would soon buy two of its own aircraft to support the Bosnian cause.) A key collaborator was Dieter Hoffmann, a shady middleman with extensive contacts in the arms trade; said to be a retired Austrian intelligence officer, the "Flying Tiger," as Hoffmann styled himself, had close ties to TWRA. It was al-Hasanayn's help that opened up an arms pipeline from China that Hoffmann facilitated by shipping the weapons and munitions via Khartoum to Maribor airport in eastern Slovenia. This worked well until it was compromised in July 1993, when Slovene investigators, acting on a tip, discovered eleven arms containers at Maribor airport. These had arrived from Sudan and were headed to Bosnia, and were stashed in Slovenia with the help of Ljubljana's military intelligence service. A scandal ensued, including revelations that al-Hasanayn had been spotted at Maribor airport with a suitcase full of cash; Defense Minister Jansa's regular meetings with Hasan Cengic emerged, resulting in the former's resignation. 17

TWRA and its Bosnian partners proved surprisingly ecumenical in their efforts to procure guns and munitions for the Balkan jihad. Hasan Cengic worked closely with the dubious Slovene arms merchant Nikolaj Oman-infamous for selling arms to Radovan Karadzic and the Bosnian Serbs, and his reputed dealings in nuclear materials with the Russian ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovskiy-and the radical imam wasn't above dealing with Vatican-linked banks when funds were needed. Cengic, with Mustafa Ceric's help, was reported to have laundered substantial sums through the Trieste Credit Bank to purchase weapons. Established in 1957 as a joint venture by the Italian and Yugoslav governments, the bank had a bad reputation for dealing with gangsters and war criminals; in its early years, the Trieste Credit Bank had been employed by the Vatican to fund the "ratline" used to assist Croatian war criminals escaping to safety in Latin America and elsewhere. 18

The ghost of Tito's secret police lingered over many aspects of the Bosnian catastrophe, including the Islamists' holy war. Despite their distaste for the old regime and its security organs, the SDA proved surprisingly welcoming to veterans of Yugoslav state security. Many officers who had loyally served in the intelligence organs of the Yugoslav People's Army and the Interior Ministry were invited to join the Muslim police and military, including key positions. Whether they could be considered loyal to Izetbegovic and his government was a question that bothered many Muslims.

The classic example was Fikret Muslimovic, a career KOS officer and protege of Aleksandar Vasiljevic, who became the SDA's top intelligence and security official during the war and long after. Muslimovic made his career in the 1980s by serving as Vasiljevic's deputy and factotum during the rigorous KOS campaign to root Islamic extremism out of the Yugoslav military. He was the JNA's leading expert on radical Islam, and was considered such a stalwart Communist that Muslimovic was one of the military representatives to the 14th Extraordinary Party Congress in January 1990, a last-ditch effort by the Communists to save the ailing Titoist state. Muslimovic addressed the faithful on the "struggle against nationalism" in the JNA, a topic he knew well, observing, "We do not permit anyone to attack Communists and their conception of brotherhood and unity. This is anti-Communist

Muslimovic's activities in the months before the Bosnian war erupted are difficult to track. His last position in the Yugoslav military was chief of security and counterintelligence for the 4th (Sarajevo) Corps. Though he left the JNA as a lieutenant colonel, exactly when that happened, and under what circumstances, has never been clear. He was in Sarajevo by the end of 1991, supposedly selling fruits and vegetables at a downtown open-air market, though Bosnian State Security believed he was actually assisting KOS in implementing the RAM plan; Muslimovic in no way participated in the establishment of the Patriotic League or any of the SDA's preparations for war. Yet once the war began, the reputedly retired KOS colonel appeared at the headquarters of the nascent Muslim army and offered his services. He was initially rebuffed-some of those behind the SDA's paramilitaries had been interrogated and incarcerated by Muslimovic in the 1980s-but Izetbegovic welcomed the counterintelligence expert into the SDA's top echelon. Before long, he was appointed the head of security for the Bosnian Army (this was formalized by General Staff Order 13/37-65 of April 27, 1993), and carved out a niche as a deep thinker on Islam. In the fall of 1992, demonstrating a conversion that was as total as it was sudden, he was a keynote speaker at the 1st Congress of Muslim Intellectuals in Sarajevo. How Muslimovic went from being the top anti-Islamist in the Yugoslav military to taking over the security-intelligence apparatus of the Muslim forces, seemingly without interruption, has never been explained, though even those sympathetic to the SDA were mystified by this turn of events, when KOS "snuck in through the side door." Izetbegovic's motivations were never explained; perhaps he couldn't resist the allure of an apostate apparently made good. Muslimovic's feelings can only be guessed at. His sympathizers have speculated that he needed a "new ideological anchor" with the sudden demise of Communism, while others have taken a more skeptical view of the case.20

Few dispute that Muslimovic's influence on the SDA was cancerous from the start, and even Izetbegovic's defenders wonder what made him appoint the "intelligence zombie" his chief adviser on security matters. The KOS colonel brought the methods and attitudes of his former employer into the SDA's security apparatus, most notably an all-consuming obsession with fifth-columnists that buttressed the new doctrine Muslimovic was hailing, something he called "Islamic security." This was hardly more than Marx replaced by Muhammad. Soon the man derided by Sarajevo secularists as "Izetbegovic's eternal intelligence officer" transformed the Muslim army's powerful secret police into a deadly team that hunted down those it deemed inadequately Islamic, just as KOS had ruthlessly persecuted dissenters under Communism. Almost immediately, Muslimovic's prominent role in getting mujahidin to Bosnia and supporting their struggle was noted by those who wished to see. He regularly accompanied Izetbegovic on visits to Islamic countries, serving as the president's personal adviser on intelligence-security matters, and thereby developed close relations with several Islamic secret police forces. His role as financier and logistics expert with terrorist NGOs was well known, for instance, Muslimovic's ties with IIRO dated to the first year of the war, while his presence at identified mujahidin training camps, including meetings with prominent Islamic holy warriors, was uncon- cealed.21 It is significant that, when the Bosnian police trapped and gunned down the three Islamic fighters initially suspected of murdering British aid worker Paul Goodall in February 1994, the doomed, cornered mujahidin were heard to shout defiantly, "We will only talk to Fikret!" and the Sarajevo number of a "Fikret M." was found among the dead men's possessions.22

Muslimovic brought a KOS cadre with him when he joined the SDA in Damascene fashion in spring 1992; this ex-KOS circle would create and run the Muslim military's intelligence service during the war and long after. Enver Mujezinovic-who had been Muslimovic's deputy and understudy in the JNA during the anti-Islamic campaign of the 1980s-and wound up in the same position in the 1990s, only now radical Islam was the cause rather than the enemy. Mujezinovic was in Belgrade, serving as a KOS major, as late as May 1992; how he made it to Sarajevo and was installed at the top of the SDA's secret police, becoming the deputy defense minister for security, is a story even murkier than Muslimovic's strange tale. Rival factions in the SDA, which found Muslimovic's conversion suspect, sponsored periodic efforts to purge ex-KOS officials from Muslim intelligence, never achieving success.23 Izetbegovic's personal spymaster cut short all attempts to diminish the influence of KOS cadres, and the former hardline Communists wound up playing an indispensable role in the Bosnian jihad, an outcome as ironic as it was unexpected.

By virtue of his power and his position of trust with the SDA leadership, Muslimovic played a key role in what critics termed "the best-guarded Muslim secret" of the war. This was the "private party intelligence service" cited in the secret report on TWRA produced by Sarajevo state security after 9/11. This shadowy force had a name, albeit one spoken in hushed tonesthe Muslim Intelligence Service (Muslimanska obavestajna sluzba-MOS). This was the SDA group operating behind the scenes that wielded much of the real power in Sarajevo. Comprised of top party officials, the men who really ran the jihad, MOS exerted influence far greater than its small numbers would indicate. The conspiratorial cabal was created in Vienna in 1991, before the war, at the recommendation of Fatih al-Hasanayn, who sought a covert mechanism by which loyal Islamists could gain control over the Bosnian Muslim government. The SDA, though run by hard-liners, was a broad tent at the beginning, and the bureaucracy, the military, and the police were filled with Muslims of doubtful devotion to the Islamist program. MOS was created to ensure the dominance of Izetbegovic's inner circle of Islamists.

This shadowy group, which began with al-Hasanayn and the TWRA inner circle-Hasan Cengic, Salim Sabic, Mustafa Ceric, and Irfan Ljevakovic-was soon bolstered by the arrival of Fikret Muslimovic, who brought years of KOS experience to the organization. Muslimovic gave the covert cadre the intelligence skills it needed to secure funds and weapons for the Bosnian jihad. Muslimovic then brought members of his circle into MOS as well: Enver Mujezinovic, Sakib Mahmuljin, Bakir Alispahic, plus SDA higher-ups like Husein Zivalj, Dervis Djurdjevic, and Bakir Izetbegovic, the president's son. Small wonder that foes of Muslimovic, who were appalled by the sinister and conspiratorial methods the former Communist secret policeman used to wield backroom power in the SDA, noted of his new position, "KOS suits it as a name better than MOS!"24

MOS members, who held positions in the Bosnian Muslim military, security services, and diplomatic corps (as well as, in many cases, positions in TWRA, too), ran most of the direct SDA support to the jihad, from Sarajevo, Zagreb, and Vienna. Their ideological vision was that of the Izetbegovic clique, the former Young Muslims who controlled the SDA: an all-Muslim state in Bosnia. This was the opposite of the multicultural Bosnia that Izetbegovic and his government claimed to be fighting for; in practice, the SDA was always willing to accept partition, so long as what Sarajevo got consisted solely of Muslims. Then they could create their longed-for Islamic state, with a radicalized army and police. The devil, as ever, was in the amount of territory that the Muslims were willing to settle for. To ensure that their hardline views won out, MOS by 1993 was selecting the Bosnian diplomats who were sent to embassies in Islamic countries-this was crucial for financial as much as political reasons, as Muslim embassy staffs served more as bagmen for the jihad than actual diplomats. Having "trusted persons" running embassies was also important because the SDA, through MOS channels, distributed Bosnian passports to mujahidin on an as-needed basis, no questions asked. (Bosnian passports were desirable because they required no visa to enter Islamic countries of import such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan.) Each embassy kept a thousand blank passports on hand, and these had a habit of disappearing, leaving no paperwork behind; the Vienna embassy, where Osama bin Laden received his Bosnian passport, was the most prolific in this line of business. Bosnian diplomats also sold passports to criminals-the price was reported to start at $500-so that by the war's end many thousands of passports could not be accounted for. As with the diplomatic corps, MOS operatives were appointed to leading positions in Sarajevo's military and security services, where they could assist the Islamic revolution that was the real cause the SDA was fighting for.25

MOS had direct links with al-Qa'ida and bin Laden's inner circle from the war's opening phase. Sarajevo's jihad support network included many players and numerous fronts. For instance, the Twaik Group, judged by the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) to be a front for Saudi intelligence, ran a network of rental car offices in Europe, including an unusually busy outpost in Sarajevo that had suspiciously robust cash flows. The Twaik Group and another Saudi firm (and intelligence front) with headquarters in Riyadh, Rawasin Media Productions, were discovered by the BND to have direct links to al-Qa'ida operatives in the Balkans and elsewhere, even ties to the Hamburg Islamist cell that became the cornerstone of the 9/11 plot. The BND assessed that Twaik's Sarajevo office was the center of its European operations, and that the whole construct could be traced back to Prince Turki bin Faisal, the son of the late King Faisal and the longtime chief of Saudi intelligence, who suspiciously resigned just before 9/11 and who famously described bin Laden as "a relatively pleasant man, very shy, soft-spoken."26

One of the most important-and malignant-of Allah's NGOs in Bosnia that was closely tied to both bin Laden and MOS was the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF), an Illinois-based jihadi fundraiser that had its origins in supporting the Afghan war in the I 980s. Led by the Saudi national Adel Abdul Jalil Baterjee, BIF sent millions of dollars to Bosnia, much of it through virtually untraceable cash transactions known as hawalas. Baterjee came from a wealthy family in Jiddah and had access to the Saudi elite. Most of the money he raised went to support not refugees and orphans, as BIF claimed, but the mujahidin, and in the early 1990s Bosnia was Baterjee's top priority.

BIF's daily operations were in the hands of Enaam Arnaout, a Syrian Islamist of Albanian lineage and a veteran of the Afghan jihad. He was also a longtime confidant of bin Laden's. The organization's reach into Bosnia was impressive: it handpicked holy warriors to dispatch to the front, and got them there without difficulty. BIF's contacts with top Bosnian Muslim officials were close and continuing. How much BIF spent in support of the SDA cannot be precisely determined, as half of its expenditures for Bosnia were off the books. What is not in dispute, however, is bin Laden's direct role in its operations. Post-9/11 investigations, including an FBI raid on BIF headquarters, revealed extensive links with al-Qa'ida, including a list of bin Laden's top twenty donors, the "Golden Chain," found on a BIF computer. Among the discoveries in the BIF "treasure trove" was a letter from bin Laden authorizing Arnaout to sign documents on behalf of the al-Qa'ida leadership. Although BIF's Illinois office was shut down in early 2002, and Arnaout was sentenced to eleven years for his terrorism support after pleading guilty, this was years after its major work in Bosnia had been completed.27

The SDA's inner circle always feared Western scrutiny of their financial activities in support of the jihad. In truth, they didn't need to worry too much, as most Western governments only took action when Sarajevo's machinations grew so out-of-bounds as to require a response, such as the September 1995 Austrian police raids against TWRA. They planned for such eventualities by creating fronts inside fronts, so operations could continue even in the face of setbacks. Thus, the SDA and TWRA established the Fund to Aid the Muslims of Bosnia-its five-member board (Fatih alHasanayn, Hasan Cengic, Husein Zivalj, Dervis Djurdjevic, and Irfan Ljevakovic) was identical to TWRA's ruling board-and in 1996, after Fatih al-Hasanayn had fled Vienna and relocated to Istanbul, this "new" organization took over TWRA's Austrian accounts. Thus did the financial jihad continue, under the firm hand of Hasan Cengic, the fund's head. In a sleight of hand typical of the SDA leadership, Cengic promptly established the Bosnian Investment Organization (BIO) under himself, to spend ex- TWRA funds; as was the custom, rumors abounded that not all the funds could be accounted for. TWRA begat the fund, which begat BIO, which wasted no time lavishing cash on friends of the SDA. In a typical case, two aircraft purchased in 1992 by al-Hasanayn to covertly supply the Muslim military, a CASA 212 and an An-74, were given to Cengic after the war, who used them to start up his own mini-airline, BIO Air, which offered Muslims flights to Mecca for the hajj.28 As usual, Cengic managed to combine fanatical support for the jihad, financial acumen, and unconcealed graft in equal measure.

WARRIORS OF ALLAH

While the Islamist financiers and money changers were vitally necessary to waging holy war, it was the mujahidin on the ground in Bosnia who made Izetbegovic's dreams a reality. Many of the holy warriors came from Western Europe, from France, Germany, Italy, and Britain, which all had considerable populations of alienated Muslim immigrants; more than a few of the Bosnia-bound fighters were converts.

How many mujahidin battled for Sarajevo is impossible to determine with precision-many fought under noms de guerre, record-keeping was intentionally poor, and there were numerous units involved-but reliable analysis concludes that between five thousand and six thousand Islamic fighters came to Bosnia during the war.29 They were the only substantial foreign force involved in the fighting. Small numbers of mercenaries assisted the Bosnian Serbs and Croats-mainly from the former Soviet Union for the Serbs and true "dogs of war," frequently ex-Foreign Legion soldiers, for the Croats-but their total strength counted in the hundreds, and their impact on the conflict was negligible.30

The SDA's cheering section in the West did its best to obscure the presence of the mujahidin, but when that was no longer possible, the journalists found excuses. Ed Vulliamy, one of the leading pro-Sarajevo reporters, admitted that there were units of Islamic holy warriors in Bosnia, adding that they were "the inevitable result of isolation, desperation, and desolation." Professor Michael Sells, a prolific propagandist for radical Islam in Bosnia (and the editor and coauthor of the tellingly titled 2003 book The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy) offered a concise excuse: "As Bosnians struggled to survive, the only ones to come to their defense were a few contingents of mujahidin, veterans of conflicts in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East."31 Mustafa Ceric, the grand mufti of Sarajevo and the SDA's favorite imam, was more honest: "We invited the mujahidin to Bosnia," he boasted after the war. "We should all be grateful to the mujahidin."32

The imported Islamic fighters acted like the personally invited guests of President Izetbegovic, whom they called Ali Izzat, demonstrating a dogmatism and heavy-handedness in social and religious matters that alienated all but ardent Bosnian Islamists. Some of the mujahidin found the Bosnian Army distasteful, with its lack of shari'a and inadequate piety; they were horrified to discover Muslims who ate pork, drank liquor, and treated women equally-on a daily basis. Abu Hamza el-Misri, the fire-breathing London imam who raised men and funds for the SDAs jihad-in one of his better-known fatwas pronounced acceptable the killing of unarmed non-Muslims--even- tually denounced the Bosnians as "infidels," and even the few tactful mujahidin in Sarajevo's army conceded that the locals needed a great deal of Koranic indoctrination to be Muslims in anything but name.33

Nevertheless, Bosnian Muslims of radical inclination fell in lasting love with the mujahidin. They were true warriors of Allah, explained a leader of the Bosnian Islamist youth movement who fought with them during the war: "They have an inner peace, you can see on their faces that they are sincere and true believers." The "inner peace" was actually a fatalism that local Muslims found difficult to swallow, especially when translated into suicide charges into enemy machine-gun fire, a common tactic among the mujahidin. As explained in the handbook given to holy warriors headed to Bosnia, "Muslim fighters must understand that their Creator determined long ago the place, time and manner of their death." But inner tranquility didn't involve peace as any Westerner would understand it, and the handbook counseled that prisoners were not to be taken-but if taken, to be liquidated.34

The Vienna-Zagreb link was critical in the opening months of the war in getting mujahidin, mainly veterans of the Afghan jihad, into Bosnia. Soon another Islamist pipeline opened up through Italy, and this would play a major role as a route for holy warriors to reach the fighting. The Italian network was centered at Milan's Islamic Cultural Center located at 50 Viale Jenner. A modest mosque without a dome or minaret, the hard-to-spot building was nevertheless Milan's busiest Islamic institution, with two thousand worshipers weekly and another thousand at an annex on nearby Via Quaranta. Milan's four other mosques barely attracted a thousand worshipers altogether. Viale Jenner was known as the Egyptian mosque and its views were openly radical. Its offices, crammed into the small building, served as the center of Islamist activity in northern Italy, and they had numerous ties to international terrorism. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was sighted at Viale Jenner before the attack, while Anwar Shahan, the senior holy warrior in Milan, had a close operational relationship with Omar Abd el-Rahman, and he used the fax machine at the mosque to stay in regular contact with Ayman alZawahiri, according to Italian intelligence.35

Viale Jenner was Shahan's base of operations for Bosnia. An imam and veteran of the Afghan jihad, Shahan served as the ranking al-Qa'ida logistician in Italy; it was his task to get men, guns, and money to Bosnia, particularly to Zenica, the Islamist safe haven in central Bosnia, an SDA stronghold. The Milan route took mujahidin, some with Italian passports, through Slovenia and Croatia, and included refresher combat training when required. Shaban ran a training camp about thirty miles outside Milan where Bosnia-bound fighters could practice with weapons and explosives. Hundreds of mujahidin received combat training at the camp. One Fighter recalled that he was worried in 1992 when "the brothers" contacted him and ordered him to Bosnia, as he had no proper battle training. But he reported to the Viale Jenner mosque, and Shaban dispatched him to the mujahidin camp, where he underwent combat training before he was sent to the front in central Bosnia.36

For Shahan and other al-Qa'ida affiliates who worked to support Sarajevo's jihad, the fruit of their considerable labor was the birth of special units of holy warriors in the Bosnian Army, the vanguard of the Islamic revolution in Europe. The preeminent unit was the el-Mujahid (Holy Warrior) Detachment (odred el-Mud .chid to the Bosnians)-it had the same name as the Islamist newspaper published by Izetbegovic in 1946-which was comprised mostly of foreign fighters, though some Bosnian radicals did join this special battalion. Among those were a small number of Bosnian veterans of the Afghan jihad, who were held in special esteem. Raised in the opening months of the war from the ranks of volunteers arriving in Bosnia from across the Islamic world, el-Mujahid was a special outfit from the start. Funded by TWRA and other Islamist NGOs, the unit's real purpose was political and ideological rather than strictly military. While there is no denying that el-Mujahid fought ferociously-its casualties from 1992 to 1995 have been estimated at two thousand wounded and five hundred dead (four hundred of them Arabs)-its mission was furthering the cause of radical Islam through propaganda as much as combat.37

Its ranks, and especially its officer corps, read like a who's who of the global jihad, and many of its stars went on to leading roles in international terrorism. El-Mujahid's most famous emir was Abu Ma'ali, a mysterious holy warrior from Algeria who, despite his youth (he was only in his midtwenties), carved out a reputation for fanaticism and violence that stood out even among his hard-bitten troops. The average fighter in el-Mujahid was an Arab, often an Algerian, Egyptian, or Saudi, who had become a professional fighter for Islam and had nowhere else to go. Their die-hard devotion to Salafi and Wahhabi forms of radical Islam was entirely sincere and, to most Bosnians, incomprehensible.38

There were exceptions to this profile, however, including more than a few converts from Europe and North America.39 These were customarily maladjusted twenty-something men whose road from misspent youth to ne'er-do-well adulthood was diverted into the jihad. A typical case was Randall Todd Royer, an American college student from an apparently normal home-his father was Baptist and his mother was a onetime Catholic nun-who converted to Islam at age nineteen and decided to pick up the sword of Allah. After joining an Islamist-friendly mosque of the kind that is depressingly common in the West, "Ismail" Royer left college in 1994 and headed for Bosnia for a unique semester abroad. He joined el-Mujahid and wound up at the front among what he remembered as "the most beautiful people I've ever met in my life." Though his parents, as expected, "first thought it was a stage," Royer was moved by his Bosnian war experience to become a full-time activist in the United States for radical Islam, a career that enjoyed success until his post-9/11 arrest-he was headed back to Bosnia-and subsequent twenty-year sentence for supporting terrorism, including sponsoring weapons training in Virginia for al-Qa'ida-linked mujahidin even after the 9/11 attacks on the United States.40

Non-Muslims who encountered el-Mujahid's "beautiful people" had a rather different opinion of them. The imported fighters quickly won a reputation as the most brutal and bloodthirsty of all the jihadi units serving under the SDA banner. They viewed non-Muslims as infidels and seldom bothered to distinguish between enemy soldiers and noncombatants; neither did they seem to play by any of the rules that governed most of the Bosnian war, when cease-fires were frequent and, occasional massacres notwithstanding, fraternization with the enemy-who often turned out to be your prewar neighbor-was a daily occurrence. The large role played by mujahidin in the 1993 massacres and outrages perpetrated by Sarajevo's forces against Bosnian Croats has been noted in Chapter 3, but el-Mujahid added special features such as kidnapping Croats who annoyed them. In a brazen example, in mid-April 1993, when the unit was eager to win the release of a dozen "Islamic humanitarian workers"-i.e., fellow holy warriors who had been captured by the Croats-el-Mujahid fighters kidnapped Zivko Totic, the commander of the local HVO brigade, killing three Bosnian Croat soldiers and a civilian in the process. According to the testimony of a veteran of the unit, el-Mujahid kidnapped Croats in the Travnik area on the orders of Halid Genjac, the local SDA party boss, who identified Croats to be taken away by the mujahidin.4'

More disturbing were the unit's lurid killings of Christian prisoners of war. A vivid example was provided by a German woman who married an Islamist radical who turned out to be part of the al-Qa'ida network in Europe-bin Laden stayed at their house when the couple was living in Saudi Arabia. In 1994, her husband took the family to Bosnia to assist elMujahid operations. She found herself the only Western European woman in the village, where she lived a veiled existence under the rule of shari'a, as was the custom wherever the mujahidin went. She observed the massacre of two Bosnian Serb soldiers captured by el-Mujahid, which the unit treated as a celebration. The holy warriors and their wives took turns shooting the prisoners, who were then decapitated; the German woman grew even more horrified when the eyes of one of the prisoners fixed on her as his head was being hacked off. Then the mujahidin played soccer with the severed heads.42

El-Mujahid made a fetish of filming such crimes for propaganda effect. Their videos with good reason bear striking resemblance to the macabre home movies filmed by al-Qa'ida murderers around the globe to commemorate the slaughter of unarmed infidels. The motifs, the scenes, the crimesand in some cases the actors-are the same whether the halal snuff films were made in Pakistan, Iraq, or Bosnia. Decapitation featured prominently in the unit's videos, and Sakib Mahmuljin, the SDA senior official and wartime general whose command included most of the mujahidin units, is said to have boasted that el-Mujahid sent a gift of twenty-eight severed Christian heads to Izetbegovic and twenty-eight more to Iran. The most famous video made by the unit was a two-hundred-minute extravaganza showcasing el-Mujahid and its wartime achievements; it was made in 1995 to raise funds for the Bosnian jihad throughout the Islamic world. The Arabic narration extols the unit's achievements on the battlefield while showing images of martyred holy warriors. The Islamist slogan "Our Path is Jihad" features prominently. Between frequent chants of tekbir ("Allahu- akbar") and denunciations of America and the West, Izetbegovic is shown reviewing the troops, while General Mahmuljin and Anwar Shaban take turns speaking of the unit's glorious war record. In one version of the elMujahid movie, the decapitation of Bosnian Serb prisoners of war is shown in detail, accompanied by gleeful shouts of tekbir, while other Serbs are made to kiss the severed heads nailed to trees.43

As usual, few Western reporters showed much interest in the mujahidin-much less their crimes-during the war. Izetbegovic and SDA higher-ups mendaciously claimed to have no knowledge of el-Mujahid or any such units, a pleasant fraud that nobody in the West seemed interested in unmasking. Izetbegovic's mid-November 1993 visit to the "el-Jihad unit of the Army of Bosnia and Hercegovina" was reported by Sarajevo radio, including the president's counsel to the holy warriors to "be merciless towards the enemy," but none of the legion of Western journalists in the capital bothered to take note.44 When it was no longer possible to deny that mujahidin were present in Bosnia in considerable numbers, Sarajevo explained that, if there were foreign fighters on the Muslim side, they were freelancers who had nothing to do with the Bosnian Army. In fact, elMujahid was a fully integrated unit of the ABIH, known as Military Unit 5689 in official documents, and its leaders were recognized and paid as Bosnian Army officers. An ABiH promotion list dated August 5, 1994, and signed by the general staff in Sarajevo, has come to light that includes several known el-Mujahid officers, including Abu Ma'ali and his promotion to captain first class.45 A lone British journalist in October 1994 warned that "To dismiss the mujahidin as a passing phenomenon is to underestimate their financial clout and misunderstand the concept of their jihad and the opportunity offered to them by Bosnia's plight," a perceptive admonition that was drowned out by the chorus of Muslim victimhood that was emanating from almost all Western media outlets in the country.46

While SDA apologists have tried to obscure el-Mujahid's status as a unit of the Bosnian Army, there were other mujahidin units openly serving under Sarajevo's General Staff. At the war's outset, local radicals established a new "Handiar Division," taking the name and ethos of the infamous Waffen-SS formation. Reported to have up to six thousand fighters, this unit, like its predecessor, spent more time murdering and pillaging than actually fighting; its crimes in central Bosnia, especially against Croats in 1993, did not go entirely unreported. The new Handzar had an overtly "fascist culture," commented one of the few Western reporters to take notice, who added that the unit was led by veterans of the Afghan jihad, and had a fair share of Albanian Muslims serving in its ranks (mujahidin from Albanian lands-more came from Kosovo than from Albania proper-and Chechnya served with Bosnian Army units during the war). One of the unit's run-of-the-mill crimes was a November 1993 attack on a Franciscan monastery that gratuitously killed two monks: thirty-nine-year-old Nikola Milicevic and fiftysix-year-old Mato Migic, who were ambushed by a four-man hit squad of Handzar mujahidin.47

The best-known and most important of the jihadi units of the Bosnian Army was the 7th Muslim Brigade, raised in mid-November 1992 around a core of Bosnian radicals, some of whom had cut their holy warrior teeth in Afghanistan, who were serving with the el-Mujahid Detachment. Funded by al-Hasanayn's TWRA, the 7th Muslim Brigade was the SDA's flagship unit, the prototype of the Islamist fighting force Izetbegovic's army was supposed to become. This vision had limited appeal to most Muslims fighting in the ABiH, but the brigade, which was recruited across Bosnia, had no trouble finding volunteers, who were subjected to an intense course of religiouscum-political indoctrination by SDA-approved imams. The program was designed to create fanatical mujahidin who would serve as an example to Sarajevo's insufficiently devout soldiery. The brigade's senior imam was Mahmut Karalic, a professor of Koranic studies at Sarajevo's Gazi Husrevbeg medresa before the war, while the officer corps consisted of parry-line SDA loyalists who believed in the unit's spiritual mission. Green flags, posters with Koranic injunctions to wage jihad, and deep hatred for non-Muslims surrounded the brigade. Beginning with Amir Kubura, the brigade's first commander, "moral purity" was a prerequisite for membership. His successor, Halil Brzina-a bearded young man derided by less devout ABiH officers as "Walking Islam" for his bin Ladenesque beliefs-explained, "Our motive for fighting is-fighting in the name of Allah."48

Although the values of the 7th Muslim Brigade were the exact opposite of the secularism and multinationalism that Alija Izetbegovic so often told CNN that he and his army were fighting for, the Muslim president was an ardent fan of the unit from its first days. The brigade's soldiers hailed "Alija, our hawk," while his interest in them was unconcealed. He reviewed the brigade on November 11, 1993, in Zenica, the unit's first birthday, and presented the mujahidin with their unit colors, a public event attended by a large SDA entourage including General Rasim Delic, the chief of the General Staff, and General Mehmed Alagic, commander of the ABiH 3rd Corps, which included the 7th Muslim Brigade.`'`

Like el-Mujahid, the new brigade's military value was overshadowed by its political impact. The 7th Muslim Brigade embodied the militant virtues of radical Islam that the Young Muslims had fantasized about a half-century before. Also like el-Mujahid, the new brigade quickly developed an evil reputation for war crimes against Christian civilians, beginning with the campaign against the Croats of central Bosnia through 1993, and continuing wherever the brigade went until the war ended in late 1995. Bosnian Muslims of a radical bent lionized the brigade's holy warriors, whose fanaticism and ardor to take the fight to the enemy without mercy had deep appeal. It was inevitable that more mujahidin units would follow.

The Bosnian Army raised two more Islamist units to serve as shock troops in an ideological as well as military sense. Both consisted of Bosnian volunteers. The 9th Muslim Liberation Brigade, formed in mid-1995, proved every bit as hardcore as the 7th Brigade, with its commander, Senahid Hadzic, explaining that "Allah's cord is binding the fighting men together, binding the Muslims together," adding that he and his men, whom he hailed as "Mujahid Knights," weren't fighting for a multiethnic Bosnia: "The roots of my 9th are Islam, the Koran."50

The same was true of the 4th Muslim Light Brigade, which was established in 1994 but actually began as a special reconnaissance-sabotage company raised in June 1992 under Nezim Halilovic, a hotheaded young imam of pronounced Islamist views. Under the leadership of Halilovic, known by the honorific of Muderis (teacher of the Koran), this brigade accumulated a war record of fanaticism and violence that endeared it to the SDA, which hailed its exploits against the "three-fingered bandits" (a crudely derogatory term for Serbs, who as Orthodox Christians cross themselves with three fingers). By the war's end, Halilovic was a colonel who enjoyed a nearly mythic reputation among Bosnian Muslim radicals, who boasted how under the leadership of the "honest teacher," the 9th Muslim Brigade's "young mujahidin assaulted [the enemy] with praise to Allah on their lips."51

It was obvious that such glorification of the jihad would have effects on the Bosnian body politic long after the war was over, which was exactly what the SDA intended. Although the el-Mujahid Detachment, the 7th Muslim Brigade, and related units of the Bosnian Army had a military role to play, their actual impact on the fighting was small. ABiH officers who found the mujahidin distasteful-this included nearly all those with any professional competence-considered their military contribution minimal, observing that their desire to attack the enemy was more than offset by their crude, corpse-producing tactics which seemed designed to produce martyrs rather than actually win battles. Many wondered too why el-Mujahid and the 7th Brigade spent the war in central Bosnia, where Muslims were most secure, and were never sent to Sarajevo or the Drina Valley, where Muslims were surrounded, and where a dose of aggressive tactics was needed to lift sieges and save beleaguered civilians.

Such commonsense questions overlooked the basic fact that the mujahidin were in Bosnia because the SDA wanted them there for ideological effect more than military purpose. Like the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, Bosnia's holy warriors served as an ideological vanguard for the regime, as well as a powerful symbol of international support for their cause. The foreign fighters used Bosnia as a training base, a place to learn battle skills and establish jihadi networks-a new Afghanistan, in other words-while the thousands of Bosnians who served in ABiH mujahidin units were to be the cornerstone of the SDA's all-Muslim mini-state in Bosnia, steely souls forged into fanatical warriors of Allah who would form the next generation of homegrown Islamists. Assisted by imported brethren, they would make Izetbegovic's dream of a shari'a-run Sarajevo a reality. In the middle of the war, a UN official in Zenica, the belly of the Bosnian mujahidin beast, offered a prescient prediction: "Five years from now, there will be factionalized groups in this place: Lebanese, Afghan-style groups, very radical because of what they've been through and the homelands they cannot return to. It's the ideal location from which to launch terrorist action in Europe, with authorities who will not, for a long time, be strong enough to control it."52 Unfortunately, few in the West were listening.

THE LARKS

For all their posturing as sensitive humanitarians for the benefit of Western diplomats and reporters, the SDA leadership prosecuted Bosnia's war with a degree of cynicism and cold-bloodedness that seems hard to fathom even a decade after the conflict's end. The party hierarchy's penchant for war profiteering was bad enough, one more issue that Western reporters did their best not to notice, but the killing of innocent civilians-many of them Muslim-to advance the SDA's agenda was a story so shocking that journalists dared not touch it.

As mentioned in Chapter 3, Sarajevo's exploitation of the war crimes issue before the world's media included blaming killings on the enemy that were actually committed by Muslim forces. The shooting of civilians by unseen snipers in Sarajevo constituted one of the war's indelible images, shown by CNN countless times. The unpalatable truth was that Muslim forces did their share of picking off innocents in Sarajevo-though Serb victims rarely received attention from Western journalists-and Muslim hit squads added to Western outrage by killing the unarmed and blaming the murders on the enemy.

This shocking reality was well known to UN peacekeepers in the city, who worked hard to neutralize snipers on all sides, a quiet war-within-thewar that received little attention. French peacekeepers worked especially hard to neutralize snipers targeting civilians. There was no love lost between the Sarajevo government and UN forces in general-the Muslims felt the peacekeepers were too evenhanded in their attitudes to the conflict-and the French in particular. Memories of the Algerian war still lurked in the minds of French soldiers, who took a dim view of armed Islamism. When sniping in the city took a turn for the worse, including shootings of UN peacekeepers, France dispatched a team of elite Gendarmerie shooters to assess the situation. The experts quickly determined that some of the worst fire against Muslim civilians was coming from positions held by Muslim forces. The Gendarmerie countersnipers went into action, employing lasers to temporarily blind snipers of all the fighting factions and thereby saving innocents. Muslim snipers didn't appreciate this kind of Western intervention, and ABiH forces grew to hate the French peacekeepers.53

In many cases, Muslim-on-Muslim murders for political effect were committed not by regular Muslim military or police units, but by a covert paramilitary cadre loyal to the SDA leadership, a shadowy and sinister group whose existence and deeds constitute one of the great secrets-and scandals-of the Bosnian war. There were a handful of tiny units on the Muslim side that quietly did dirty jobs-wetwork in espionage parlance-at the behest of the SDA leadership, but the most important and enduring of such outfits was the elite team known as "the Larks" (seve in Serbo-Croatian).

This criminal organization was established in May 1992 around a small group of trained killers, many of them ex-KOS operatives who had volunteered to fight for the SDA. The Larks were led through the war by Nedzad Ugljen, a career state security officer, but the idea for the unit seems to have come from the KOS cadre around Fikret Muslimovic. He and his deputy, Enver Mujezinovic, are believed to have recruited snipers from KOS to work for Sarajevo.54

The unit's mission was dealing with what was termed the "internal enemy." Although it never counted more than two dozen members at any time, the Larks did their work effectively and quietly. They were the SDA leadership's secret weapon, covert problem-solvers, and are believed to have been under Muslimovic's control throughout the war; the regular Muslim military and police had no authority, over the Larks. Several Muslim political rivals of the SDA were felled by sniper fire in Sarajevo, crimes that in some cases are reported to have been the Larks' handiwork. Deputy Prime Minister Zlatko Lagumdzija, a Socialist, was wounded by a sniper while he was in a hospital room, a shooting attributed to the Larks by a former member of the unit. They employed some of the best snipers in Bosnia, including two pairs of siblings: Slobodan and Slobodanka Sakotic, prewar champion shooters, and Dragan and Josip Bozic, reputed to be the unit's best killers. None were Muslim, and the unit intentionally recruited them and other Serbs and Croats, figuring they would be less squeamish about killing Muslim civilians.55

The Larks took care of the SDA's dirty work, especially in the Sarajevo area. Nedzad Herenda, a founding member of the unit and one of its most active killers, implicated the group in many crimes, including the murder of numerous Serb and Croat civilians in an effort to scare non-Muslims out of Sarajevo. Lark operatives assisted with killing and covering up murders, with the bodies of some victims being destroyed in acid. Herenda blamed the unit for the killing of a dozen JNA troops before police headquarters in May 1992, and the deaths of UN troops, too. Herenda asserted that Lark snipers kept their skills sharp by practicing on civilians in Sarajevo. In many cases, they spotted targets by looking for black clothing, customarily worn by elderly Christian women.56

Herenda and other sources have blamed the Larks for perhaps the most reported single crime of the Bosnian war, the cold-blooded shooting of two lovers, a Serb boy and a Muslim girl. This shocking killing captivated the world, not least because the bodies of Bosko Brkcic and Admira Ismic lay in the sun for a week, decaying, after they were gunned down along the Miljacka river on the afternoon of May 19, 1993 while trying to escape the city. Their rotting corpses made an ideal photo op for CNN and others. The crime became a media sensation, spawning a deluge of Western condemnations of the Serbs, including a 1994 Canadian documentary, Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo, which was maudlin even by the low standards of Western reportage about the war.57 What was seldom noted, however, was that blame for the crime was never placed on the Serbs by the UN or anybody else. Reliable sources, including Herenda, have named Lark snipers Senad Golja and Dragan Bozic as the killers in this infamous case.58

Aside from murdering civilians for political advantage, the Larks' main mission was ridding the SDA of troublesome Muslims. Operatives from the Larks played a major role in the October 1993 Operation Trebevic to bring the out-of-control 9th and 10th Mountain Brigades to heel; here, too, Lark snipers found plenty of work. That month saw the most audacious Lark crime, the attempted murder of the top Bosnian Muslim general. It was also one of the unit's rare failures.

The intended victim was Sefer Halilovic, the first chief of the General Staff for the Muslim forces. A career JNA officer, Halilovic was a Muslim from Sandzak who offered his services to the SDA when war broke out. A secular nationalist, he was an energetic soldier who, despite a pressing shortage of heavy weapons, transformed Sarajevo's forces from a fledging militia into a moderately capable army of over two hundred thousand troops in only a few months. Halilovic's efforts in 1992 were a decisive factor in staving off the defeat of the Muslims at the hands of the better armed and led Bosnian Serb Army.

However, the hard-driving general soon fell afoul of the SDA leadership. Halilovic disliked the party's attachment to radical Islam, particularly when it combined with cronyism to promote Koran-quoting hacks over trained professional officers. He even began to entertain doubts about President Izetbegovic, whom he formerly admired, viewing him as a talker, not a doer, who was content to wait for Western intervention rather than fight the Serbs. After his plans to lift the siege of Sarajevo were scuttled by the party's top leaders-an inexplicable act, Halilovic concluded, unless Izetbegovic actually wanted the siege to continue and thereby score political sympathy points with the West-the general had had enough. His falling out with the SDA was total and final.

On October 7, 1993, Halilovic's apartment was torn apart by a massive explosion that killed his wife, Mediha, and his brother-in-law, Edin Rondic; his son and daughter narrowly escaped death. The general only survived because he was unexpectedly not home that morning. The SDA quickly offered condolences and the sad explanation that two more innocent civilians had fallen victim to Serb shelling. Halilovic, on the other hand, had questions. He knew shells and trajectories, and the blast that destroyed his apartment was suspiciously powerful; furthermore, he could see no Serb position where the shell could have plausibly come from. His doubts were bolstered by the conclusions of Dr. Neset Muminagic, the Bosnian Army's top munitions expert, who refused to cave in to political pressure and assessed that the October 7 blast was not a shell of any kind, and certainly did not come from any known VRS positions; instead it was a bomb placed under the apartment.59

Dr. Muminagic's bravery was rare, as few Muslims were willing to stand up to the SDA and its quiet reign of terror in wartime Sarajevo. Faruk Balijagic, a celebrated Bosnian Muslim attorney, attempted to investigate Lark crimes during the war, including the Halilovic case, a line of questioning that earned him death threats judged so serious that the U.S. government put him on a flight to Germany to save his life.60 The Halilovic bombing, it later emerged, was orchestrated by a three-man Lark team, including Nedzad Herenda; the general survived because the bomb was placed improperly, and it was detonated when Halilovic wasn't home because Lark observers misidentified his brother-in-law as the general.

The Halilovic hit wasn't the Larks' only high-profile assassination during the war. The unit is believed to be responsible for the murder of Juka Prazina in Belgium in December 1993. The Muslim mafioso-turned-freedom-fighter fell out with the SDA leadership and in August 1993 the gangster who recently had been chief of Muslim special forces fled the country. The reasons for Juka's flight weren't clear. He claimed to be fed up with Izetbegovic's radical policies, which is plausible, though Prazina's flagrant war profiteering may have been too much even for the SDA. The Larks engaged in significant smuggling, including drug dealing, to raise funds for the unit and themselves, and perhaps they and the organized crime boss had a "professional disagreement."

What is not in dispute is that Prazina arrived in Liege, Belgium, but stayed only a few months. He was last seen on December 3, and it would be ten days before his bullet-riddled corpse was found dumped in a roadside ditch by two hitchhikers. It was widely believed that the long arm of the SDA-meaning the Larks-had eliminated Prazina. Croatian intelligence soon concluded that the plot to kill Prazina could be traced to Bakir Izetbegovic, the Bosnian president's son and a known figure in both terrorist and mafia circles. Juka was assassinated by a five-man hit team acting on Izetbegovic's orders. Prazina had an appointment with the killers, whom he believed were weapons dealers. When Juka got out of his car in a parking lot, he was gunned down and his body was dumped in a nearby canal.

Hasan Cengic was fingered by Croatian intelligence as the plot's organizer. Prazina was apparently under Lark surveillance before the murder, and Cengic reportedly arrived in Belgium on a Pakistani passport to coordinate the hit. The SDAs top logistician supplied the assassins with vehicles, weapons, and fake documents to facilitate their escape. The day after the murder, the fiveman team left Brussels for Khartoum, while Cengic took a trip to Islamabad and Bakir Izetbegovic went to Baghdad to avoid the attention of Belgian authorities. European police named Zijo Orucevic, a mafia figure from Mostar, as the leader of the hit team. Only days before Juka's disappearance, Zikrija Djonko, a former State Security officer, witnessed Bakir Izetbegovic meet with Orucevic in Sarajevo's Holiday Inn, a hangout for SDA higher-ups and mafiosi alike (these groups were hard to distinguish from each other). The meeting ended with Izetbegovic giving the criminal a passport.61

Such evidence made it appear highly likely that Juka's death was the result of his nebulous falling-out with the SDA. Average Sarajevans understood, in a way few foreigners cared to, that Izetbegovic and his party would stop at nothing to achieve their political goals, and they would eliminate those who got in their way or challenged them. Nobody seemed surprised that Juka Prazina didn't die in bed, apparently at the hands of the Muslim secret police. Sarajevans noted wryly that Juka died of "lead poisoning," like so many others.

CHAPTER 6

What is a C-130 doing here? That was the question on the mind of Captain Ivan Moldestad, a Norwegian helicopter pilot serving with UN forces at Tuzla airbase in northeast Bosnia. Late on the afternoon of February 17, 1995, several UN peacekeepers witnessed an unexpected sight. A large air- craft-Moldestad and other Norwegians at Tuzla immediately identified it as a C-130 Hercules, the longstanding workhorse of Western military air transport-arrived at the airbase escorted by two fighters. As it was already dark, Moldestad couldn't make out the insignia on the cargo plane or the fighters.

Following procedure, Molestad reported this mystery flight to NATO's Combined Air Operations Center in Vicenza, Italy, which was responsible for coordinating Western air activities that enforced the no-fly zone over Bosnia. But the Norwegian captain was informed that there were no flights near Tuzla that night, and was told he must be mistaken; when Moldestad persisted, the CAOC hung up the phone.

Moldestad, however, was sure of what he had seen, and his account was corroborated by troops with the Norwegian logistics battalion located two miles west of the airbase. When peacekeepers saw another mysterious C-130 arrive at Tuzla two days later, the Norwegian commander in the region drafted a report marked "sensitive" that summarized the observations and forwarded it up the UN chain of command.

Mystery flights by cargo aircraft landing in Muslim-controlled areas of Bosnia were commonly spotted by UN peacekeepers in late 1994 and early 1995. Rumors abounded that the C-130s were American, and that Washington was secretly arming the Muslims. Such accounts were whispered among UN troops, especially intelligence and special operations personnel, with mounting frequency, and suspicions about what the Americans were up to weren't helped by the desire of U.S. officials to keep the "black flights" story under wraps. Captain Moldestad discovered how much interest Washington took in the matter when, on a visit to Zagreb, he encountered three American officers. Displeased with Molestad's reporting of the Tuzia C-130s, the fellow NATO officers took the Norwegian to the balcony of a fifth-floor hotel room and menacingly told him that if he stuck with his story, "things could get messy for him." Ivan Moldestad wasn't the only UN official to run into trouble with Washington because he took notice of things in Bosnia he wasn't supposed to.1

THE ONLY WAR THEY HAD

The story of how the Clinton administration intervened directly in Bosnia's civil war on the side of the mujahidin is a complex tale, littered with shortsighted strategies, bureaucratic intrigues, and mendacity. In the aftermath of 9/11, Washington's semi-covert alliance with Izetbegovic and the SDA doesn't make for a pleasant read, yet it must be dissected to understand what happened in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, and how bin Laden and the mujahidin wound up the real winners of the conflict.

A decade later, when George W. Bush sought to wage a global war on terrorism, it would be the Europeans who were dubious about the threat of radical Islam, but in the first Clinton administration the Americans were the ones who refused to heed European counsel about armed Islamism. Not all Western Europeans saw Sarajevo as a threat. The Germans in particular had a soft spot for the Muslims, for both emotional and strategic reasons. They had fought together against the Serbs in both World Wars, and German long-term politico-economic interests in the Balkans dictated support for Slovenia, Croatia, and a Muslim Bosnia. Therefore no one seemed particularly surprised by the revelation that Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND) had armed the Muslims during the war. A German parliamentary investigation uncovered that BND officers infiltrated UN and European Union programs and dispatched weapons to the Muslim forces through peacekeeping channels. The head of Germany's team of EU peace monitors was actually a BND officer, and the Germans shipped munitions in food packages, with shells hiding in boxes of powdered milk.2

Germany's strong support for Bosnian independence and the SDA was viewed skeptically by many of their European NATO partners, particularly France. As one French scholar observed, "The German haste to put the Bosnian Muslim state on the baptismal font does not prevent one from observing that when it came to themselves, the Germans worked at reunifying their territory the same as the Serbs are demanding it for theirs."j French skepticism about finding "good guys" in Bosnia was well known, but Britain and Italy weren't far behind in their doubts about what the SDA stood for. David Owen, the British peace negotiator who spent long hours with the leaders of all Bosnia's warring factions, was more charitable than many when he characterized Izetbegovic as "enigmatic," adding perceptively that "whether he is a fundamentalist, very few know for certain. In any case, he hides it behind a self-disciplined portrayal of himself as secular politician, as any dissenter learned in Tito's

Whatever doubts European politicians and bureaucrats had about the radical side of Bosnian Islam, the continent's leading intellectuals were nearly as lockstep in their support for Sarajevo as their American counterparts were. Protests and handwringing about the Bosnian "genocide" were all the rage among Europe's beautiful people and, as expected, France's intelligentsia played a disproportionate role in this campaign. The preeminent Parisian culprit was Bernard-Henri Levy, the leading French public intellectual, who fused big thoughts, political activism, and a rock star lifestyle in a unique fashion (one famous article about BHL, as the hometown press called him, began: "God is dead but my hair is perfect").

Levy jumped onto the Bosnian bandwagon early, and wherever BHL went the Parisian smart set followed. Like most intellectuals, he had no immunity to SDA propaganda and saw in Izetbegovic's regime a fantasyland of interethnic equality liberated from the retrograde prejudices of nationalism and religion. BHUs Alija fetish was pronounced-he declared the president was "no extremist," merely "an old-fashioned conservative." He hailed Izetbegovic's chattiness, expressing awe that the SDA leader, "a man of letters and culture," was "talking philosophy" in the middle of a war-besieged Sarajevans found this otherworldliness less mesmerizingand comparing the saintly Izetbegovic's trademark beret to Mahatma Gandhi's white cotton tunic.5

BHL's advocacy for Sarajevo knew no bounds, and included a pro-SDA film, Bosna, that he showcased at Cannes. His demands for Western military intervention against the Serbs grew stronger, and in 1994, the coifed raconteur led a cast of intellectuals in what he called the "Sarajevo list," a singleissue group to stand in EU parliamentary elections; their only position was support for the Bosnian Muslims. This was, Levy stated, "a slap in the face for the policy of capitulation." Susan Sontag took a hiatus from staging plays in Sarajevo and stood as a candidate for the list, though she wasn't a citizen of any EU member state. Levy invited Izetbegovic to Paris in May 1994 to meet with the "Sarajevo list," which he did. In an oversight that was typical of BHL and his friends, they failed to note that Izetbegovic came to Paris to meet with his secular, postmodern admirers direct from Mecca, where he had just made the hajj.6

France didn't have a monopoly on wooly-headed intellectuals, and their American equivalents exercised disproportionate influence on the Clinton administration during the decisive 1993-1994 period. Indeed, they pretty much were the Clinton administration when it came to Balkan policy.

President Clinton's interest in the Bosnian war seems to have been slight-as noted in Chapter 3, it was mostly just a tool to criticize President Bush in the 1992 election campaign-and by the spring of 1993 the new commander-in-chief's ardor for fixing Bosnia had waned considerably. That said, there were plenty of pro-Sarajevo partisans in and around the White House to ensure the Muslim view triumphed inside the Beltway. Vice President Al Gore was the senior member of the pro-Izetbegovic wing, and from the outset the Clinton administration rejected any notion that Bosnia's conflict was actually a civil war; the debates weren't about whether the Muslims deserved American backing, but how much and how that could be achieved.?

From the outset, Clinton administration efforts to arm the Bosnian Muslims were met with skepticism in the Pentagon, the CIA and much of the intelligence community, and key American allies. The spring 1993 public relations effort by National Security Adviser Anthony Lake to gain support for "lift and strike," which would end the UN arms embargo while using U.S. and NATO air power to attack the Bosnian Serbs, broke up on the rocks when European partners balked. Fears of a rift between Washington and top NATO allies cut short detailed plans to use stocks of ex-Warsaw Pact weapons-President Clinton met with Prince Turki alFaisal, the notorious head of Saudi intelligence, to discuss this concept-and by summer 1993 the White House's desire to help the SDA win hadn't yet translated into policy.8

The State Department, where pro-Sarajevo views now dominated among bureaucrats and political appointees alike, was growing frustrated with the lack of support for the Muslims. Richard Holbrooke, the senior diplomat who was State's point man on Bosnia, was solidly pro-Izetbegovic, and complained repeatedly about U.S. policies. Anthony Lake considered the egocentric Holbrooke "high maintenance," and the diplomat had few friends at the Pentagon either. They especially didn't like Holbrooke's suggestions on arming the Muslims. He thought that clandestine U.S. support for the Afghan jihad offered an ideal model, and Holbrooke advocated sending arms to Sarajevo using third parties such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan. Although Pentagon officials and many military officers viewed the Muslims with deep skepticism, and resisted Holbrooke-line thinking where they could, it was inevitable that the pro-Sarajevo faction would win out, a victory that would have long consequences.`

The Clinton administration's decisive move came in early 1994, when Washington herded the Bosnian Croats and Muslims into an alliance. At the end of February, representatives of these factions, which had spent the last year fighting each other more than the Serbs, met at the State Department, resulting in the so-called Washington agreement. Formalized in a White House ceremony on March 18, this united Bosnia's Croats and Muslims in a federated state and promised a coordinated military strategy to fight the Serbs. Now that Zagreb's cooperation was assured, the agreement opened the door to an easy flow of weapons and munitions to Izetbegovic's army.

Not everyone in Zagreb was enthusiastic about sending more arms to the Muslims, particularly when the Iranians were the middlemen. Miro Tudjman, the head of Croatian intelligence, came to the conclusion reached by most intelligence officers in Washington: increasing the role of Iran in anything to do with Bosnia would be a serious mistake. But Tudjman, like his U.S. counterparts, was overruled. Defense Minister Gojko Susak, a strong advocate of increased arms for Sarajevo-no fan of Izetbegovic, he was receiving substantial kickbacks from every planeload of war materiel that crossed Croatian territory en route to Bosnia-was the lead figure in Zagreb behind the arms increase. The notoriously corrupt Susak, head of the so-called Hercegovina mafia in Zagreb, had been assisting the Iranians for over a year anyway, getting weapons to the Muslims and enriching himself in the process, against the wishes of the Bush administration, whose "red light" policy had told Zagreb not to allow the Iranians to gain a foothold in Bosnia. In April 1994, before the ink on the Washington agreement was dry, the Clinton White House had opted for the "green light" and the Bosnian jihad would he the beneficiary.I0

Acting on orders from Washington, Ambassador Peter Galbraith in Zagreb contacted Croatian and Bosnian officials about getting more arms to Izetbegovic's forces, including talks with Sefko Omerbasic, the head imam in Zagreb, another jihadi cleric in the service of the SDA. Galbraith's proposal was to employ disguised Iranian Boeing 747s to get arms and munitions to Croatia; the spoils would be divided between the Croats and the Bosnians. The Clinton administration moved fast, and the president discussed the green light on April 27 with National Security Adviser Lake on Air Force One. Soon Washington's approval of increased arms for Bosnia, via Iranian channels, was communicated to Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, and America's own arms pipeline to the mujahidin-what Dick Holbrooke famously termed a "not-so-secret secret"-was in business.

The Iranians wasted no time, and senior officials from Zagreb and Sarajevo traveled to Tehran on April 29 to sign agreements. Not ten days after the green light was switched on, Iran opened an embassy in Sarajevo, headed by Mohammed Taherian, a professional mujahid who had been the Iranian envoy to Afghanistan in the 1980s. Iran's new embassy quickly became the largest in Sarajevo, with UN personnel forbidden to come near it. Iran's embassy in Zagreb, a modest establishment, grew rapidly in size beginning in April 1994, though many wondered how many of the new arrivals from Tehran were really

CIA officials in the Balkans and in Washington were concerned by the administration's actions, not least because nobody informed them about the green light. The U.S. Embassy in Zagreb witnessed nasty disputes between State Department officials and CIA officers, with the latter well aware that something odd was happening that they were in the dark about. The CIA determined that Ambassador Galbraith, acting on Washington's orders, was running his own clandestine operation-what spies term a "unilateral"and, even worse, he was doing it in partnership with the Iranians. Before long, unpleasant cables were flying between the Balkans and Washington, and State and the CIA were in a full-blown bureaucratic war.12

James Woolsey, Clinton's first director of Central Intelligence, was not informed of any changes in U.S. policy vis-$-vis Sarajevo, and had the intelligence community been consulted, the spies would have objected strenuously. Their concerns about the SDA's intentions were compounded by worries about allowing the Iranians to expand their Balkan empire and increase their influence in Sarajevo. Iran finding a European safe haven for its espionageterror apparatus was a nightmare for the intelligence community.

Tehran moved faster than the skeptics in Washington feared, with the first shipment of arms landing at Zagreb on May 4, sixty tons of explosives and military equipment (insiders suspected this first batch was provided gratis by the happy Iranians). Two days later, Iran's Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati arrived in Zagreb to present President Izetbegovic with a check for $1 million, a sign of Tehran's support. Soon the "secret" Iranian flights were landing with such frequency at Zagreb's Pleso airport, working up to three flights per week, that the aircraft were diverted to the island of Krk in the Adriatic to deflect awkward questions. The Croats used helicopters to fly the weapons and munitions from Krk after dark to bases in Bosnia for distribution to Muslim forces.13

CIA officials determined that the arms shipments flowing from Clinton's green light were coordinated by the National Security Council, which was running its own clandestine arms pipeline involving Iran without informing Congress or the intelligence community. Parallels with the IranContra scandal of the mid-1980s-another illegal arms scheme involving Iran secretly run by the NSC that had dangerous consequences-were obvious and alarming. Yet the Democratic legislators and investigators who ferociously pursued the Reagan White House over Iran-Contra were nowhere to be seen when a Democratic president's staff was doing the same thing, the only difference being that this time arms were being sent to Islamic fighters who were no friends of the United States.

The Clinton Administration always had trouble keeping a secret, and its Tehran-Zagreb-Sarajevo arms pipeline was poorly concealed for a clandestine program. In December 1994, a helicopter laden with munitions exploded at Pleso airport-it turned out to be Izetbegovic's personal helicopter-and the local media noticed. The cover story portrayed an accident, while EU monitors were bizarrely told that a pyromaniac had committed suicide. When European diplomats asked questions about what the Iranians were up to, Washington made little effort to conceal its involvement. Assistant Secretary of State Alexander Vershbow admitted to Dutch representatives in July 1994 that America was aware of the jihadi pipeline and the cut the Croats were taking, and he indicated Washington supported it.14

The Europeans were particularly troubled by numerous reports of mystery aircraft dropping arms to the Bosnian Muslims. "Black flights" were an irritant among NATO allies, most of whom concluded that the unidentified C-1 30s were American, or at least were flying with Washington's permission. NATO countries with troops on the ground in Bosnia weren't pleased that America was fueling the conflict. UN contingents reported black flights at numerous places in Bosnia from 1994 to 1995. A British general stated simply, "They were American arms deliveries. No doubt about that." The Norwegian report of February 1995 sparked by Ivan Moldestad's observation came at the height of sightings of fighter-escorted C-130s over Bosnia that U.S. officials claimed to have no knowledge of. NATO allies understood, however, that it was impossible for American AWACS aircraft not to have known about the coordinated flights.

DCI Woolsey was emphatic: "The CIA did not move weapons to Bosnia. We were perfectly willing to do that. We had enough experience in this field but the policy level did not want the CIA to do that."15 Then who was behind the black flights? The CIA wondered, too, as its personnel in the Balkans heard the stories circulating among UN peacekeepers. The Pentagon's Special Forces personnel witnessed mysterious arms shipments to the Muslims via C-130s and helicopters (it was a relatively open secret that several countries, including the United States and United Kingdom, infiltrated special operations teams into Bosnia to support UN peacekeeping activities).

There were several potential suspects. Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, which had all shipped arms to Sarajevo, had C-130s in their air forces. Dutch intelligence concluded that the Turks were performing their own periodic airdrops to the Muslims using C-130s. But the black flights were another matter, and UN officials believed that they could not be happening without the approval of somebody highly placed in Washington. Britain's Defence Intelligence Staff investigated the reports and concluded that the operations involved three countries and were directed by Clinton's NSC. DIS was then told to drop its analysis of the matter.16

The Bosnian Serbs protested to the UN about the C-130s; General Mladic sent a formal letter, as he believed the aircraft were Turkish. Bosnian Army records that were later submitted to war crimes investigators confirm unusual arms shipments arriving by air at Tuzla, Srebrenica, and Zepa in early 1995, while they had been reaching Bihac, the Muslim stronghold in western Bosnia, well before that. In March, General Bernard Janvier, commander of UN forces in Bosnia, reported to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan that Visoko airport, built by Hasan Cengic with Iranian help, was in operation and receiving illegal supply flights. The seemingly needless airport, with its mile-long airstrip, was completed at the end of 1994 and raised suspicions among many. Canadian peacekeepers alleged that the unmarked arms flights into Visoko were American.17

The U.S. Senate's investigation of the black flights concluded that there was no official American involvement in the affair, though that leaves open the obvious possibility that front companies were doing Washington's bidding. While CIA or U.S. military involvement can be ruled out, it seems incontrovertible that the Clinton NSC was ultimately behind the operation to arm the Muslims in collaboration with Tehran. However, for want of detailed investigation of what exactly happened between April 1994 and the war's end, and whose C-130s were involved on whose orders, the matter must remain officially unresolved. Cees Wiebes, a Dutch scholar who has researched the topic with thoroughness and balance, and enjoyed access to classified NATO records, concluded that although there is "no hard evidence" that the Clinton administration was behind the mystery flights, Washington's involvement appears beyond question. Given U.S. control of Bosnian airspace during the conflict, no sustained air supply program could have operated without American awareness-and backing, according to most of those who looked into the matter.18

Unfortunately, the CIA warnings about giving the Iranians an entree proved as accurate as they were unheeded. The greatly increased Iranian intelligence presence-from spring 1994, Bosnia and Croatia were teeming with VEVAK and Pasdaran operatives-quickly became a menace to American interests. Iranian spies aggressively monitored U.S. activities in Zagreb at an "alarming pace," beyond the ability of the CIA to protect Americans with countersurveillance. Worse, protests to Croatian officials resulted in no action; Zagreb was unwilling to boot out (PNG in intelspeak, from persona non grata) the Iranians who were, after all, their business partners. The CIA was increasingly worried that the on-the-march Iranians would plan terrorist attacks against representatives of the "Great Satan" in the Balkans.

Just as bad, the increased Iranian complement in Bosnia included four hundred Pasdaran trainers and an unknown number of VEVAK operatives. The congressional investigation into the matter described Iranian intelligence operations in the Balkans as growing "exponentially" in a manner contrary to American interests. By the war's end, the number of Bosnian Muslim military personnel trained by the Iranians numbered in the thousands, to say nothing of the police and intelligence operatives who passed through Iranian courses in both Bosnia and Iran. The House International Relations Committee expressed the matter concisely: "The MOIS [i.e., VEVAK] developed an extraordinarily close working relationship with the Bosnian intelligence service which it largely set up. In addition to training, the Iranians provided political direction and financial support. This assistance was repaid by Bosnian assistance to MOIS."19

The spy wars would continue to the conflict's end and beyond. American intelligence, under pressure from the Clinton administration to lean towards Izetbegovic, found itself increasingly at odds with its allies. An egregious case was the Markale massacre of February 4, 1994, an explosion at a downtown Sarajevo market that killed sixty-eight civilians and wounded over a hundred. Since cameras happened to be nearby, the incident got big airplay on CNN and all the Western news networks, setting a firestorm of outrage. NATO aircraft bombed the Bosnian Serbs in retaliation, a direct intervention in the war from which there would be no return.

But the Markale massacre was in fact deeply suspect. Almost immediately, rumors swirled among UN peacekeepers that the crime was staged by the Muslims for political effect. Although eleven artillery specialists studied the scene for over a week and determined that the Bosnian Serbs were responsible-though the verdict wasn't unanimous-Western intelligence agencies were by and large unconvinced. Washington's secret agencies were likewise divided over the issue. After studying the matter, the intelligence services of Canada, Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, and the Netherlands, all of which had troops on the ground in Bosnia, concluded independently of each other that the Muslims had committed the Markale massacre to "show the Bosnian Serbs in a bad light." London's highly respected joint Intelligence Committee, noted for its dispassionate analysis, reached the conclusion that the crime probably wasn't the work of the Serbs, but the Muslims. It was the same story when a mortar attack on a Sarajevo water distribution point killed several civilians. Again, the crime triggered NATO air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs. The UN investigated, studying blast patterns and trajectories, and the head of UN military observers in Sarajevo concluded that the shelling was done by Muslim forces-an unwelcome finding that was pushed aside by U.S. officials.

Years later, such incidents would remain a point of contention among American intelligence officers, with battle lines drawn between those who refused to believe that Sarajevo would kill its own citizens for political gain, and those who found that scenario entirely plausible. Yet, in truth, the skeptical view of the Bosnian war had lost out inside the Beltway by early 1995. James Woolsey, the politically neutral DCI who barely had any relationship with President Clinton, resigned early that year, beleaguered by the espionage scandal caused by the arrest of CIA officer Aldrich Ames, a longtime Russian spy. After Woolsey's departure, the CIA veered more in the Sarajevo direction, though analysis at the agency remained more level-headed than most places in Washington. The State Department continued to be the bastion of pro-Muslim sentiments in the Washington bureaucracy, working closely with the White House to advance the SDA's interests. By 1995, some elements of the Defense Department were less skeptical of the Muslims than before. The Defense Intelligence Agency, always susceptible to political winds, and a permanent also-ran among America's intelligence agencies (inside the Beltway, it was said that CIA stood for Christians in Action, NSA meant Never Say Anything, while DIA stood for Do It Again), was increasingly supportive of Izetbegovic, to the frustration of many U.S. officers in Europe, who remained dubious about the virtues of the SDA's alleged multiethnic democracy.2°

In the end, Bosnia was the only war the Clinton administration had, and from the beginning they had pushed a one-sided view of the conflict. Their blindness to realities on the ground, and in particular the willingness to support radical Islam-a long-term mistake committed for short-term gains-showed that Washington had learned nothing since the questionable decisions of the 1980s such as backing the Afghan mujahidin and the IranContra affair. But unlike those Reagan-era missteps, the Balkan disasters of the Clinton administration would see no serious efforts at accountability by Congress or the media.

ENEMIES AND FRIENDS

The Bosnian Muslims and Croats weren't the only factions benefiting from semisecret foreign aid. The Bosnian Serbs had friends too, most of all in Belgrade. Despite increasingly serious political disputes between Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, contacts between the VRS and the Yugoslav military were close and friendly. Many VRS officers, including Ratko Mladic, were Yugoslav Army (Vojska Jugoslavije-VJ) personnel seconded to Bosnia, whose salaries were paid by Belgrade. Logistically the Bosnian Seth forces were heavily dependent on regular supplies from across the Drina. There was some foreign assistance to the VRS, though nothing on the scale of Islamic largesse dispensed on the SDA's forces. Orthodox allies Russia and Greece provided the Bosnian Ser6 forces with limited weaponry and munitions, as did Israel. Tel Aviv's support of Mladic's army was small-scale and discreet, borne of a shared fear of radical Islam, and Israeli gratitude for the Serbs' assistance in getting Bosnia's Jewish community out of the war-torn country. Israeli assistance occasionally came to light, for instance at the end of 1994 when mortar shell fragments at Sarajevo airport were discovered to have Hebrew letters on them, but it was in nobody's interest to advance that story.21

Less concealed was the large role played by organized crime behind the scenes throughout the war. Indeed, Balkan mafias can be seen as the conflict's real winners, as they emerged from the Bosnian catastrophe richer, more powerful, and more firmly entrenched in political parties and governments. All the warring factions purchased supplies from organized crime syndicates to meet their military needs, and in many cases it was difficult to distinguish mafiosi from bureaucrats.

Muslim interior minister Alija Delimustafic, a wartime wheeler-dealer without equal, enjoyed exceptionally close ties with the Serbs, a relationship he exploited to commercial advantage. This was easy for Delimustafic since he was considered a "trusted person" by the VRS and VJ, and by KOS in particular; he was one of the "top SDA officials" in Belgrade's service. Notwithstanding, he was deeply involved in bringing the mujahidin to Bosnia in 1992, and helped form the Larks, too. The Serbs allowed the minister, who was in charge of the Muslim police, to reap considerable profits from illegal trading. It would be incorrect to characterize such commercial arrangements-they were practiced by all sides-as an adjunct to the fighting; it might be more accurate to state that from 1992 to 1995 there was a great deal of black marketeering in Bosnia that was occasionally slowed by fighting. Frequently fighting was halted to allow a "big deal" to go down, and all involved understood that the Bosnian conflict had a pervasive make-believe element, and that leaders on all sides were often more concerned with enriching themselves than winning 6attles.22 Although the vast majority of Bosnians were impoverished by the war, which destroyed the middle class, the SDA hierarchy emerged distinctly better off than before.

Sarajevo at war was something of a siege manque, and those with sufficient cash had no trouble getting anything they needed. Skeptics noted that while Muslim forces managed to keep Bosnian Seth armor and infantry out of downtown, somehow truckloads of cigarettes and other black market items coming from Serb lines penetrated Sarajevo daily. There was extensive collusion between Muslim, Serb, and Croat officials regarding food supplies, which succeeded in driving prices absurdly high, to the benefit of mob bossescum-politicians, and to the detriment of everybody else. Profiteering was Sarajevo's real business, and it infected the SDA at all levels. The Western media reported little of this, fearing it would besmirch the Izetbegovic legend, but graft and corruption surrounded every aspect of life in wartime Sarajevo. The military and particularly the police were the worst culprits. In 1994, Munir Alibabic, the respected head of the Sarajevo office of State Security, was dismissed when he protested too strongly about Muslim police corruption. In a letter to Izetbegovic, he elaborated the role of top police officials, including Interior Minister Bakir Alispahic (Delimustafic's replacement) in trafficking in weapons, consumer goods, even drugs. Izetbegovic's only response was to get rid of Alibabic.23

Cigarette smuggling was the biggest cash cow for the mafias, and it was controlled on all sides by powerful politicians. In the Republika Srpska, which supplied the country with most of the black market tobacco, the business was handled by Select-Impex, a firm with direct links to Karadzic and other leading Bosnian Serb politicos. On the Muslim side, the secret police arranged the shipment and distribution of contraband cigarettes, with some of the jobs being handled by the Larks. Their smuggling ring brought cigarettes from the Serbs to Sarajevo via Vrace, and netted the SDA death squad substantial profits that financed their operations and enriched members.24

The Bosnian Croats were astonishingly corrupt, and at times their military seemed more like an armed Balkan gang than a bona fide fighting force. In an impressive racket run by Defense Minister Gojko Susak, millions of dollars in war booty-expensive cars, consumer items, jewelsmade their way from HVO-held territory to Zagreb, where the Bosnian Croats' real masters were (two luxury vehicles stolen in Bosnia by the HVO wound up in President Tud)man's vehicle fleet). Profiteering affected the fighting, with the armies selling each other weapons and munitions-batteries of artillery could be rented by the hour or the day, for enough cash-and relations between officers on all sides were often friendly. Many had served together in Tito's military before Bosnia fell apart, and seldom did warfight- ing get in the way of business.

This was hardly the image of the Bosnian war that Westerners were accustomed to seeing. The CNN version of the conflict paid next to no attention to corruption and profiteering and gave far too much airtime to war crimes and "genocide." The painful truth-understood by nearly all Bosnians but few in the West-was that Serbs, Croats, and Muslims got along fine when mutual interests were involved. No small amount of the conflict was waged for the cameras. While mutual hatreds were real and dangerous, and war crimes did occur with depressing regularity, the war itself had a comic opera aspect from beginning to end. All sides, the SDA very much included, were waging war to gain the best possible political settlement in the end. By 1994, with the fighting stalemated and the front grown largely static, it was clear to all factions that the war's outcome would be determined more by Western intervention than by events on the ground in Bosnia. Izetbegovic's agitprop offensive had worked, and the United States was now actively supporting the Muslims and their cause.

The Washington agreement of March 1994, and the U.S. power that stood behind it, sealed the fate of the Bosnian Serbs. While Belgrade's support for Karadzic and Mladic was waning, and the Bosnian Serbs increasingly feared a falling-out with their brethren across the Drina river, the Clinton administration's backing of Sarajevo was rising. The Bosnian Croats and Muslims commenced high-level meetings to coordinate military strategy and plans to inflict decisive blows against the VRS. There were bad feelings on both sides, stemming from the dirty Croat-Muslim war in central Bosnia throughout 1993, but the allure of victory-and the promise of American backing-made them take the long view and overcome their differences. Yet even the more trusting Bosnian Croats were surprised to see that Sarajevo's representative in the talks was none other than Fikret Muslimovic, the Balkan chameleon, Communist counterspy, latter-day Islamic intellectual, and master of the mujahidin. All understood that he represented President Izetbegovic and his Islamist agenda.25

The fashionable view of the war, which minimized or altogether ignored the role of crime and corruption in the Bosnian conflict, just as it pretended that the mujahidin problem didn't exist, ensured that when the Clinton administration was making decisions about Bosnia, unreality prevailed. Thus Washington's intervention in Bosnia in 1994 and 1995, which determined the war's outcome, was based on dangerously deluded premises about the peoples and agendas involved.'

Not everybody in Washington belonged to the unreality-based community regarding Bosnia. Experts in counterterrorism and counterintelligence were alarmed by the influx of holy warriors and Iranians into Europe. Yet even those whose radar was attuned to the threat of radical Islam didn't always penetrate the thick haze of propaganda and wishful thinking that surrounded the conflict. Richard Clarke, Clinton's competent-if-self-promoting terrorism czar, conceded that Osama bin Laden's "name popped up in intelligence in connection with terrorist activity" in Bosnia as early as 1994, something that received less attention than seems warranted in hindsight.27 For al-Qa'ida, Clarke observed, "Bosnia seemed to fit the bill" for an organization seeking the next jihad. He described the pattern unfolding in Bosnia before the eyes of American intelligence as "a guidebook to the bin Laden network," yet he admitted frankly that, "we didn't recognize it as such at the time." (Why not? is the obvious question in the aftermath of 9/11.) However, even professional counterterrorists, not usually a wishful-thinking bunch, have shown an unwillingness to admit that Sarajevo invited the mujahidin, for political as much as military purposes, and that they were quite welcome guests of the SDA. "The hard-pressed Bosnians clearly wished they could do without these uncontrollable savages," Clarke stated without offering evidence, "but Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic decided to take aid where he could," citing the usual litany.28

Those who offered cautionary counsel behind closed doors in Washington were regarded as Islamophobes, genocide-deniers, or not being team players, and the many intelligence officers who doubted the wisdom of Clinton administration policies retreated to their offices and cubicles and commiserated quietly. The bureaucratic battle had been lost, though they couldn't rationally explain why. The CIA's first chief of station in Sarajevowho was nearly murdered by Iranian "allies"-recalled simply that the Clinton White House entered a Balkan alliance with Tehran and the mujahidin "for reasons that are still not credible."29

Certainly Izetbegovic and the SDA went to some lengths to convince Washington that the mujahidin were a non-factor in the conflict. Interestingly, while Bosnian Muslim spokesmen in public denied any official connection between Sarajevo and the holy warriors, they were telling a different story to the Clinton administration. In a December 1994 meeting with mujahidin leaders in Bosnia, General Rasim Delic, the chief of the General Staff, revealed that Sarajevo was making efforts to convince the Americans that the el-Mujahid Detachment was part of the ABiH-pre- sumably to assure Washington that the atrocity-prone unit was actually under firm SDA control and would be kept on a short leash in the future.30

UN peacekeepers were told a different story. General Enver Hadzihasanovic, commander of the ABiH 3rd Corps in the middle of the war-his corps included nearly all the mujahidin units, including the 7th Muslim Brigade as well as el-Mujahid-told UN officers in central Bosnia, "There are no foreign fighters in 3rd Corps, only Bosnians." Few UN personnel were fooled by this ruse, UN intelligence reports were filled with details of Islamist misdeeds, and mujahidin activities and crimes were well known in and around their base at Zenica. (Illustrating the defect of UN peacekeepers, however, one Swedish colonel who served with the UN recalled he saw "no trace" of mujahidin during a year in central Bosnia, though the few reporters who pursued the story had no difficulty finding the holy warriors, even some of their leaders who were willing to give interviews on the record.)31

If Swedes on the ground in Bosnia could be duped into thinking there were no armed Islamists there, no al-Qa'ida operatives bent on waging jihad, perhaps it's no surprise that Clinton administration functionaries who wanted to believe in the SDA so badly were fooled at long distance. Yet that is no excuse for the misguided policies of 1993-1995 that made the Bosnian catastrophe worse and granted both revolutionary Iran and bin Laden's legionnaires a foothold in Europe. The simple truth, covered up during the 1990s, was that Washington used the global jihad movement to fight its dubious war in Bosnia, in collaboration with unlikely allies in Tehran.32 Instead of using diplomatic and perhaps military means to end the conflict, the Clinton administration aggressively backed the Bosnian Muslims, ensuring the war's outcome and the victory of anti-Western forces. Worse, by backing the SDA, Washington reinforced the worst tendencies and excesses of the Izetbegovic government, especially its deeply cherished-if seldom admitted-kinship with armed Islamism.

CHAPTER 7

Bosnia:
The Real War

"Allahu akbar!" shouted the security guards, shattering the festive mood on the Air France passenger jet. For the 227 passengers on Flight 8969, headed from Algiers to Paris on Christmas Eve 1994, flying out of a war zone to the City of Light, a nightmare had begun.

Nothing seemed amiss when four armed men in blue uniforms carrying Air Algerie identification boarded the Airbus A300 before takeoff; after all, Algeria was wracked by a civil war, and high security was the norm. Then the Algerians shouted the tekbir and charged the cockpit, their machine guns aimed at the passengers. The terrorists' ruse had worked, and they had control of the jet. Without delay, the Algerian Islamists killed two passengers in cold blood. The hard young men seemed euphoric, punctuating polite words with passengers with threats to kill everyone to "give a lesson to the French." But they spent more time ensuring that all the women on the flight, stewardesses included, were veiled as the Koran wished; women without scarves were given blankets to cover their faces.

Extended negotiations commenced between the hijackers and Algerian authorities, mostly over the release of local terrorists sitting in Algerian jails. Like most negotiations with mujahidin, they got nowhere. When the lead hijacker's mother got on the radio and pleaded with him to surrender, his response was chilling: "Mother, we'll meet in paradise!"

After hours of fruitless negotiations, and the murder of more passengers, Paris had had enough. France readied an elite group of Gendarmerie commandos, the country's top counterterror team, for action, should talks fail. With Paris's assent, the Airbus headed for France, amid concerns that things might get worse-an anonymous informant claimed that "a flying bomb will explode over Paris." The plane landed at Marseilles before dawn on December 26 to refuel. French negotiators stalled, working slowly to give the commandos time to ready the assault.

At 5:17 pm, minutes after the terrorists' deadline had passed, three groups of Gendarmes, clad in black ski masks, assaulted the plane in a textbook operation. Though the terrorists fought hard, and nine commandos were wounded, as were thirteen passengers and three crew members (only one was seriously hurt), no police or passengers were killed in the rescue mission, despite a great deal of gunfire, smoke, and confusion. The police fought their way through hundreds of terrorist bullets and evacuated the plane rapidly. The four terrorists were dead, and just seventeen minutes after it started the operation was over, a complete success. The fifty-four-hour hijacking ordeal ended better than any had imagined possible.

What the commandos didn't know was that they had saved not just hundreds of lives, but thousands. The Algerian Islamists who seized the Airbus planned to fly it into the Eiffel Tower, which was packed with Christmastime tourists and merrymakers. Bolstered by veterans of the Bosnian jihad, the Algerian terrorist underground wanted to take their holy war to France, to Paris itself. The destruction of Air France Flight 8969 was to have been their unforgettable opening act of a terrible drama. France narrowly missed its own 9/11, thanks to the professionalism and courage of their counterterrorism forces-and the willingness of political leaders to abandon negotiations in favor of more direct methods of saving lives. Paris gained an appreciation of just how hard the hard men of the global jihad really were, and the mass murder methods they would use to attack the West. Unfortunately, few outside France paid much attention. America would learn an identical lesson at the hands of the same enemy, with a far less happy outcome, in a few short years.

"VIRTUOUS MUSLIM STATE"

By the war's second year, the Party of Democratic Action had consolidated power in the one-third of Bosnian territory under its control. Ethnic minorities and rival political parties had been deceived by false promises of pluralism, then brushed aside when no longer needed. Izetbegovic and the onetime Young Muslims who formed the backbone of the party and Sarajevo's power structure at last had what they wanted-a Muslim pseudostate that was smaller than hoped for (the SDA claimed half of the country as rightfully Muslim) but more importantly was all theirs. Now they could enact their dreams of an Islamic government in Europe.

Yet what the SDA's mini-state looked like on close examination-something very few Westerners bothered to do-was an unpleasant creation marked by one-party rule, fanaticism, violence, and corruption no different from the Serb and Croat mini-states in Bosnia. Izetbegovic's government expended much energy on moneymaking off its own beleaguered people and even profiteering at the expense of the Bosnian Army. Party stalwart Omer Behmen, Izetbegovic's longtime comrade-in-Islam, was placed in charge of fund-raising for Muslim forces early in the war. His tenure was denounced by the military since millions of dollars disappeared, and what the ABiH received frequently wasn't what the soldiers ordered or needed. Even in besieged Srebrenica, SDA officials pocketed funds intended to buy weapons-in one case, $12,000 collected by Srebrenica for guns and ammunition was stolen by the SDA. Profiteering in logistics ran rampant, with the Bosnian Army regularly receiving poorly made uniforms or boots made in China that were too small to fit any European. I

Things only got worse when ABiH supply was taken over by the fanatical and thievish Cengic clan. Under their direction, the party sold weapons to the military at vastly marked-up prices. Guns that reached Bosnia through TWRA and SDA channels were marketed to the Bosnian Army at many times what Sarajevo paid for them. AK-47 assault rifles, the mainstay of the ABiH, were purchased by the SDA at $250 each but sold to the military at $500 to $750. The army's main logistics center at Visoko, managed by Halid Cengic (Hasan's father), eventually charged the General Staff $1,000 per AK-47. Members of that clan featured in many of the worst cases of organized crime-cum-governance in Muslim regions of Bosnia, and Hasan's Cengic's ability to enrich himself while waging jihad was legendary. Virtually all the SDA higher-ups stole from state coffers, and kickbacks became so widespread in Sarajevo that graft on anything less than a grand scale went unnoted. In 1995, Husein Zivalj and Irfan Ljevakovic-members of the TWRA managing board and intimates of Izetbegovic-arranged the donation of $10 million to build an Islamic center and mosque in Vienna, and kept $1 million for themselves.2

Izetbegovic's party combined profiteering and the jihad in unique ways. A typical case was Abduladhim Maktouf, an Iraqi mujahid who backed the holy war and got rich doing it. He came to Bosnia in the mid-1980s to study agriculture at the University of Sarajevo and took a local wife. When war arrived, Matkouf set up a video shop in Travnik, a hotbed of mujahidin activity. The unassuming business was a front fi>r al-Haramayn, the notorious Saudi jihadi NGO, and for al-Qa'ida, according to Croatian and Bosnian intelligence. Palma did business in Western Europe and Pakistan, but its core competency was financing the jihad. Maktouf, a naturalized Bosnian citizen, laundered Islamic dirty money using forged invoices, and supplied funds and documents for mujahidin from Algeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, and he became suspiciously wealthy doing so; his wife, who divorced him after thirteen years together, concluded, "I was living with a man with a double life." Maktouf got rich because he was operating under the protection of the Muslim police in Travnik, thanks to his close ties with Halid Genjac, a top SDA official. When investigators eventually began looking into Maktouf's unsavory connections, Genjac arranged the documents for the jihadi entrepreneur to escape the country.3

Average Muslims were disgusted by the SDA's visible corruption, and to many it seemed that not much had changed since Communist days. The ideology was different, but the organized graft was the same (if not worse), and the ranks of Izetbegovic's party included many ex-Communists, derided by the locals as "watermelons"-green on the outside, red on the inside. Like the Communists, the SDA controlled the media, had a stranglehold on public debate, and wouldn't tolerate too much dissent, but was content to have the passive allegiance of the Muslim population.4 As under Tito, party membership and connections were necessary to obtain good jobs and apartments. The SDA was an authoritarian clique that used the war to realize its radical goals; the Islamic transformation of society it sought wasn't a spontaneous by-product of the conflict, as the SDA's Western admirers suggested, but was the party's actual agenda from the start.

Izetbegovic and the party leadership, for all their waxing Koranic to improve public morality, were careful to never speak openly about their plan for implementing a fully Islamic society. This goal, which originated with the Young Muslims in the 1940s, would have had little support among Bosnian Muslims. The French scholar Xavier Bougarel, the leading expert on the party's inner workings, concluded that "the Pan-Islamic ideology remains a confidential matter: It is never clearly manifested in public SDA documents and speeches and is not intended for the public at large."5 Nevertheless, the party succeeded in completely penetrating and taking over state organs by the end of 1993, and a few months later Fikret Muslimovic, the head of ABiH intelligence and security, and Interior Minister Bakir Alispahic were appointed to the SDA's main committee (i.e., politburo), a clear sign of which way the ideological winds were blowing in Sarajevo. Muslimovic wasted no time and initiated a campaign to "re-Islamize" the Muslims of Bosnia, who were too secular and Western for the SDA's liking.'

Alija Izetbegovic aided the campaign by encouraging traditional Islamic piety and public mores, including practices that were utterly foreign to Bosnian Muslims in the twentieth century. In one case, the president and his wife attended a bizarre "fashion show" intended to encourage Sarajevo's famously fashionable women to dress modestly. This not-ready-for-Milan event included "models" clad in Afghan-style burqas.7 What the party wanted was explained by Dzemaludin Latic, the SDA's chief ideologist and the editor of Ljil an, the SDA magazine. "My law does not allow women to expose their bodies," he stated, adding, "jihad is our holy task." When queried about the SDA's views of non-Muslims, Latic elaborated that "We are tolerant thanks to Islam," and defined his vision for Bosnia not as Islamist but rather "anti-secularist," without explaining what the difference might be. Citing a popular SDA view, Izetbegovic's top propagandist denounced the Serbs as "polytheists" (a common prejudice among devout Muslims, who consider that belief in the Holy Trinity removes Christians from the ranks of monotheists).8

The SDA sponsored and encouraged hatred of non-Muslims in party statements and publications, a campaign that Western journalists in Bosnia declined to report. In a February 23, 1994 editorial in the party magazine Lillian, Zilhad Kljucanin feted a rare ABiH victory: "There are 500 Serb orphans in Ugljevik. Praised be Allah! The Bosnian Army has so far sent 50,000 Chetniks to hell.... A Serb starts to resemble a human being only after his death." Kljucanin went on to edit the Travnik-based Islamist magazine Bosnjak and author the book Yes, I Despise Serbs; among his more pointed statements was, "Every Muslim should pick a Serb he will kill when the time comes." He hailed the late October 1995 Muslim capture of the town of Sana from the "Vlachs" (a derogatory term for Serbs) with the memorable Boinjak headline: "We entered Sana, you Vlach motherf ****s!"9

The SDA's re-Islamization campaign enjoyed some success, and views and attitudes that were seldom encountered in Bosnia before 1992 were commonplace two or three years later. A benchmark was the reaction to the deaths of several Muslim youths in Tuzla on May 25, 1995, when a shell hit a popular cafe; a local imam explained that the youngsters wouldn't have died if they hadn't been engaged in public immorality (i.e., having a drink in a cafe).10 While many Muslims were shocked by such beliefs, no longer were secularists the dominant element, even in Sarajevo. In rural Bosnia especially, imams spread rumors that Alija Izetbegovic was the hidden twelfth imam-a fixture in Islamic folklore-who was sent by Allah to lead the Bosnian Muslims on the true path. Some imams taught that, "Izetbegovic is the next after Muhammad, who will tell and realize final truth." Mosque sermons prominently featured discussions of the thirteenth imam and his supposed connection to the Bosnian war; as one imam explained, "We have saved the Islamic world because we have disclosed the enemies it has in the West, we have sacrificed ourselves to save

Such thinking horrified Muslims who wanted their country to be something other than a Balkan Iran. They viewed the SDA with derision and fear. Adil Zulfikarpasic, again in exile and able to speak more freely than Muslims living under the SDA, denounced Izetbegovic's "one-party dictatorship," warning that Bosnia was "sinking into fundamentalism."12 The earthier Fikret Abdic, who was becoming public enemy number one in Sarajevo for his refusal to accept the SDA's radical program, offered a thumbnail definition of his opponents, whom he characterized as, "Alija's creators of evil and mass graves, whose ultimate goal is to realize the concept of a radical Islamic society on as large an area as possible." Abdic pinpointed the true face of the SDA: "This is not a question of Islamic fundamentalism based on religion, but an attempt to justify unprecedented terror and crime by religion."13 Abdic's opinions were common among many Bosnian Muslims, who by the middle of the war considered the SDA to be as dangerous to their lives and interests as the Serbs. This, unfortunately, was one more inconvenient story that the West never got to hear, thanks to the journalists who refused to report bad news about the saintly Izetbegovic, and the Western politicians who were content to let such stories go unreported.

"TRANSFORMING" THE BOSNIAN ARMY

The most important component of the SDA's re-Islamization effort was gaining complete control of the Muslim security apparatus, and ensuring that the military and police were in the hands of party loyalists who were sympathetic to radical Islam. Here Fikret Muslimovic played an indispensable role in purging "undesirable elements"-meaning non-Muslims and secular Muslims alike-from the Bosnian military and police. Ridding the State Security Service (SDB) of the unwanted was simple, particularly after Munir Alibabic was purged as head of the Sarajevo SDB office. By mid1994, of the 135 officers serving with that office, 124 were Muslim, six were Serbs, and two were Croats.14

It took the SDA longer to purge its enemies, real and imagined, from the vastly larger Bosnian Army. Muslimovic euphemistically termed this the "desecularization of the army," and he oversaw the implementation of his "Islamic security" policy with his usual thoroughness and cunning. Opponents of the SDA, regardless of their religion or ethnicity, were subjected to character assassination before being fired, an old KOS trick. As critics noted, at a time when the hard-pressed ABiH ought to have been employing every trained officer to win the war, the General Staff was expending more energy on ridding the ranks of "enemies" than actually fighting.15 As even a defender of the SDA observed, by 1995 "military power in every territory held by the ABiH was firmly in the hands of local SDA leaders loyal to Izetbegovic.""6

Beginning in 1993, following the SDA's party line, particularly regarding religion, was a requirement to get ahead in the military. Izetbegovic made clear what loyalty entailed, explaining that faith was a private matter for an officer, "But he cannot blaspheme Allah. You have to resemble your own people. Among our people, blasphemy is a completely unknown occurrence."17 Sarajevo claimed that its army bore the heroic legacy of Tito's Partisans, with their multiethnic struggle against fascism. Izetbegovic regularly hailed the Bosnian Army as the inheritors of the Partisan tradition, including calling the enemy not Serbs and Croats, but Chetniks and Ustashas. But this, like so much else, was window dressing. In public, Izetbegovic appealed to the 1941-1945 struggle against fascism ("We shall win if we earn the reputation of an army that does not kill women and chil- dren"-though the ABiH did plenty of that), but three-quarters of the more than two hundred Sarajevo streets and squares named for Partisan heroes and units were changed to reflect new politics. The names of Bosnian Serb and Croat Partisan heroes disappeared from the city's streets (the relatively few named after Muslims who fought for Tito mostly stayed), and were renamed after SDA-approved figures such as imams and Islamic religious

Serbs and Croats serving in the ranks of the Muslim forces were mostly purged, often dismissed without explanation, once their propaganda value was spent. In the jihad that the SDA was waging semi-openly, non-Muslims had become a liability. Dragan Vikic, a Bosnian Croat and hero of the defense of Sarajevo in the war's first months, was dumped unceremoniously in 1993 despite-or perhaps because of-the public adulation he received. Vikic was angered by the Islamization of the army and police, which belied the SDA's multiethnic statements. As Vikic explained it, "I couldn't remain in an army in which the first basic condition was that you were a member of the SDA, the second that you were in good with the Cengic clan, the third that you swore allegiance to Izetbegovic, and only fourth that you knew something. In fifth place-so you can see how important it wascame your war record."19

Vikic's views were widely held by the few non-Muslims who remained in Sarajevo's forces, and many less-religious Muslims felt the same. The army was subjected to intense propaganda that encouraged radical Islam, including religious speeches by imams and the distributing of Islamic literature to the troops (Izetbegovic's Islamic Declaration was the most widely seen; it wasn't popular with the troops, who found it tendentious). ABiH soldiers were frequently exhorted to wage jihad, though hardly any Westerners noted this, even when Reis ul-ulema Mustafa Ceric denounced "European trash" and preached against ethnically mixed marriages. Occasionally a top SDA functionary would slip up and mention jihad in front of the camerasPrime Minister Haris Silajdzic did this on July 9, 1995, declaring an Islamic holy war on Sarajevo TV and inviting all Islamic states to fight on the side of Bosnia's Muslims-but even when that happened, the co-opted Western press corps could be trusted to keep the incident under wraps.20

The most visible manifestation of the Islamization of Sarajevo's war effort was the widespread terming of war victims as "martyrs." In Islam, as in Christianity, martyr-shahid in Arabic (sehid in Bosnian)-is a loaded term; like martyr, Shahid means "witness," though to Muslims it has the explicit meaning of one who dies in a jihad.21 Soon the SDA was proclaiming war dead as shahids-first just soldiers killed in action, but eventually anybody who died was hailed an Islamic martyr. This was deeply offensive to secular Muslims, who saw this as one more attempt by Izetbegovic to force radical Islam down their throats. A wounded Muslim soldier whose son died fighting in the ABiH was brave enough to write the president an open letter, declaring Izetbegovic had no right to call his son a shahid. The father didn't like the SDA's Islamist policies, arguing that he and his son shed their blood to defend Muslims, not to wage jihad; he further asked Izetbegovic why he insisted on greeting the troops with selam, an Arabic, not Bosnian, greeting, in what was supposedly a secular army. The father was subjected to a campaign of vilification in the press for daring to question SDA policies. Before long, Sarajevo's war dead were gathered in "martyrs' cemeteries" that dotted the landscape. These were expressly Islamic in tone, with headstones engraved with Koranic inscriptions, though some nonMuslims were buried among the martyrs as honorary shahids, meaning they fought in the jihad. This made sense to Izetbegovic and like-minded radicals but nobody else.22

Izetbegovic and his party succeeded in portraying their struggle as Western, secular, and democratic when it was actually Eastern, Islamic, and authoritarian. Many Bosnian Muslims found the SDA's vision acceptable, or at least better than the other options, and weren't too troubled by Sarajevo's regular invocation of the jihad. For many, the SDA's struggle had become theirs, and they confused the defense of Muslims with waging holy war, just as Izetbegovic wanted. In a revealing interview, Hase Tiric, the commander of the Black Swans, a Muslim special forces unit that did its share of dirty work for the SDA during the war, was asked, "Are you fighting for a Bosnian or a Muslim state?" "What's the difference?" was his reply.23

Unfortunately for average Muslims, heavy doses of Koranic anesthetic were no substitute for military competence, and the Bosnian Army continued to be plagued by an ineffectiveness and inertia that were attributable in large part to the SDA's personnel policies. While the ABiH remained seriously outgunned by the well-armed Bosnian Serbs, by the middle of the war the Muslims' manpower advantage was potentially decisive. In the hands of competent generals, Sarajevo's forces could have turned the tide. By the end of 1993, the ABiH had 180,000 troops in six corps and seventy-six brigades (though two-thirds of the soldiers were reservists on short-notice recall; total mobilization could produce a quarter-million men under arms). The front, which snaked across the entire country, continued to be stalemated mostly because the Muslims lacked the will to attack. The Bosnian Serbs were grossly overextended, and were themselves displaying battlefield lethargy. Mladic's VRS probably could have taken Sarajevo, but they didn't want to deal with the messy political aftermath; besides, the faux-siege was tying tip many more Muslim troops than Serb.24

Sarajevo's forces continued to be poorly trained and equipped compared to the VRS; one ABiH officer recalled that his training upon being mobilized in May 1992 was basic indeed, consisting of three days of target practice before being shipped to the front with 2nd Corps near Tuzla. And there he stayed for the next three-and-a-half years. While the Serbs were clearly overstretched, the ABiH hardly ever took advantage of this. "For offensive war we were a spectacular failure," the officer explained. Though the main objective for 2nd Corps was obvious-cutting off the Posavina corridor, the lifeline of the Republika Srpska-"This was never done. We never even tried."25 Although some Muslim soldiers attributed such inexplicable lethargy to a lack of military professionalism, others suspected that Izetbegovic and the SDA were perfectly happy to wait for the West to intervene on their behalf. What, therefore, would be the point of taking on the Serbs alone when the Americans would eventually do it for you?

THE THIRD YEAR OF WAR

The problem with the SDAs waiting-for-Clinton strategy was that it surrendered any initiative and inflicted continuing needless suffering on Bosnians. Every month the war dragged on gave the mujahidin more time to wreak havoc and plot terrorism while recruiting new holy warriors to their cause. Sarajevo was sometimes brutally frank about its desired end-state. What the SDA wanted, explained party ideologist Dzemaludin Latic, was not less than 45 percent of Bosnian territory plus Sandiak. Gaining control of almost half the country was something Sarajevo stood no chance of achieving without major American military help, while occupying Sandiak, a region of Serbia, was an Islamist pipe dream.26 The SDA's vision of an Islamic mini-state carved from central Bosnia bore strong resemblance to the plans of Bosnian Islamists during World War II, who desired satellite status under the Third Reich; the later concept was much the same but under American protection: a Balkan Islamistan subject to Holbrooke rather than Himmler.

Bosnian Muslims not committed to the SDA's Islamist project-which was most Muslims, who after two years of war saw their government as corrupt, inept, and fanatical-were growing increasingly frustrated by Izetbegovic's intransigence when international negotiators kept trying to get Bosnia's warring factions to agree on a peace settlement. Many Muslims quietly agreed with Adil Zulfikarpasic's verdict: "Izetbegovic is worse than the Muslims' worst enemy."27 Peace for its own sake had limited appeal to the SDA leadership. They had willed a civil war with their aggressive political Islam and their refusal to take the rights of non-Muslims seriously. Agreeing to a peace settlement that gave Sarajevo less than it had before the war started-after tens of thousands of Muslims were dead-was a political nonstarter for Izetbegovic.

Even some of the president's closest confidants were having doubts about his political abilities. Izetbegovic's carefully crafted otherworldly image, so effective with the Western media, grated on many SDA higherups, who found his retreat into prayer and contemplation a hazard. "Alija doesn't know what a state is," stated Nedzib Sacirbegovic, the president's longest serving partner-in-Islam. "He belongs in a mosque, not in government," he said in 1993. Izetbegovic's political opponents were even more pointed, particularly the irrepressible Fikret Abdic, who denounced the president as "this cunning impostor and the biggest murderer of his own people." "Everybody now realizes that Izetbegovic's goal is a Muslim state," he explained in mid-1993, adding a sketch of the man based on his personal experience: "Alija is again trying to remain a humble, nice old man-the eternal loser. But behind the scenes we actually have his love of power and his life's dream of creating a state known only to himself, which he conceived in his mind while he was doing time in Foca prison and writing his Islamic Declaration, which he has never renounced."28

Abdic's critique resonated with many Muslims, but with the army and police firmly in their hands, the SDA leadership's hold on power in Sarajevo was safe. The war was another matter, however, and the agitprop campaign to win Western sympathy, and ultimately NATO intervention, continued relentlessly. After so many missteps and bad choices, playing the Washington card was the only game Sarajevo had left. And the Muslims played that hand with great effectiveness. Anyone who relied on CNN for coverage of the war inevitably concluded that besieged Sarajevo was hell on earth. Yet by the war's third year things had calmed down considerably, particularly as there was no end in sight to the faux-siege. Certainly life in Sarajevo was nasty, and civilians continued to die unnatural deaths, but conditions were much more normal than the Western media was willing to portray.

The SDA claimed that ten thousand had died in Sarajevo, and six hundred thousand shells had hit the city, damaging or destroying 60 percent of the buildings, but the gray market economy was flourishing. On the thousandth day of the siege, Sarajevo's markets boasted fresh produce, including oranges, lemons, and bananas at prices only slightly higher than in Western Europe. Gasoline was readily available, at prices 35 percent cheaper than in Germany. After the tough winter of 1993-1994, the World Food Program surveyed nutrition in the city, establishing that there was no malnourishment and only a small percentage of the population was undernourished. During 1994, the UN concluded, only 324 civilians were killed in Sarajevo-a violent death rate lower than in Washington, DC.29

No wonder that George Kenney, the dissident ex-State Department officer, reexamined the Bosnian war and became disillusioned. Analyzing the "easy answer" of 200,000 dead in Bosnia's catastrophe, Kenney in early 1995 asserted that this oft-cited figure was notional at best, and certainly a gross overstatement. "Bosnia isn't the Holocaust or Rwanda," he observed: "It's Lebanon."30 This message was something the pro-Sarajevo lobby was acutely attuned not to hear. Only two years before, the mainstream media had been clamoring for interviews with the maverick young diplomat who dared to take on the bureaucracy and, as the policy wonks love to put it, "speak truth to power." When Kenney kept doing this, however, no one seemed to care.

The only Sarajevans in truly desperate straits were the city's Christians, though this was a story few Western reporters or politicians cared about. Just as in Bosnian Serb and Croat territory, SDA-run parts of Bosnia saw unwanted minorities killed, terrorized, and run out of town. By 1994, Sarajevo's Serbian population, nearly 160,000 strong two years before, was down to a third of that. The Islamic intimidation campaign succeeded in driving the Serbs out of their homes. Downtown Sarajevo had three Orthodox churches and two chapels; all were badly damaged by shelling and small arms fire, much of it intentionally aimed at the religious sites. Orthodox priests had been run out of the city, and in many cases their churches were looted by Muslim mobs.31

The domestic terrorism practiced by the SDA and the mujahidin against what Fikret Muslimovic termed "the internal enemy" worked as intended, and opponents of Izetbegovic were silenced through fear, intimidation, and exile. Interestingly, some of the imported Islamists concluded that their harsher methods were counterproductive. Violent advocacy of radical Islam won over Bosnian hotheads, but had limited appeal to average Muslims. (As Adil Zulfikarpasic observed, "I am a faithful Muslim and I have fought for the emancipation of Islam in our country my whole life. It is another matter that we are primitively imitating Central Asia and North Africa, which after all have nothing to do with real religious command- ments."32) An internal study of mujahidin activities in Bosnia concluded, "We engage in jihad without sufficient Islamic upbringing," decrying some of the holy warriors' Islamic tough love: "Their method of promoting virtue was to beat up a young man and a young woman if they saw them walking together in the street." Similarly, "these people broke bottles of liquor in a barbarous way without first using friendly argument as Allah instructs us to do"-a common mujahidin misstep with Bosnians who, though Muslim, were also Slavs with a deep affection for liquor.

Mujahidin efforts to take local wives were singled out as a problem in the study. "Some got married in a way totally new to the Bosnians. Some armed men would go to the home of the chosen woman and ask her father for her hand in marriage to one of them without prior appointment. When Bosnians saw a platoon armed to the teeth, they immediately accepted the marriage proposal." Even in the most backward corners of the country-the ancient practice of "bride capture" was known among rural Muslims into the 1970s-proposing an arranged marriage while bearing AK-47s was considered excessive.

Mujahidin tactics held out for criticism in the paper included theft and the abuse of peacekeepers: "Fighters regarded UN vehicles and the vehicles of peacekeeping troops as booty," a practice that didn't help their cause. Worse was the edifying but foolish use of decapitated Christian heads as propaganda tools. This was bad for public relations, according to the jihadi study, and playing up decapitations of Serbs-especially videotaping them-was considered an unwise move, as it provided evidence for possible criminal charges against the mujahidin. War crimes investigations could result, particularly if survivors were left who witnessed the torture and decapitation of non-Muslims.33

Fortunately for the SDA's Islamist fighters, they seldom left inconvenient witnesses behind.

BLOWBACK

For Europe, the consequences of Bosnia's jihad didn't take long to be felt. The arrival of thousands of mujahidin in the Balkans, only a short flight or a few hours' drive from Central Europe, presented a rising threat to public security in many quarters. Middle Eastern regimes that were trying to keep domestic Islamist movements at bay were watching Bosnia closely to determine what effect the Balkan war would have on the global jihad movement. While security services in Egypt, Algeria, and Jordan were pleased to see many of their most troublesome missionary-terrorist suspects decamp for Europe, they were very concerned what would happen when Bosnia's war was over and the mujahidin began to return home.

Problems began even before the fighting ended in Bosnia. To start with, the veterans of the Balkan jihad-termed "Bosnians" just as their predecessors had been called "Afghans"-were considered more dangerous than the holy warriors forged in the Afghan crucible. Middle Eastern security services feared the tenacious "Bosnians" even more, especially Egypt's secret police, perhaps the most determined foes of radical Islam in the Arab world. Mujahidin veterans of Izetbegovic's war were a cunning group, trained by the Iranian secret services and benefiting from the excellent networking opportunities offered in Bosnia. Cairo's top police officials openly accused the Muslim Brotherhood of running terrorist training camps in Bosnia, while official sources in Egypt indicated that the Mubarak regime's secret police had been secretly monitoring the activities of Egyptian holy warriors in Bosnia as early as mid-1992.34

Jordan faced the same challenge. Amman's secret police monitored the "notorious Jordanian Bosnians," a contingent that included most of the country's most ferocious Islamists, fearing that they would return home and propagate terrorism and chaos. As early as June 1994, the Jordanian Interior Minister Hasan al-Alfi was issuing open warnings about the impact of the Bosnian jihad on the Islamic world, including pointed admonitions to Amman's ally, Washington, that unfortunately were never heeded: "The United States supported Afghanistan not by virtue of the fact that it is an Islamic state, but it did that within the context of an anti-Communist effort. Let me here warn about what is happening in Bosnia-Hercegovina lest it be used to promote the same end."35

Hardcore Islamists were headed to Bosnia from every corner of the Muslim world, including some of the remotest. Polish counterintelligence determined that jihad recruiters were dispatching fighters from Poland's tiny Islamic community (five thousand strong when Bosnia's war began, it would grow fivefold in the 1990s) to fight for the SDA. Graduates of Sarajevo's Gazi Husrevbeg medresa, who ran the local Islamic society, were the ringleaders in Warsaw, proselytizing a virulent Salafi form of Islam and assisting would-be mujahidin to get to Bosnia.36 Farther East, Russian authorities tracked the movement of holy warriors from Chechnya to the Balkans-and after the war back home, to Moscow's displeasure. Bosnia was a key meeting ground for affiliates of al-Qa'ida and other terrorist groups, and Bosnian passports were popping up wherever the jihadi cause could be found. Their appeal was explained by a colonel of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR): "The Bosnian passport is now considered a cover that facilitates the activities of the 'pimps' who travel to the countries of the Gulf and North

North Africa was a particular hotspot for "Bosnians," and the aftershocks of the Balkan jihad were felt across the Mediterranean, in Algeria, before almost anywhere else. While Bosnia burned, Algeria was caught up in its own religious-based civil war that was just as savage as anything in the Balkans, though it received modest press in the West. When the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), a radical party that advocated a shari'a-based state, appeared able to take control of Algeria in 1991, the military cracked down and drove the FIS underground. The Islamists declared war against the Algerian state and a hyperviolent terrorist wing of the Islamists, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) appeared, ready to wage jihad against fellow Muslims to achieve its goals.

GIA battled "infidels" when it could find them, but since Algeria was 98 percent Muslim, there were few Christians and Jews to target. The country's tiny Catholic presence received GIA's lethal attention, and most of Algeria's 27,000 Catholics fled rather than be killed. In mid-December 1993, GIA terrorists massacred a dozen Croats who were working in Algeria. The men were kidnapped from a worksite and were taken to a dry river bed, then had their throats slit in ritual fashion. This was retribution for the crimes committed by Christians against Muslims in Bosnia, GIA claimed. Significantly, eight workers were spared-they claimed to be Muslim.38

This was just the beginning of CIA's war on Europe. Algerian Islamists had a special hatred for France, their former colonial master. Their top emir, Djamel Zitouni, was a veteran of the Afghan jihad with a burning desire to take the holy war to Europe; eliminating the European presence in Algeria was the first step. He began with the slaughter of the twelve Croats, followed in March 1994 with the murder of a French businessman and his son (again, by slitting their throats, the preferred Islamist modus operandi when killing Christians). Seventy-six foreigners, including twenty-six French nationals, were murdered by GIA in targeted killings by the end of 1994. The worst outrage was the butchery perpetrated by GIA killers against the Catholic Church's minimal presence in Algeria. Though there were only two Catholic monasteries and three hundred religious in the country, they were a focus of GIA misdeeds, beginning with intimidation and ending in mass killings.;`

The calm of Our Lady of the Atlas Mountains, a Trappist monastery at Tibhirine, was shattered on March 27, 1996, when seven monks were abducted by GIA terrorists. The ordeal really began on Christmas Eve 1993, when GIA fighters arrived at the monastery and began a campaign of intimidation. But the monks, all Frenchmen, many of whom had spent decades in Algeria and had close and affectionate ties with the locals, refused to leave; it was their caring for Algerians that GIA so objected to. The head terrorist behind the crime was Emir Sayat-Attya, who massacred the Croats in 1993. The monks' abduction led to a macabre two-month ordeal, including pleas for their release by Paris and the Vatican-in a revealing reply, Zitouni sent a letter to French President Jacques Chirac explaining that all France's troubles with GIA could go away: "Embrace Islam and you shall have peace"but the crime ended, inevitably, with the decapitation of the monks. Theirs was a death easily foretold.40

There were other senseless and brutal killings of Catholic monks, nuns, and priests in Algeria by armed Islamists. Yet GIA didn't restrict its antiEuropean offensive to Algeria, and here was where the "Bosnians" played an important role. During the Algerian civil war, France served as a rear base for GIA. With lax asylum laws and a teeming population of alienated Algerian immigrants, France was a convenient place for GIA to send fighters to cool down and plan more attacks; certainly Zitouni's terrorists feared French counterintelligence less than they dreaded Algeria's heavy-handed police. By the mid-1990s, CIA's underground infrastructure in France was teeming with mujahidin fresh from the Bosnian front. Hardened by war and eager to continue the jihad, Algerian "Bosnians" were behind the wave of terrorism that struck France at the end of 1994.41

The first warning sign was the Christmas Eve 1994 hijacking of the Air France Airbus by GIA terrorists, a crime that raised fears in France but caused less concern than seems warranted in hindsight. By intrepidly saving the day, French commandos gave the West the luxury of not having to think seriously about Islamist hijackings of commercial airliners, a slumber that would end abruptly on a September morning almost seven years later. Thwarted in Marseilles, GIA mujahidin planned less logistically demanding attacks. Bolstered by veterans of Bosnia and weapons smuggled into Western Europe from the Balkans via jihadi channels, GIA was ready to open a new front in Paris itself.

Any belief that GIA cells in France weren't a serious threat because the terrorists were only using the country as a safe haven was shattered on the early evening of July 25, 1995, by a bombing at the Saint Michel metro stop in the heart of the French capital. Eight civilians died and eighty-four were injured in this attack, the first of several by GIA that bloody summer. The bombing campaign during Paris's Black Summer injured some two hundred, in addition to the eight killed in July; there were eight attacks in all-two more against the Paris metro plus bomb strikes against targets such as the TGV high-speed train and a Jewish school near Lyon. The purpose of these crimes was revenge for the failed Christmas Eve hijacking, and GIA was using veterans of the Bosnian jihad to carry out the attacks. The hardened killers, led by Ahmed Zaoui, a top Algerian mujahid, relied on logistical support in France but also Belgium and Luxembourg.42

GIA had a sophisticated support network in Western Europe, led by "Bosnians" who knew how to smuggle weapons, relying on Islamic organized crime groups to help support their cause. They wanted to run guns and munitions from Bosnia to Algeria via France and the Low Countries, but the arms were distributed freely in Western Europe too, and by 1995 machine guns, grenades and other heavy weapons were appearing on the streets of Paris and Brussels, straight from Bosnian Army stocks, thanks to the mujahidin. These connections, with their Bosnian origin, were laid bare by a dramatic car chase on the night of December 11, 1995. French police stopped a suspicious vehicle with Luxembourg plates, but the driver fled, resulting in a long pursuit that ended with a crash in the Belgian town of Bastogne. The wanted men fled the scene, throwing grenades that injured one policeman, and leaving a submachine gun behind. The grenade and the gun came from Bosnia-no surprise, as deadly weapons "courtesy of Sarajevo" were known to French and Belgian police-but the trail led to Nusret Jusuvovic, a Bosnian Muslim living in Luxembourg. He was already being watched by the local police, who considered him an organized crime suspect. But the story was about to get more interesting.43

Jusuvovic and several other jihadi gangsters who had left Bosnia and set up shop in the Low Countries were linked in a complex network that included native Bosnians and militant converts, holy warriors who had been hardened by the war and returned home to foment terror. This was a collection of GIA fighters, fresh from the Balkan jihad, bolstered by Bosnians. The most troublesome Islamic gang to emerge from Bosnia in 1995 was headed by Christopher Caze. Of the ten members of the socalled Roubaix Gang, nine were veterans of the Bosnian jihad; most had trained in the same camp and fought in the el-Mujahid Detachment. Their leader was the prototypical fanatical convert, a former medical student and churchgoing Catholic youth who found Islam, then went to Bosnia to assist with humanitarian relief and returned a die-hard Islamist. After his fifth year of medical school, Caze disappeared into the Balkan maze, where he called himself Abu Velid, and even his family didn't know where he'd gone. With shoulder-length black hair and long white robes, the charismatic Caze returned from Bosnia very different, having accepted the jihadi worldview with gusto, and he was out to change the worldby force.

In Bosnia, Caze met another young, disillusioned Frenchman, Lionel Dumont. His early life in the gritty industrial town of Roubaix, near the Belgian border, wasn't easy. The youngest of nine children in a devoutly Catholic working-class family, Dumont was never a problem child; he was "very sensitive, idealistic, a dreamer" who could not tolerate injustice, recalled one of his sisters. His first experience of a different kind of life came in 1993, when the twenty-two-year-old Dumont was serving with French peacekeepers in Somalia, a difficult assignment surrounded by misery that shook the idealistic soldier to his core. He returned from Africa a changed man, desperate to better the world.

He wanted to go to the Balkans with an NGO, to assist those isolated and victimized by war, like the Somalis he wanted to help but couldn't. After several false starts, Dumont made it to Bosnia in May 1994 with an Islamic "humanitarian" organization in Zenica, mujahidin central, and there met Caze, another convert from Roubaix. Dumont, known as Abu Hamza in Bosnia, would return to France the next year with new friends, a new life, and a new faith. He brought with him a burning hatred of the West, and wanted nothing to do with his old friends and family; they were now the enemy. Dumont and Caze settled in Roubaix, aimlessly, and seethed with alienation from the society around them. Before long, they were talking about "actions in France."44

The Roubaix Gang started with a series of holdups-five smash-andgrabs against mini-marts in northeast France in the first week of February 1996. They were aggressive, opening fire on police and killing a driver. Realizing that they needed more firepower to handle "big jobs," Dumont and Caze went to Bosnia and promptly returned with a full arsenal. The gang was diverse, consisting of converts like Dumont and Caze, and also Carlo Mazzoni, an Italian mujahid who underwent combat training near Milan then fought in Bosnia, plus Algerians like Fateh Kamel, a professional holy warrior whose wounds in Bosnia had been treated by Caze. There were also young French Muslims like Mouloud Bouguelane, raised by Algerian immigrant parents into a life of disillusionment. He turned to radical Islam to overcome his feelings of alienation from the society he grew up in, a path that led to Bosnia and the jihad, where he met Caze. Armed with Bosnian machine guns, grenades, and an antitank rocket launcher, the Roubaix Gang assaulted an armored car, seriously wounding a guard.45

The greatest effort by the thieves-cum-terrorists was an attempt to blow up the Group of Seven international economic conference at Lille, near Roubaix, on March 28. Gaze's fighters rigged a Peugeot with explosives and compressed gas three blocks from the G7 meeting, but the vehicle was discovered and the bomb defused. French police sprang into action, and within hours the investigators located the gang's hideout at 59 rue Henri-Carette in Roubaix. On March 29 elite French counterterrorist commandos raided the house, believing they were dealing with mere gangsters. It was an unpleasant surprise when the inhabitants proved astonishingly well armed, full of fight, and unwilling to surrender. Four members of the gang, Caze included, were incinerated rather than having to give themselves up. Two policemen were wounded, and France had its eyes opened to what the Bosnian jihad had wrought.

The weapons in the house-almost a dozen automatic weapons, antitank rockets, grenades, and a huge stash of ammunition-were all traced to Bosnia, as were the dead men inside. The Roubaix Gang was no more, but investigation of the Islamist network revealed disturbing leads. Jean-Louis Bruguiere, France's top terrorism investigator, took over the inquest, which determined that the Islamist criminals in Roubaix were in regular contact with GIA cells across Western Europe, including the Jusuvovic cadre in Luxembourg, and that the network was ultimately traceable to Bosnia. Decrypting the gang's address books and financial paperwork, the police learned that Caze and his mujahidin had sent hundreds of thousands of dollars, mostly from robbing shops and banks, hack to Zenica to finance terrorist activities in the Balkans. Arrests of associates in France and Belgium followed in the summer of 1996, but the extended network wasn't dead. The complex web-involving Bosnian Muslims, Algerians, Moroccans, and European converts to Islam, rotating around mafia groups and mosquesshared an ideology, a cause, and roots in the Bosnian jihad.46

Lionel Dumont survived the late March shootout and was on the run. He led the remnants of the Roubaix Gang back, inevitably, to Bosnia. They made their way to Zenica via the Islamist underground through France and Italy, and walked over Balkan mountains, map and compass in hand, until they reached the SDA-protected mujahidin sanctuary in central Bosnia. A wanted man in several European countries, Dumont settled down to a seminormal life in postwar Bosnia, with a teenage Muslim bride, holding down a job on a NATO base at Ilidza, near Sarajevo, right under the noses of French peacekeepers.

Old habits proved hard to break, though, and the cause always needed funds, and he was the ringleader in a February 1997 gas station robbery that killed a Bosnian policeman. Dumont was on the run again, but not for long. He was arrested in March-the Muslim police had no trouble finding Dumont when they wanted to-and convicted in July 1997 of the recent robbery and murder, receiving a twenty-year sentence. Yet few seemed surprised in May 1999 when Dumont, who liked being called "the new Lawrence of Arabia," managed a mysterious getaway from Zenica prison. He was supposed to have escaped through a kitchen window, but it was suspected that sympathetic prison authorities simply let him walk away. As his lawyer explained, "It wasn't in some people's interest for Lionel Dumont to say everything he knew about arms trafficking in

French intelligence believed that Dumont had headed to the Far East, protected by the silent brotherhood of Islamist terrorists scattered around the globe. It would be several years before the law caught up with the mujahid from Roubaix. In the meantime, no one in the many intelligence and police agencies that were looking for him thought that they had heard the last of Lionel Dumont-or of the terrorists and criminals like him who were spreading around Europe and the world in the aftermath of Bosnia's jihad.

CHAPTER 8

The summer of 1995 saw the beginning of the end of the Bosnian civil war. After more than three years of inconclusive fighting, the Bosnian Serbs began to lose. Though they staved off battlefield defeat, they would soon accept a peace agreement that wasn't any sort of victory for their leaders, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. After years of rising involvement, Westernspecifically American-intervention in Bosnia's conflict came in earnest in the summer of 1995, turning the tide of the war in political terms. The Clinton administration granted the Bosnian jihad a victory at the negotiating table that Sarajevo's mujahidin could never hope to win on the battlefield.

The Bosnian Serb massacre of several thousand Muslims around Srebrenica in mid-July changed everything. Western guarantees of safe haven for besieged Bosnian Muslims were shown to be hollow, and under Washington's direction NATO launched an air campaign against the Bosnian Serbs to show that they meant business. The disaster at Srebrenica was the war's real turning point, leading to American military intervention, and ultimately the political victory that Izetbegovic and the SDA had long sought but could never deliver on their own. Yet despite the significance of the events of mid-July 1995, what actually happened at Srebrenica, and why, has never been fully examined. Those most intimately involved with the Srebrenica debacle have been the least willing to explain their actions-and inactions. Why?

TURNING THE BOSNIAN TIDE

By the spring of 1995, three years into Bosnia's nightmare, the warring factions were exhausted, their militaries strained by the inconclusive fighting, their morale dwindling with no end to the conflict in sight. Offensives and counteroffensives in the latter half of 1994 had changed few of the facts on the ground, and for the Bosnian Serbs in particular, the coming summer offered sparse hope for better times.

The U.S.-brokered Muslim-Croat alliance was slowly turning the tide. Politically, Radovan Karadzic had lost the conflict before it really began, never having a chance in the propaganda war aimed at the West; militarily, defeat took longer. The once-mighty Bosnian Serb Army, Ratko Mladic's feared VRS, had plenty of fight left in it, but its long-term prospects were grim, particularly in light of a Serb-on-Serb dispute between Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic, the undisputed boss of Serbdom, that threatened the very existence of the Republika Srpska. The VRS had entered a long downhill slide from which there would be no return.

That said, the Muslim-Croat alliance frequently seemed more notional than real, despite the State Department's best efforts, with bad feelings on both sides running deep from the bitter war-within-the-war between the ABiH and the HVO during 1993. Despite strong orders from Zagreb to cooperate with the Muslims, the Bosnian Croats viewed the SDA with deep suspicion. Such doubts weren't helped by the behavior of some Muslims, particularly the mujahidin, towards the Croats. Although joint planning for war against the Serbs moved forward, bad incidents cropped up at inopportune moments. Perhaps the lowest point came in March 1995, when a top HVO officer disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Vlado Santic, chief of Bosnian Croat forces in the Bihac pocket in westernmost Bosnia, went missing on the night of March 7-8 and was never seen again. Relations between Muslims and Croats in the besieged Bihac region had been better than average; the heavily Muslim region had a long tradition of friendly ties with Croatia, and was closer to Zagreb than Sarajevo both geographically and politically. Even during the worst of the 1993 Muslim-Croat fighting, relations between the ABiH and the HVO in the Bihac pocket had been cordial.

General Atif Dudakovic, commander of the ABiH 5th Corps, had nevertheless grown frustrated with Santic, probably because Dudakovic spent as much time smuggling as fighting and Santic knew it. Dudakovic told two of his staffers, Colonels Hamdija Abdic and Aleksandar Mrenica, "Take him" shortly before Santic disappeared. Although it was universally believed that Satiric was murdered by Muslim allies, the case was never resolved, remaining a sore point between the ABiH and the HVO.I

A bigger problem in Zagreb's view was the malignant influence of the large mujahidin presence in Bosnia and Croatia. By 1995, it was all too evident that the unheeded warnings from the Croatian intelligence services about the unwisdom of entering an alliance with radical Islam and the likes of al-Qa'ida had been prescient. While the Defense Ministry and corrupt Croatian bureaucrats were getting rich by skimming arms and cash off the Tehran-Zagreb-Sarajevo pipeline, holy warriors were causing trouble on many fronts. Croatia had become a sanctuary for an alarming number of the world's most wanted jihadi fighters, and something had to be done. American intelligence officials, if not everyone in Washington, were worried about all the armed Islamists running around Croatia, threatening Americans and openly supporting the Balkan jihad.

That Croatia was no longer an unconditional mujahid's paradise was made clear on September 13, 1995, when Croatian authorities arrested Tala'at Fuad Qassem upon his arrival in Zagreb on a flight from Amsterdam. Qassem was one of Cairo's most wanted terrorists, a senior member of Egypt's Islamist underground and a key figure in Ayman al-Zawahiri's Islamic Group. Sentenced to death in absentia for his role in the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat, Qassem had lived in European exile for years, followed by the Egyptian secret police, who had never managed to catch him. Many countries offered asylum to Egyptian terrorists, who claimed to be victims of political persecution at home. Cairo had informed Zagreb more than once that the presence of wanted Egyptian terrorists on Croatian soil was a diplomatic problem; now the Croats delivered.

What happened to Qassem has never been made public, though it is generally believed that he was covertly deported to Egypt and executed. This was in fact an early example of the American policy of "extraordinary renditions" of terrorist suspects-a practice employed on a significant scale after 9/11 but which had its origins in the mid-1990s. Sharing a concern about the large numbers of terrorists at large, Washington approached Cairo about getting wanted men back to Egypt quietly, and Qassem was the first example, according to Michael Scheuer, a.k.a. Anonymous, the senior CIA counterterrorism officer who retired after publishing two acid-penned critiques of U.S. policies vis-a-vis radical Islam. American intelligence tracked, captured, and transported the wanted al-Qa'ida affiliates; as Scheuer explained, "It served American purposes to get these people arrested, and Egyptian purposes to get these people back, where they could be interrogated." American intelligence officers participated in the arrest of Qassem, then interrogated him onboard a ship in the Adriatic before sending him covertly to Egypt. There Qassem's trail runs cold.2

The mujahidin had no doubt that their esteemed brother had been kidnapped by the Americans, with Croatian help, and returned to Egypt to face certain death. "Croatia will suffer the consequences" was the threat issued by Abu Ma'ali, the emir of Bosnia's imported holy warriors. What he meant was made clear in the port of Rijeka on October 20, 1995, when a suicide bomber drove a car into the city's police headquarters. Disaster was narrowly averted, as the bomb exploded prematurely, and five people were injured seriously and twenty-one received minor wounds; the police building was located next to a school and kindergarten, and a properly fused bomb would have killed dozens of children.

The dead bomber was identified as a Kuwaiti national and known mujahid, a regular at Milan's notorious mosque on Viale Jenner. Based on interrogations and communications intercepts, Italian intelligence concluded that the Rijeka bombing was planned in Milan under the tutelage of Anwar Shaban, al-Qa'ida's point man in Italy. It is believed that Ayman alZawahiri, bin Laden's number two, visited the Balkans, including Croatia, shortly before the Rijeka attack, further proof that the bombing was an alQa'ida operation. It was simple payback: "Rijeka had to pay the price" for what happened to Qassem, according to Abu Ma'ali. Sponsorship of the crime by al-Qa'ida, specifically its Egyptian wing, the Islamic Group, wasn't in doubt. Abd al-Moti, a senior member of al-Zawahiri's organization, publicly asserted that the Rijeka bombing was "our warning to the regime in Zagreb." With this attack, the Egyptian element of bin Laden's legion embellished its reputation for bloodthirsty ferocity, gained by brutal attacks on Western tourists in Egypt. As al-Moti reassuringly explained, "We don't kill all tourists, only American and Israeli tourists, because they are not tourists, but spies who come to pollute Egyptian soil."3

Zagreb had reached the limits of its tolerance for mujahidin crimes committed on Croatian soil. While the arms pipeline stayed open, the Croatian intelligence services began monitoring the activities of the "humanitarian aid workers" more closely. Italy likewise had begun to closely watch the imported Islamic fighters. Operation Sphinx, a multiagency Italian effort to identify and root out mujahidin leadership in Milan, resulted in the arrest of thirteen members of the al-Qa'ida network that ran through Viale Jenner, but the ringleader, Anwar Shaban, escaped. He naturally headed for Bosnia and continued his logistics support to the jihad from the Zenica area. But his terrorist career came to an end on December 14, 1995- in a fitting irony, the same day that Bosnia's warring factions signed a peace agreement in Dayton, Ohio, concluding the fighting-when Shaban was killed by Bosnian Croat troops in what mujahidin claimed was an ambush.

Shaban's diary, seized by the HVO, was revealing. It cited regular meetings between senior al-Qa'ida members and the leadership of the SDA and the Bosnian Army, including General Staff Chief Rasim Delic, Interior Minister Bakir Alispahic, and Sakib Mahmuljin, the gray eminence behind the ABiH 3rd Corps, in whose ranks the mujahidin units were found. The diary, which named virtually every Islamist notable in Bosnia, left no doubt of Alija Izetbegovic's regular and deep involvement in the activities of the holy warriors; the mujahidin rightly saw Izetbegovic as their "real commander." As the war was winding down, the SDA was determining how to keep the special units of radical Islamist warriors going; their jihad wasn't over just because the fighting was ending. Shaban noted a December 4 meeting, shortly before his death, with the leadership of the Muslim military about this issue, which included promises from the SDA regarding "the continuation of the missionary work for which we have fought honorably." When it came to the jihad, Izetbegovic and the SDA would prove to be as good as their word.4

THE END OF DADDY ABDIC

Sarajevo was determined to continue the holy war, regardless of what happened with the Bosnian civil war. Like all true believers, the SDA leadership had no tolerance for coreligionists who failed to see things their way. Throughout the war, Izetbegovic and his followers reserved a special hatred for Fikret Abdic, who broke with the Party of Democratic Action and refused to tow the SDA line on anything, least of all the war. To Abdic, Bosnia's civil war had been entirely avoidable, and was borne of intransigence and stupidity on all sides, most of all Izetbegovic's. Moreover, Abdic believed, and publicly stated, that Sarajevo's continuing fanaticism and blindness were the real reason the bloody conflict kept going despite countless peace efforts by the international community. The SDA returned this contempt with interest, and Izetbegovic's military and secret police waged a war against Daddy Abdic and his followers with a vigor and determination they never employed against the Serbs.

This nasty civil war between Bosnia's Muslims received less attention from Western press and governments than it deserved, for it punctured many myths about the conflict. It showed Izetbegovic and the SDA in a very unflattering light, and was therefore an unwanted story. Fikret Abdic was the same roguish charmer he had always been, a Balkan wheeler-dealer from central casting, and the hometown crowd adored him with undiminished fervor. Cazin Krajina, the westernmost corner of Bosnia, was the most Muslim part of the country, and the most politically volatile. The fiercely independent locals possessed a rebellious streak that was centuries old, as the Ottomans and Habsburgs knew. Cazin saw the only serious revolt against Communist rule in Yugoslavia, a short-lived but tenacious rebellion in 1950 that shocked Tito's secret police. The Muslims there had always considered themselves a breed apart from their coreligionists in the rest of Bosnia, and never more so than when the SDA ruled in Sarajevo.

"Daddy" exploited his cultlike popularity and Cazin's rebelliousness and began to challenge Izetbegovic's hold on western Bosnia. Abdic's political and economic base of support in the Cazin Krajina was rock-solid. His feud with Izetbegovic was personal as well as political, and by the spring of 1993 Abdic was openly challenging not just the competence of the SDA president, but his legitimacy as well, styling himself "the moral president of Bosnia" (a claim not without merit, given the outcome of the 1990 election). Abdic wasn't Izetbegovic's only potential rival-the SDA sponsored a campaign to discredit Selim Beslagic, the respected (and secular) mayor of Tuzla, who was too popular for Izetbegovic's liking-but Abdic, with his overt condemnations of the SDA and its program, was a more serious matter.5

What the ruling clique in Sarajevo claimed to find so objectionable about Abdic was his willingness to deal with Serbs and Croats-the mortal enemies of Bosnian Muslims, per SDA gospel. There can be no doubt that Abdic considered his Serb and Croat neighbors around Cazin friendlier than Izetbegovic and his ilk, and the bumptious Daddy was willing to do business with anybody. But what the SDA leadership really hated about Abdic was his popularity-in feeble emulation, the party encouraged the masses to call Izetbegovic dado (granddad); it didn't take-and the troubling fact that the secular politician had gotten more votes than Izetbegovic in Bosnia's sole presidential election.

Sarajevo's secret police made attempts to discredit and undermine Abdic, and when those failed to shake his hold on Cazin, they planned assas sination. In the early summer of 1993, ABiH special forces under the direction of Fikret Muslimovic made two attempts to infiltrate Velika Kladusa, the main town in Cazin Krajina and Abdic's base of operations. SDA assassins, disguised as UN peacekeepers, were discovered by Bosnian Croat troops and both attempts failed. Operation Efendija (meaning Reverend, fittingly) did nothing but make Abdic even angrier at Sarajevo, and he was soon denouncing Izetbegovic's efforts "to make the Cazin Krajina into a mass grave of Muslims, just like he has done elsewhere in

Abdic formalized his fiefdom's status on September 27, 1993, by declaring it the Autonomous Province of Western Bosnia, a pseudo-state recognized by no one outside Velika Kladusa but which enjoyed a lifestyle far better than those in SDA-controlled Bosnia thanks to Abdic's robust trading with the Serbs and Croats who surrounded his "province."7 Thousands of Muslims in the Bihac area flocked to Abdic's haven of peace, including troops from the ABiH 5th Corps. This, in Izetbegovic's eyes, was war.

Henceforth the real enemy for Sarajevo's forces in western Bosnia, that is Atif Dudakovic's 5th Corps, wasn't the Serbs surrounding them, but Abdic's pseudo-state and its pseudo-army. While the siege of Sarajevo continued and Muslim enclaves like Srebrenica and Zepa were in dire straits, the Bosnian Army was making its major effort on the other side of the country, to crush Muslims who dared to reject Izetbegovic and his Islamist plan for Bosnia. The stakes were clear to those who filled the ranks of Abdic's militia. As one of those soldiers explained, "We're not fanatics and criminals like those from the 5th Corps. We all bow, go to mosque, and respect the Koran. We don't need an Islamic state under Alija Izetbegovic. Whether my sister will wear a veil is up to her to decide and not up to some stupid imam."8

The struggle between Alija Izetbegovic and Fikret Abdic involved many things-power, prestige, money-but above all it was about what kind of state Bosnian Muslims wanted to live in. This, for the SDA, was the real struggle, and it was religious in nature. Twenty-eight imams who backed Abdic were excommunicated by the Izetbegovic-controlled Islamic Community, while Abdic's forces denounced "Alija's mujahidin" and "Sarajevo fundamentalists," who they claimed were a threat to all of Europe. The Bosnian Army's all-out offensive against Abdic, when it arrived in early July 1994, was spearheaded by troops shouting "Allahu akbar!" as they attacked fellow Muslims, whom Izetbegovic's forces revealingly referred to as murtadi-apostates.

It says something about the SDA that the most successful offensive waged by the Bosnian Army during the entire war was the operation to destroy Fikret Abdic. Operation Tiger-Freedom, launched by Dudakovic's 5th Corps, was a well-planned attack that employed deception, including the use of fake defectors to convince Abdic that one of Dudakovic's brigades, the 502nd, had staged a revolt in Bihac. For sixty-three hours Abdic and his staff were fooled by the ruse, which the ABiH used to good effect, attacking the "apostates" and seizing Velika Kladusa. Some thirty thousand of Abdic's supporters fled into Serb-held territory, and although Abdic's forces retook some of the lost ground, Daddy's little empire had been whittled down to a size Sarajevo found more manageable.9 The Serbs staved off Abdic's complete collapse by supplying his militia with arms and munitions (this was a winwin for the Serbs, as they sold them to both sides in this Muslim-on-Muslim war; the VRS charged Dudakovic's forces five times what Abdic paid).

Rebel Muslims captured by the ABiH were treated badly. As recounted by Adem Seidic, after his capture by Dudakovic's troops, he and 1,400 other Abdic supporters were held in two hangars at Bihac airport, where they endured beatings with fists and rifles, plus long interrogations. Reis ul-ulema Mustafa Ceric visited the prisoners, who complained about the regular beatings; the Sarajevo mufti said this "wasn't a problem"-after all, they were apostates. SDA reeducation aimed to bring them back into the Islamist fold. The prisoners were employed on wood-cutting duties and many developed serious health problems due to overwork and malnutrition. Yet they were refused treatment unless they greeted the camp doctor with "proper Muslim greetings" such as selam and merhaba ("peace" and "good day" in Arabic).10

Fikret Abdic's pseudo-state collapsed in late summer 1995, when Dudakovic's 5th Corps finally broke out of the Bihac pocket. With the Serbs on the ropes, they had little help to offer Abdic, and he and his followers fled to neighboring Croatia. Daddy set up shop in a hotel in Rijeka, under the protection of the Croatian government-Abdic was, above all, a survivor-and attempted to reconstitute his commercial holdings. He had left Bosnia, but as far as Izetbegovic and the SDA were concerned Abdic wasn't gone enough. In early April 1996, a hit team of Sarajevo's secret police was dispatched to Rijeka to solve the Daddy problem once and for all. Muslim secret police chief Kemal Ademovic would later testify under oath that the assassination plot, codenamed Operation Dover, was approved at the highest levels in Sarajevo, including President Izetbegovic. However, the terrorists were discovered in a routine check at the Croatian border; customs guards were suspicious of the car with Bihac plates, and discovered an arsenal in the trunk. Investigation revealed that the would-be killers were employees of the Muslim secret police office in Bihac, headed to Rijeka to administer what the Croatian intelligence services termed the "Bihac recipe." The five assassins involved in the operation turned out to have been trained by Iranian intelligence at a secret base near Sarajevo, and frequent visits by Kasim Trnka, the Bosnian ambassador in Zagreb, to Bihac in the weeks before the planned assassination appeared sinister in hindsight. Zagreb protested this brazen attempted murder by Bosnian officials and increased the protective detail assigned to

Fikret Abdic survived, as he always seemed to, but his profile dimmed after Bosnia's war. His one-man secular movement had lost the battle with the SDA, and Daddy nearly lost his life in the process. He wasn't the only "apostate" that Izetbegovic sent Iranian-trained assassins to kill in 1996. Muhamed Filipovic, a Muslim scholar who had been critical of the president and his party, was informed by British intelligence that he was on an SDA hit list, and fled Bosnia to safety. (The plot to assassinate Filipovic was later confirmed by Bosnian The five SDA secret policemen arrested by Croatian police for planning to murder Abdic received light sentences. After eighteen months in prison, the convicts returned to Bihac and went straight back to work for the Muslim police.13

FLASH AND STORM

Fikret Abdic's last significant role in the Bosnian conflict was his inadvertent triggering of the summer 1995 offensive that decisively shifted the balance of power in favor of the Bosnian Muslim-Croat alliance, and opened the door to a diplomatic agreement to end the fighting. While the Bosnian war dragged on, Zagreb was readying its military for reconquest of the one-third of Croatian territory held by the Krajina Serbs since 1991. The Croatian Army (Hrvatska vojska-HV) was rebuilt on NATO lines, and trained in maneuver warfare by retired U.S. military officers; Washington's support to the HV was an open secret, and although the Clinton administration viewed Tudjman's Croatia with some distaste-there was no affection for the Croats like the deep feelings for the Bosnian Muslims-they shared a common enemy: the Serbs. By the spring of 1995, the Zagreb's new model army was ready to take on the Krajina Serbs and thereby shift the balance of power in the western Balkans.

The Krajina Serbs had always been a paper tiger-without the Yugoslav military behind them, as the JNA was in 1991, they were all but defenseless-and by May 1995 their military existed mostly on paper. The Serb statelet in Croatia lacked defensible frontiers, a coherent plan of defense, and a functioning economy. Thousands of Krajina Serbs, particularly military-age young men, had left for brighter pastures in Belgrade: it speaks volumes about the state of the Krajina that anyone would decamp for better economic prospects in Serbia, where inflation and unemployment had surpassed levels seen in Weimar-era Germany. Milosevic made it clear that he was weary of the Krajina issue, four years after Belgrade went to war to defend the Serbs in Croatia. When Zagreb's initial blow came in the first week of May 1995, the Krajina Serbs essentially folded without a fight.

Operation Flash, launched by the HV in western Slavonia, steamrolled the Krajina Serbs' "18th Corps"-it actually mustered about four thousand men, many of them unwilling-in a few hours. The Serb defeat was unexpected and ignominious. The Krajina Serbs, famed for centuries as ferocious warriors, had given up almost without a fight; especially painful for Serbs was the failure to defend Jasenovac, site of the worst Ustasha death camp, the Balkan Auschwitz, where many thousands of Serbs had been liquidated during World War 11.14

Flash, though a small operation, was a complete success for Croatia and a body-blow to Serbdom, particularly because Belgrade didn't lift a finger to help their Krajina kinsmen. The anticipated backing by the Yugoslav military never materialized. Immediately suspicions mounted that there had been a backroom deal between Zagreb and Belgrade to sell out the Krajina. This was plausible, since Milosevic's cynicism knew no bounds and he certainly wanted to wash his hands of the messy problem. That there was some sort of secret agreement between Milosevic and Tudjman to resolve the Krajina issue in Croatia's favor has since been confirmed by senior officers of the Krajina Serb military (who were actually Yugoslav officers on ment).15 But something bigger than Flash was soon to arrive.

The May attack was only a warm-up for the real HV offensive to destroy the Krajina Serb mini-state. Termed Operation Storm, this was an all-out effort by Zagreb to wipe out what the JNA and Milosevic had created in 1991. It started ahead of schedule, thanks to Fikret Abdic. In late July, his ragtag militia of anti-SDA Muslims attacked the ABiH 5th Corps, their nemesis, and Dudakovic's forces were losing ground. Abdic was on his way to retaking the land his "Autonomous Province of Western Bosnia" had surrendered to the 5th Corps the previous summer. This threatened to unravel Zagreb's operation, since it assumed ABiH forces in western Bosnia would be free to fight the Serbs once Storm commenced.

Therefore, in the last week of July, HV forces quietly moved into Bosnia to save Dudakovic; Zagreb's brigades also advanced against Bosnian Serb units to lay the groundwork for Storm. When the offensive officially began in early August, the conclusion was preordained. Although destroying the Serb Krajina Republic was Storm's primary objective, the offensive drove deep into Bosnia as well. Undermined by the HV maneuvers in late July, and lacking support from Belgrade, VRS units in western Bosnia retreated before the Croatian onslaught. It didn't turn into a rout, and in many places the VRS stood and fought. In contrast, Krajina Serb units mostly melted away, and in less than a week nearly the entire Serb statelet in Croatia had evaporated, and over a quarter-million Serbs retreated into Bosnia as refugees. A centuries-old community virtually disappeared.

As in Operation Flash, Belgrade's support for their brethren in Croatia and Bosnia was nowhere to be found. Now the consequences were more dire, and there would be several weeks of desperate fighting until Mladic's VRS stabilized the front in western Bosnia, barely holding on to Banja Luka and losing substantial ground to the combined forces of the HV and HVO.16 Aided by NATO bombardment of the Bosnian Serbs, Operation Deliberate Force, the Atlantic Alliance's dubious debut in actual combat, the Croats inflicted a history-making defeat on Serbdom. Milosevic's Greater Serbia lasted barely four

This was an unrecoverable setback for the Bosnian Serbs. Mladic's forces were never defeated in detail, despite a pummeling by NATO (mostly U.S.) bombers, but the VRS had lost the initiative and much territory to the Croats. Zagreb wasn't powerful enough to inflict a decisive defeat on the Bosnian Serbs, who proved as tenacious as ever once Mladic restored discipline with his renowned determination and charisma, but Operation Storm (combined with its follow-on HV-HVO push deep into Bosnia, Operation Southern Move) unquestionably changed the strategic dynamic of the Bosnian war. The Croats took on the Serbs and won. By the summer's end, all the warring factions, exhausted by two months of fluid combat, acknowledged that a diplomatic solution to the war was needed.

Zagreb's triumph was Sarajevo's as well, thanks to the Croat-Muslim alliance. Although the contribution of the ABiH to the victory was modest, the Muslims were finally taking ground back from the weary VRS. September saw several successful local offensives by Izetbegovic's army, including some noteworthy attacks by mujahidin units, who proved they were capable of more than Salafi missionary work and medieval atrocities. Muslim regular officers customarily viewed the holy warriors with distaste and derision. One senior ABiH officer, noting that the mujahidinheavy 3rd Corps was "absolutely the most unsuccessful" corps in the army (there were seven), added, "the presence of the mujahidin and their participation in the war did not bring us a single tactical or strategic victory and it didn't mean anything in terms of the success of the fight against the aggressor."18

One possible exception to that statement was the seizure of Vozuca by the mujahidin in mid-September, a hill that Muslim forces had repeatedly tried to take without success. The el-Mujahid Detachment spearheaded the assault, with a battalion of three hundred holy warriors charging the Serb lines with shouts of "Allahu akbar!" Witnesses claimed that the human wave attack, which overwhelmed the outnumbered defenders, included mujahidin who fought "like animals," being shot and getting up and running towards VRS positions.19 They fought with determination out of faith and because they were offered special incentives by Izetbegovic, with lucrative bounties per enemy weapon captured. The Vozuca attack also led to multiple atrocities by the Islamist stormtroopers, including the torture and ritual decapitation of Serb prisoners of war (some of whom were forced to kill fellow Serbs to avoid being massacred themselves). It was the severed heads of these VRS soldiers that were sent to President Izetbegovic and Iran-twenty-eight heads to each-according to Sakib Mahmuljin, the ABiH general responsible for liaison with the "special units." El-Mujahid fighters videotaped the butchery, providing evidence that helped shed some light on the fate of numerous VRS troops captured in the Vozuca area-as many as four hundred-who were never seen again and presumably slaughtered by the mujahidin.20

The mujahidin's battlefield successes of late summer 1995 were hailed by Abu Ma'ali, the emir of el-Mujahid, as "truly a great victory for Allah," adding that this was but a foretaste of future glory: "We know the day will come when we shall fight against the Jews and that the almighty will give us victory, and we know that the best soldiers will fight against the Christians and that all these promises and joys are from Allah's prophet."2'

While the holy warriors were launching suicide attacks and butchering prisoners, Sarajevo was searching for a negotiated end to the war on terms favorable to the SDA. For the Muslims, Zagreb's offensives had opened the door to a political victory that remained elusive on the battlefield. The diplomatic efforts to end the Bosnian civil war, which culminated in the Dayton Accords of December 1995, form a long, complex, and unsatisfying story filled with deceit and intransigence. Izetbegovic had gambled everything to maintain a Muslim-dominated centralized Bosnian state, and he saw no point in settling for less than that, war or no war. The SDA's loss of that bet, including the rejection of the Lisbon agreement in early 1992 that set Bosnia on a short road to war, would be redeemed by Washington's military and diplomatic backing.

The road to Dayton can be summarized as Washington's concocting an agreement that preserved enough of a fig-leaf of Bosnian unity that Izetbegovic would agree to sign it. By the fall of 1995, the Croats were happy, as the HVO had taken all the Croatian areas of Bosnia and Hercegovina, while the Serbs were exhausted, and Milosevic was pressuring them to take any deal Clinton's State Department would put on the table. The SDA formed the last holdout. Having rejected the Lisbon agreement, and several European Union peace plans that similarly de facto divided Bosnia into ethnic cantons, the Muslims refused to accept any deal that didn't leave at least a nominally unified state under Sarajevo, an intransigence quietly supported by Washington.

By fall, however, the State Department, led by Clinton's Balkan fixer Dick Holbrooke, wanted an agreement. Foggy Bottom's position had softened somewhat also, based on the gradual realization that the Bosnian Serbs would keep fighting indefinitely, no matter how much pressure Washington and Belgrade put on them, rather than sign any document that enshrined a unified Bosnian state ruled by Izetbegovic. Nevertheless, since spring 1994 all sides had been inching towards an agreement to end the fighting; finally the moment had arrived for Washington to do something decisive. Clinton and Holbrooke liked the title of peacemaker, and once the great Croatian offensive of August-September 1995 had withered away, they persuaded the warring factions to do something untried in the history of international diplomacy. They went to Ohio.

SREBRENICA

Like so many aspects of the Bosnian war, the peace agreement that emerged from the "proximity talks" held at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was based on a genial deception that was understood by all involved. Dayton was a partition in everything but name, an agreement to divide Bosnia into two halves, the Republika Srpska and the Croat-Muslim Federation, while everyone present consented to make believe that there would still be a unitary Bosnian state with a capital in Sarajevo. It was "a veiled partition but a partition nevertheless," noted perceptive critics.22 Izetbegovic agreed because Washington wanted him to, and because the Muslim-dominated Federation received half of Bosnia's territory; the Americans would guarantee the security of the SDA's half-state. The Bosnian Serbs weren't pleased, but at least they received international recognition for their half-state, which wouldn't be ruled directly from SDA-controlled Sarajevo: this was what they wanted all along. Dayton's similarities to the rejected Lisbon agreement were impossible to miss, and plenty of Bosnians wondered what the difference was, and why Izetbegovic had started a terrible war and waged it for over three years to get essentially the same deal that was on the table in February 1992. Cynical wits in Sarajevo-there was no other kind-observed that the only difference between Dayton and Lisbon was three years of mass graves.

Dayton was no cure-all for Bosnia's problems, no kind of panacea, nor was it a bona fide peace agreement. It was an unfinished peace, with all the warring factions leaving Ohio unsatisfied, embittered, and wanting more. The Croats got their land, but it had to be shared with the Muslims. The Serbs received recognition of their Republika Srpska, but they had to acknowledge it was nebulously part of a Bosnian state. The Muslims got most of the land they wanted-Izetbegovic would have his mini-Islamic state-but they had to agree to partition of a sort. It was no secret that to all sides, Dayton represented not the last game of the season, but more of a semi-final.

What made the difference this time-why Dayton wound up signed and implemented when all previous peace deals went into the dustbin of history-was Washington's diplomatic backing and military intervention. The Clinton administration agreed to a large-scale U.S. troop deployment in Bosnia to guarantee the peace settlement, while its late-summer bombing campaign against the VRS had helped persuade the Bosnian Serbs that they could not stand up to the might of America and NATO, plus the Croats and Muslims, indefinitely.

But what really changed everything was Srebrenica. A decade after, the name evokes shame and horror in the West. Srebrenica remains a conversation-stopper in polite Western circles, the darkest moment of the Bosnian disaster, when ritualistic invocations of "Never Again" and related Holocaust-derived pieties turned out to be as hollow as the skeptics reckoned they were. Srebrenica happened, so Dayton happened.

In one of the more consequential ironies of a very ironic conflict, the Srebrenica story that was sold to the West by pro-SDA press and governments was incomplete, bearing only some resemblance to what actually happened in that doomed Drina valley town in July 1995. What is not in dispute is that the events that transpired around Srebrenica that fateful midsummer week amounted to the biggest killing of the war. About 7,000 Muslims-some civilians, many ABiH troops caught in a disorganized retreat-were killed by Mladic's forces after the VRS captured the refugeefilled town. (After extensive investigation, the International Committee of the Red Cross assessed that 7,079 Muslims died around Srebrenica between July 12 and 16.) Almost everything else about the Srebrenica saga, however, is open to question.

The commonly told version of the story, the one broadcast by CNN ad nauseam and cited by the Clinton administration to justify direct U.S. military intervention in Bosnia, implicates the Bosnian Serbs in a premeditated massacre of innocent Muslims, a liquidation offensive against a collection of refugees that posed no threat to anyone. This was genocide, pure and simple.

But was it? Although Srebrenica has inspired a torrent of news articles as well as more substantial literature, most accounts focus on the mechanics of the massacre itself rather than the roots of the disaster and why it happened. Any detailed examination of Srebrenica rapidly uncovers facts that are incompatible with the standard version of events, resulting in a portrayal that is disturbing and deeply critical of all parties involved. It offers no easy moral lessons of the sort beloved by NGOs, reporters, and human rights activists (who are frequently the same people wearing different hats). The real story of Srebrenica is a tale of cynicism astonishing even by Bosnian standards.

Ratko Mladic's Drina Corps launched an attack on Srebrenica on July 6, what they termed Operation Krivaja 95, which was resisted feebly by Muslim troops of the 28th Division that garrisoned the town. This was not a large operation, involving only about 3,000 VRS troops, and it took the Drina Corps over five days of fighting to achieve Mladic's objective.23 Why the Serbs chose to attack Srebrenica and why the ABiH failed to resist seriously are key questions. The choice of Srebrenica as a target ought to have surprised no one. The VRS had wanted to seize the town for more than two years, for solid strategic reasons that were well understood in Sarajevo. The Muslim enclave jutted dangerously deep into Serb lines, close to the Drina river and Serbia itself. Moreover, ABiH forces had used the UN-protected "safe area" as a staging base for brutal attacks against Serb villages in the Drina valley since the war's beginning.

An amalgam of strategic calculation and a desire for revenge stood behind Mladic's plan to capture Srebrenica. While the SDA successfully presented Srebrenica to the world as a UN-protected "safe area" where some 40,000 Muslim refugees from the Drina valley were sheltered from VRS attack, to the Bosnian Serbs the town was the launching pad for ABiH terror against Serbs. Since the war begin, more than 3,000 Bosnian Serbs, some soldiers but at least 1,300 unarmed civilians, had been killed by Muslim forces based at Srebrenica.24 The noncombatant Serbs, including women, children, and the elderly, who were killed by Srebrenica's garrison were in many cases butchered, tortured, mutilated, burned alive, or decap- itated.25 Small wonder that the VRS thirsted for revenge against the Muslims of Srebrenica, especially the soldiers responsible for such crimes, which had succeeded in "ethnically cleansing" nearly all the Srebrenica municipality of Serbs.

SDA-affiliated soldiers and politicians were responsible for the massacres of Serbs, but the main culprit was Naser Oric, the ABiH commander at Srebrenica and one of the war's most remarkable characters. Born near Srebrenica in 1963, Oric had served in the JNA as a conscript, then joined the police. Before the breakup of Yugoslavia, he was assigned to Belgrade, and was for a time a member of Slobodan Milosevic's bodyguard (Oric received a gift pistol from the Serbian president for his service). When the war broke out, Oric was appointed commander of Muslim forces in Srebrenica; by mid-1994, he had received the highest Muslim decoration, the Golden Lily, and was an ABiH brigadier.26

The muscled Oric was no more than a thug thrust into a position of real authority, and he looked and acted the part. His tenure as Srebrenica's commander was marked by horrifying atrocities against those he took a disliking to. Oric's crimes against Serb civilians, noted in Chapter 3, were among the worst perpetrated by anyone in the Bosnian civil war, including much wanton butchery against innocent victims.27 Oric's treatment of fellow Muslims was only slightly better, however, and the young general combined terror, power lust, fanaticism, and personal corruption in best SDA fashion. While Srebrenica's refugees starved, Oric and his retinue ate lavishly and enriched themselves off the international aid racket. ABiH officials, with Oric in the lead, sold UN aid to the refugees and were deeply involved in black marketeering with all sides. Oric's reign of terror in Srebrenica was sanctioned by Sarajevo, which considered him a successful commander; UN representatives, who dealt with him frequently, considered him a corrupt and dangerous provocateur, who used UN peacekeepers and Srebrenica's helpless refugees as a shield for his barbarism and thievery. Conditions were so bad in the "safe area" thanks to Oric's malignant rule that by early 1995, dozens of Muslim refugees in the enclave were escaping to safety in nearby Serbia! Those who made their way across the Drina to refugee camps in Serbia claimed that the belts of landmines laid by Oric's forces around the town were intended to keep the refugees in as much as the VRS out.28

Oric killed rivals, real and imagined, inside his fiefdom, including ABiH personnel who disliked his management style. Those who fell afoul of the SDA party line inside Srebrenica wound up dead, including Nurif Rizvanovic, who was the first to establish a Muslim defense force in the area in early 1992. A hardened man of mystery-he had been a suspect in the February 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme- Rizvanovic was lionized by local Muslims until his November 1992 murder by ABiH soldiers, acting on Oric's orders.29 Srebrenica's capo did nothing to hide his thuggish ways, indeed he seemed to revel in them. Reporters who made their way to the "safe area" found the commander's upscale lifestyle a surprise, and in February 1994, Oric entertained a Washington Post reporter by showing him a videotape of his soldiers decapitating Serbs.30

By late winter 1995, there were pervasive rumors that Srebrenica would soon be attacked by the VRS, something that Mladic's forces had long wanted to do but the UN had repeatedly persuaded them not to. Press reports in Sarajevo discussed the "humanitarian catastrophe" in the town, bursting with refugees, and the Serb attack that was said to be coming.31 Yet instead of bolstering Srebrenica's defenses, Sarajevo did the opposite. The 28th Division garrisoning the town, about six thousand strong, was poor in weapons but relatively rich in experience and leadership; despite his moral defects, One was a competent fighter and leader of men, and his staff knew the area intimately. In April, Oric and his senior staff left the town under cover of darkness, headed for Tuzla, ostensibly to take a command training course. He never returned.

Srebrenica was left without effective leadership. The new commander, Ramiz Becirovic, was an unwell man whose ability to command the 28th Division in a crisis was limited. Why One abandoned Srebrenica as the dismal hour approached-and why he never returned-are questions that have never been answered by anyone in Sarajevo.

General Mladic's desire to settle scores with the 28th Division and take Srebrenica was swelling for many reasons, not least the black flights of early 1995. The VRS was aware that the mystery arms flights into Tuzla were followed by helicopter missions bringing weapons and munitions to Srebrenica and the nearby "safe area" of Zepa, another town held by the ABiH and brimming with Muslim refugees. The Bosnian Serbs saw this as a provocation and wanted the covert arms pipeline into the nominally UN-run towns to cease. When a formal protest about the black flights to the UN got no response, Mladic opted to solve the problem with force. The Serbs were tired of the atrocities, and the Muslims' use of the UN as cover for their activities, including attacks by 28th Division troops hiding behind UN posi- tions.32 Operation Krivaja 95 was borne of three years of mounting frustration and anger. Mladic's revenge, when it came, would be ferocious.

The VRS attack that began on July 6 encountered scattered resistance. Without leadership, ABiH forces fought back sporadically and ultimately ineffectively. A battalion of Dutch peacekeepers tried vainly to defend the "safe area," but was poorly equipped for a real fight; it could do little to hold back the Serbs, particularly when the Muslim defenses proved inadequate. Limited U.S. air strikes did nothing to keep Mladic's forces at bay. On July 9, Osman Suljic, the top Muslim civilian in Srebrenica, called Sarajevo, begging for help; President Izetbegovic did not respond. On July 11, the town fell to the Serbs.

Although the Srebrenica massacre has been studied in exacting detail by journalists and war crimes investigators, assembling a complete picture of the five days beginning on July 11 is impossible. What is certain is that as many as two thousand Muslim men, mostly soldiers, were killed by VRS troops in and around Srebrenica. Most of these were executed by special operations forces of the 10th Sabotage Detachment, a sinister unit under the control of VRS counterintelligence. They machine-gunned Muslims, most of them disarmed ABiH prisoners, after the fall of Srebrenica and dumped the bodies in several mass graves. While this was unquestionably a war crime, it is difficult to term it genocide. To Mladic's troops, who like all Bosnians believed in blood feuds and payback, this was simple revenge.

About twelve thousand Muslims, a mix of ABiH soldiers and refugees, attempted a breakout on the evening of July 11. They were headed northwest to Tuzla, to their own lines. They would have to fight their way through VRS outposts, relying on the cover of darkness where possible. This wasn't a column of unarmed civilians, but a collection of confused and desperate Muslims led by armed troops. After six days of harrowing ambushes and firefights, survivors began reaching ABiH lines. About half of those who set out from Srebrenica on the fifty-mile odyssey made it to safety, and small groups of half-mad escapees filtered into Tuzla for weeks. The rest had died en route, most of them felled by VRS machine guns and artillery fires. Although there were many civilians among the escapees, this again wasn't genocide as commonly understood. To the Serbs, this was battle, albeit a one-sided and hopeless one for the Muslims who opted to break out of the doomed enclave.33

Immediately Sarajevo began blaming the West nearly as much as the Serbs for the catastrophe, citing alleged NATO inaction in the face of "genocide." The SDA was very careful to deflect blame away from Izetbegovic and his coterie. ABiH soldiers, especially those with the nearby 2nd Corps in Tuzla, were furious that nothing was done to aid the Srebrenica garrison before, during, or after the VRS attack. It was painfully clear that many lives could have been saved had Sarajevo done anything; instead, the General Staff and the political leadership sat on their hands and watched the massacre unfold.

Here the account of an ABiH captain serving in Tuzla is instructive.34 Troops of the 28th Division began appearing in Tuzla as early as the end of June; having been left leaderless, some of Srebrenica's garrison began saving themselves even before Mladic's forces opened their attack. Although soldiers of the 2nd Corps were told little about the VRS offensive, it was clear by July 14 that something was going very wrong; the radio was filled with the pathetic sounds of Muslims attempting to reach ABiH lines. Many of Izetbegovic's troops were itching for a fight. Finally the war seemed to be going their way, the captain observed: "Like most people, I had lost many friends and family in this shit, and I thought this meant a chance to get even. Stupidly." Instead, 2nd Corps listened helplessly as groups of Muslims from Srebrenica tried, and often failed, to reach Tuzla and safety; in many cases, columns were only a few miles from their own lines when they were struck by VRS shells (the Serbs were listening to the radio too-the retreating Muslims displayed no communications discipline-and VRS gunners used the broadcasts to call down artillery salvos on them).35 The orders from Sarajevo were clear: nothing was to be done to assist the escapees from Srebrenica. The captain, like thousands of Muslim troops, sat back and listened as thousands died. They had angry questions. Srebrenica was indeed a betrayal, the captain concluded, "but least of all from the West."

Was Srebrenica sold out by Sarajevo? That was the unavoidable conclusion of many Muslims who lived through the horror and knew the measures Izetbegovic would endorse to gain political advantage. After all, the Srebrenica disaster did lead directly to the Western military intervention that the Muslim president had always seen as the real salvation of their cause. There can be no doubt that ABiH intelligence had ample warning of the Bosnian Serb offensive. In Tuzla, 2nd Corps had a capable signals intelligence (SIGINT) detachment that listened to VRS communications; according to Captain Hajrudin Kisic, a JNA veteran and experienced SIGINT officer in Tuzla, the 2nd Corps had clear SIGINT warning of Operation Krivaja 95, well in advance of the attack, but the ABiH did nothing with this information. Kisic's account has been bolstered by senior Muslim officers who claim to have warned Sarajevo, and the UN, of the impending VRS move, to no effect. Moreover, transcripts of VRS communications intercepted by 2nd Corps intelligence during the offensive have come to light, and they make clear that the Muslim military had a good picture of the enemy's movements and activities before, during, and after the fall of Srebrenica. Sarajevo knew that the "safe area" was doomed, and it knew about the massacres as they occurred, but the SDA chose to do nothing.36

Certainly the behavior of the SDA leadership during the crisis was strange, to put it kindly. On the morning that Srebrenica fell to the Serbs, there was a meeting of the parry leadership and the top officers of the General Staff in Sarajevo; the enclave wasn't on the agenda. That same day, Muhamed Sacirbey, the Muslims' loquacious ambassador to the UN, was in Strasbourg for a meeting with the European Union Representative for Bosnia, Carl Bildt. When Mo learned of the fall of Srebrenica, he was oddly nonplussed. "It seemed that the news had more effect on me and that I was more upset than he was," recalled the veteran Swedish diplomat: "His peaceful reaction and his calm reasoning are some of, for me, the still mysterious mosaic pieces of the Srebrenica drama." Bildt was especially disturbed by Sacirbey's chilling response to learning the news: "In a way, this event will simplify the

Later, Sacirbey loudly demanded a UN investigation of the events surrounding Srebrenica, and proceeded to cooperate with the inquest hardly at all. In this, Mo was merely parroting the actions of his president. Izetbegovic made much of the catastrophe-here at last was proof of the "genocide" he had been talking about for three years-but resolutely refused to answer public inquiries about what Bosnian Muslims politely referred to as the "unclear circumstances" surrounding the fall of Srebrenica.

There is considerable evidence that the SDA leadership conspired to sacrifice Srebrenica to gain the winning hand in the propaganda war. Aware of the atrocities perpetrated by Oric's forces, Sarajevo knew Mladic's revenge would be terrible. All Izetbegovic had to do was let it happen. Many have pointed to the sinister behind-the-scenes role played by Mehmed Zilic, an ABiH officer serving as chief of security for 2nd Corps in Tuzla. Zilic had direct links to mujahidin units, and has been fingered as a culprit in the Srebrenica cover-up; conveniently, relevant 2nd Corps documents for the July 1995 period have disappeared, and are unavailable for war crimes investigators.38

Some Muslim politicians have openly accused Izetbegovic of complicity in the Srebrenica crime. "The scenario for the betrayal of Srebrenica was consciously prepared," stated Ibran Mustafic, who founded the SDA chapter in the town before the war. Oric's attacks against Serbs were "the conscious giving of a pretext" for Mladic's offensive. Mustafic survived the disaster, but his attempts to address the Muslim parliament about the debacle were blocked by his own party, leading him to conclude that the SDA is "afraid of living residents of Srebrenica." The experience left Mustafic disillusioned with Izetbegovic and his party because "their version of Islam advocates crime, murders, lies, looting."39

More disturbing were the accusations made by Sefer Halilovic, the ex-General Staff chief who inconveniently survived the SDAs October 1993 assassination attempt. Halilovic asserted that Izetbegovic had long intended to be rid of Srebrenica-it would likely be lost in any peace settlement, so why not score some political points from its pathetic fate? The general reminded the president of the September 1993 secret agreement between Sarajevo and the Bosnian Serb leadership, which laid out a division of Bosnia into three ethnic mini-states; it left Srebrenica in the Republika Srpska. Then, Izetbegovic asked Halilovic to disarm the "safe area," which the General Staff refused to do, stating that the refugees there would be slaughtered by the Serbs. The SDA leader's response was chilling and prophetic: "Well, even if they slaughter them, we won't be the ones who are responsible." Based on this exchange, Halilovic deduced that beginning in spring 1995 Sarajevo crippled Srebrenica's defenses by removing One and his staff and then forbade the army to help the enclave during the VRS attack. Srebrenica was a special case, that everyone agreed. The neighboring "safe area" of Zepa fell to Mladic's forces a week after Srebrenica, but this time there was no massacre. Halilovic's claim of betrayal of Srebrenica by the SDA, particularly Izetbegovic, had many adherents among the Bosnian Muslims, though few Western reporters bothered to report this unflattering account.40

The most chilling revelation about the fall of Srebrenica comes from Hakija Meholjic, the leader of the Social Democratic Party in the town. "Srebrenica was sold," he declared. During the war, Meholjic and other politicians from Srebrenica frequently pleaded with Sarajevo for helpmore men, more aid, more munitions. Refugees were starving, and everyone in the enclave knew that the Bosnian Serbs wanted revenge for Oric's crimes. In September 1993, Izetbegovic held a memorable meeting with Srebrenica's representatives. Having signed a secret agreement with the Serbs that would give them the town, he explored his options and asked the group, "What do you think about the swap of Srebrenica for Vogosca?" Trading a VRS-occupied Sarajevo suburb for the "safe area" would mean a massacre, the Srebrenicans explained. Izetbegovic's response, which shocked the representatives, haunted them two years later. "You know, in April 1993 President Clinton told me that if the Chetniks enter Srebrenica and massacre five thousand Muslims, then there will be military intervention."41

Despite SDA promises of an investigation of the circumstances surrounding the fall of Srebrenica, a decade later none has occurred. Srebrenica was the propaganda coup that Izetbegovic wanted; it guaranteed American intervention, as Bill Clinton promised it would, and it doomed the Bosnian Serbs. For Sarajevo, seven thousand dead must have seemed a small price to pay for a decisive and resounding political victory.

Many aspects of the Srebrenica story seem destined to remain shrouded in silence. One of the uglier aspects of the disaster was the pogrom launched by Muslims against Christians in SDA-controlled regions after Srebrenica. In the month after the town's surrender, there were over a hundred violent attacks on Serb civilians in Tuzla alone, including murders in the presence of Muslim police, and assaults on elderly Serbs. Houses were looted and demolished while their owners were beaten, in some cases to the point of paralysis. Muslims, some of them Srebrenica survivors, were taking revenge on any Serbs (and Croats) they could find. During the terrible retreat from Srebrenica, troops of the 28th Division took time out to attack several Serb villages that were in their path. It was the same Balkan story of revenge that led Mladic to attack Srebrenica, played out in seemingly endless titfor-tat. As was the custom, however, such Muslim crimes against Serbs were considered unnewsworthy by the Western press.42

Exactly which Serbs were responsible for Srebrenica is far from clear. While Ratko Mladic and elements of the Drina Corps stood behind war crimes-the 10th Sabotage Detachment and KOS elements of the VRS were the primary actors-who else can be blamed is uncertain. While it has been almost universally assumed that the offensive could ultimately be traced back to Belgrade-after all, the VRS was heavily dependent on the Yugoslav military in logistics and supply, and small numbers of troops from Serbia are alleged to have participated in Operation Krivaja 95-evidence has not been forthcoming. Almost a decade after Srebrenica's fall, the leading expert on the events of July 1995 concluded that Belgrade could not be tied to the massacres. The respected Dutch scholar Cees Wiebes, who investigated Srebrenica over years and had access to the entire UN archive, many classified NATO files, and interviewed over eight hundred people in his pursuit of the truth, testified at the Hague that "we never found evidence that Milosevic was involved or ordered the mass murder at Srebrenica." Instead, Wiebes informed the war crimes tribunal that the Serbian president "reacted very indignantly when he heard about the events at Srebrenica, because they thwarted his political plans to bring about peace in the Balkans."43

The only people who seemed certain what to make of Srebrenica were the Islamists. For mujahidin, the massacre of their coreligionists was ultimately for the good. "We complain to Allah about what is happening in Bosnia in terms of the ugliest atrocities mankind has ever seen," explained Mustafa Mashur, the deputy general of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, with customary hyperbole. "We complain to Allah about the actions of these pigs and those who support them.... Let all these Serbs, Zionists and their supporters know that Allah is lying in wait for them." Mashur explained, however, that Allah's will had been fulfilled, and that the martyrs of Srebrenica had helped the jihad by their deaths: "O Muslims in Bosnia-be patient for Allah will help you. You must know that your patience and steadfastness against the criminal Serbs has done a great service to Islam and Muslims."44

It seems likely that Alija Izetbegovic trusted in Allah to the same degree as his brethren in Egypt did, and there can be no doubt that Srebrenica brought many blessings to the SDA and their plans for Bosnia. Izetbegovic and the party leadership had Allah on their side, but they had Bill Clinton behind them too, just in case.

CHAPTER 9

Whose Victory?

Who is Benni Antoine Noris? wondered the officer. It was a pressing question for Diana Dean in the cold, early evening hours of December 14, 1999, as the wintry night descended on the U.S. Customs post at Port Angeles, Washington. The ferry arriving from Victoria, British Columbia, carried many sorts of passengers-tourists, businesspeople, the occasional low-level criminal or smuggler, the usual crowd. Pretty mundane stuff most days.

There was nothing overt to suggest that Monsieur Noris was anything other than a Canadian from Montreal born somewhere else. His English was poor, but that was hardly uncommon. All the same, Inspector Dean felt that Noris was acting "hinky." She was a low-level civil servant, the sort of underappreciated functionary who stood as America's first line of defense against terror. She had no intelligence about this matter, nothing more than a sixth sense of the kind possessed by people who spend their days and their lives looking carefully at other people. Inspector Dean had no idea that days before Jordanian intelligence had received a tipoff from Abu Zubaydah, one of the top officials in al-Qa'ida, that "the grooms are ready for the big wedding." This was a hunch, no more, no less.

She asked Noris to step out of his green Chrysler 300M with British Columbia plates, and he complied reluctantly. Dean suspected he was a smuggler, a suspicion that increased when her request for identification resulted in Noris producing neither a passport nor a driver's license, but a Costco membership card. Two bigger, male inspectors escorted Noris away from the car, at which point he bolted. He dashed away across the parking lot but got not much farther, and an inspection of his car revealed a trunk filled not with the drugs Dean had expected, but jars of a mysterious brown liquid. It turned out to be a powerful, highly unstable variant of nitroglycerin, enough to blow the whole customs post sky-high.

Subsequent investigation revealed that Benni Noris was really Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian member of al-Qa'ida, a trained terrorist who was headed to Los Angeles to blow up the international airport there. Bin Laden's organization had decided to target America directly, on its own soil. Ressam turned out to have had several accomplices, all of them veterans of the Bosnian jihad. His group had its origins not in Afghanistan, but the Balkans. Inspector Dean's hunch had saved hundreds of lives and averted the most serious al-Qa'ida plot yet aimed at the United States. Unfortunately, few Americans realized how near a miss they had thanks to Diana Dean, and hardly anybody cared that Ressam's plot traced back to Bosnia. The country, its government included, slouched back into a slumber regarding al-Qa'ida that would be interrupted for good almost twenty-one months later on a beautiful, clear late-summer morning.

POGORELICA

The signing of the Dayton Accords in December 1995 led to the rapid dispatch of a large contingent of NATO troops to Bosnia to enforce the peace. The Intervention Force (IFOR), about sixty thousand strong and under U.S. command (nearly one-third of the initial contingent was American), was equipped to do battle to enforce the agreement; as it turned out, all the fighting factions were weary and glad for the war to be over. When IFOR's mandate concluded at the end of 1996-it was renamed the Stabilization Force (SFOR), which would remain until the end of 2004-it was clear that the peacekeeping mission would last far longer than the single year that the Clinton administration had stated would be required to restore peace to Bosnia and make Dayton a reality.

No security problem in the war-torn country was more pressing than the mujahidin. The White House was willing to cut Izetbegovic a great deal of diplomatic slack, but even the SDAs supporters in Washington considered the presence of several thousand Islamist fighters in Bosnia a genuine threat to peace. Sarajevo's friends inside the Beltway began exerting pressure on the SDA to kick the mujahidin out. But Izetbegovic had other ideas. On December 10, he attended a third birthday party for the 7th Muslim Brigade, along with much of the ABiH leadership, a lavish public ceremony. The brigade was described by Brigadier Dzemal Merhan, chief of training in the Muslim military, as "the embodiment of the mentality of the Muslim people." When a Washington Post reporter queried Merhan about a large Iranian flag in his office, he replied laconically that it was a gift from the Iranians. A question about a prayer rug in his office got a curt reply: "Did the reporter expect to see a crucified Jesus on the wall?" I

Izetbegovic informed his friends in Washington, "there are no mujahidin among the Bosnian Muslims," a bald-faced lie that even his admirers found hard to swallow. When quietly challenged by the Americans with irrefutable evidence that the country was swarming with imported holy warriors, many with direct links to the world's worst terrorist organizations, Izetbegovic promised to resolve the issue. "Izetbegovic never did expel anyone" nevertheless was the assessment of Richard Clarke, the Clinton administration's counterterrorism guru.2

This SDA subterfuge was enabled by the mass naturalization of thousands of imported Islamists. Sarajevo wasn't required to expel mujahidin who weren't foreigners, rather newly minted Bosnians. As many as twelve thousand Bosnian passports went missing during the war (optimists said "only" eight thousand were misplaced), customarily winding up in the hands of friends of Izetbegovic such as Osama bin Laden. The number of Bosnian passports issued under questionable circumstances by the Vienna and Zagreb embassies alone ran into the thousands. Moreover, at the war's end the SDA leadership decided to issue Bosnian citizenship en masse to any foreigners who had assisted the jihad. Under Sarajevo's generous naturalization rules, almost any Islamist fighter or "humanitarian aid worker" was eligible to become a citizen of Bosnia-Hercegovina and remain in the country indefinitely.

Subsequent investigation revealed that 741 mujahidin were known to have been granted Bosnian citizenship in late 1995 and early 1996, most illegally. However, as citizenship was also granted to at least hundreds of mujahidin who never actually lived in Bosnia, the mass naturalization after Dayton involved thousands of foreign fighters. The Muslim secret police was circumventing the rules and ensuring that terrorists were given citizenship at a frantic pace, in many cases on the spot; 103 imported mujahidin received citizenship on one day, December 28, 1995, alone. They came from what Sarajevo termed "AA" (for African-Asian) countries, and most could not return home. Some of the key players behind this massive fraud included Irfan Ljevakovic and Sakib Mahmuljin, old friends of the jihad, while Interior Minister Bakir Alispahic was implicated in over a hundred cases of mujahidin who received citizenship at the war's end under clearly fraudulent circumstances, i.e., on the basis of forged documents and fake residences and war records. How many terrorists received Bosnian citizenship to prevent their deportation, or simply to facilitate the global jihad, cannot be determined thanks to the SDAs cover-up. The problem, explained Munir Alibabic, who had been purged from Sarajevo's State Security office in 1994 for speaking out against an alliance between Sarajevo and the Islamist International, was that the Bosnian Muslim secret police "had been infected by al-Qa'ida ... there was virtually a cell of that organization there."3

The Iranians constituted an even bigger problem as far as Washington was concerned. Iran's oversized contingent of secret agents and terrorist trainers in Bosnia was something the Clinton administration was willing to overlook during the fighting, but would not tolerate now that thousands of U.S. troops were serving with IFOR. They were a major target for the Iranians, and everyone knew it. No one in Washington wanted another Iranbacked massacre like the October 1983 marine barracks bombing in Beirut to happen to U.S. peacekeepers in Bosnia. It had been easy to let the Iranians into Bosnia, the Clintonistas learned, but getting them out was another matter entirely.

How tricky-and deadly-a business this was became frighteningly clear to the CIAs first station chief in Sarajevo.4 Selected in mid-1995 to lead an all-volunteer team into Bosnia, the chief of station (COS in CIA parlance) had failed to make it into the war-torn capital the year before due to the intensity of the fighting. An ideal choice, he was one of the CIAs few Serbo-Croatian speakers, having served in Belgrade as well as Croatia and Kosovo. He knew the region and the risks. The journey over Bosnia's mountains and battlefields was harrowing ("I soon learned that no one in Washington had a clue how I was supposed to get to Sarajevo"). The new station's primary mission was detailing the situation on the ground in Sarajevo, mainly for the benefit of the U.S. military. A large part of the station chief's job was dealing with the local intelligence service, what the CIA termed liaison. Sarajevo's secret police could provide the Americans with information the tiny station couldn't discover for itself.

The COS recalled that daily meetings with Muslim counterparts, usually held in the Interior Ministry building downtown, were "intense" and the Iranians were a problem from the start. Having established a very close alliance with the Muslim secret police, the Iranians considered Bosnia their "backyard" and didn't appreciate the Americans showing up. Iranian surveillance of the COS and his staff was obvious to the point of harassment. One day, the chief's meeting with the Bosnian Muslims included a visitor, a bearded Middle Eastern man in fatigues, a gray eminence who turned out to be his Iranian counterpart, the top VEVAK officer in Sarajevo. Before long, the COS learned that his VEVAK opposite number was planning an operation to kidnap, torture, and kill him. It wasn't personal, he realized. "It's not every day that a lone CIA officer shows up and declares his true name to a security service controlled by Iran."

A quick, improvised escape from the city followed. The COS was exfil- trated before the Iranians had time to act. He made a fellow CIA officer promise to kill him rather than let him be captured and tortured by the Iranians. Once he reached safety, the veteran officer pondered what had happened. He learned that one of the Bosnian Muslims who worked for the U.S. Embassy was a spy for the Muslim secret police "and therefore Iran, since they were giving the orders." Moreover, the COS had met regularly with Nedzad Ugljen, the number-two official in Sarajevo's secret police, who turned out to be an Iranian agent, like many of his fellow officers. Ugljen had betrayed the American to his partners from Tehran, almost sealing his fate. Recalling his near-death experience, the COS was sanguine about what had transpired: "When my Bosnian secret service colleagues betrayed me to the Iranians, then, it was nothing more than the consequence of the totality of our misguided policies."

The Iranian intelligence network was impressive in numbers and influence by late 1995. VEVAK and Pasdaran had hundreds of operatives in Bosnia, working under various covers: diplomatic, military, press, and many NGO workers of dubious intent. Of greatest concern to IFOR were the mujahidin training camps scattered across central Bosnia where Iranian instructors taught Muslims both local and imported how to wage the jihad through terror. While Sarajevo's secret police sent some officers to Iran for extended training, hundreds of mujahidin passed through VEVAK and Pasdaran courses held in Bosnia in the last year of the war. Neither Tehran nor Sarajevo showed any inclination to shut these unsavory schools down now that the war was over and the country was under NATO occupation.

The camp of greatest concern to IFOR was located near Sarajevo at Pogorelica, a former hunting lodge perched on a mountain top. Officially the site was a farm that supplied the ABiH with potatoes; unofficially it was the Shahid Irfan Ljubijankic Center, run by Iranian intelligence. Established in early 1995 under the patronage of three of Sarajevo's usual jihadi suspects-Bakir Alispahic, Irfan Ljevakovic, and Enver Mujezinovic-the camp was where operatives from the Muslim secret police and military intelligence service received instruction in black arts from Iranian veterans. In addition to conventional espionage topics such as agent handling and secure communications, Pogorelica's curriculum included sabotage, bomb-making, assassination, and black propaganda (for instance, how to stage murders to blame on IFOR). The students, the new generation of Larks, were hand-selected by the leadership of the secret police and the SDA. They attended the school under aliases to protect their identity.5

Given the sensitivity of the Pogorelica operation, the staff made little effort to hide their activities. The main building was customarily surrounded by a half-dozen SUVs, marked with Interior or Defense Ministry insignia; it was evident that this was no potato farm. Locals were aware that the Iranians were running a spy school on the hill. This "lack of professionalism," admitted a onetime student, compromised the training by forcing the Americans to take note. In fairness to the Iranians and Bosnians, Washington had long looked the other way about such activities-why should they care now?6

Yet the Americans had begun to care, resulting in a raid on Pogorelica on February 15, 1996, by IFOR special operations troops. It was a fullfledged take-down mission, with masked commandos descending from helicopters. Stunned by the daring raid, the Iranians and Bosnians surrendered without a fight. IFOR netted several Bosnian students as well as four Iranian instructors, all VEVAK officers; among them was Mohamed Saleh Pour, one of the most senior Iranian spies in the country. The schoolhouse was filled with automatic weapons, grenades, mines, rocket launchers, as well as bomb-making materials; the Americans were unnerved by a toy car that was actually a bomb. Neither did they like the prominently displayed picture of the Ayatollah Khomeini. It was "crystal clear" that Pogorelica was a terrorism training center run by Tehran, recalled David Hunt, the U.S. officer who led the raid.?

That was the end of Pogorelica and the beginning of a new hard line by Washington about the Iranian presence in Bosnia. Fearful of losing his West Wing patrons, Izethegovic declared in his dissimulating fashion that the Iranians weren't a problem, but if they were they would leave Bosnia soon, if they hadn't already. Some Iranian "diplomats" did quietly depart Bosnia in early 1996, and Sarajevo made efforts to appear to be distancing itself from Tehran, but the fallout from Pogorelica still left as many as two hundred Pasdaran operatives in the country, and perhaps an equal number of VEVAK representatives. The Iranians couldn't operate as openly as before, but their covert influence in SDA circles continued, as did their targeting of Americans for espionage and worse. Four years after the Pogorelica raid, Iranian intelligence planned a terrorist attack on U.S. forces in Bosnia, according to NATO sources; this was the work of a top official of Pasdaran's elite Qods Force, who based plans for the attack on inside information from the American Embassy in Sarajevo.8

The Clinton administration nevertheless liked to believe that it had purged the Bosnian Muslims of negative influences from Tehran. This, like so much else, was wishful thinking. Tehran's agent network reached deep into the Party of Democratic Action, the Bosnian Army, and the Muslim police and secret services, and there was little Washington could do about it short of getting rid of the SDA. While the Americans, Izetbegovic's new paramours, had his wallet, the Iranians still owned his heart.

Nearly two years after Pogorelica and the demi-purge that followed, U.S. intelligence estimated that over two hundred Iranian spies remained active in Bosnia. Using their agents spread throughout the Bosnian Muslim hierarchy, Tehran had penetrated everything worthwhile in Sarajevo, including Train and Equip, the American military program to develop the postwar ABiH along NATO lines. VEVAK operatives still considered Bosnia to be a "backyard" of sorts, and their covers were frequently paperthin, a sign of how secure they felt in Sarajevo. Abbas Asauah, chief of the Iranian Republic News Agency (IRNA) in Bosnia-he was actually the number-two VEVAK officer in the country-claimed to have five journalists in his Sarajevo office, yet NATO had issued Asauah press credentials for nineteen IRNA journalists. Such antics led Munir Alibabic, Tehran's opponent in Sarajevo, to ask pointedly, "I don't know why the Americans behave naively, they should see what is happening to us."9 Unfortunately, foes of the SDA like Alibabic, Bosnian Muslims who sincerely opposed the Iranianization of their country, had no credibility with the Americans, who had banked everything on Izetbegovic. Not until Clinton left office, in truth after 9/11, would anyone of high rank inside the Beltway seriously ponder the wisdom of American policy.

THE UGUEN CASE

Reverberations of the Pogorelica raid echoed in Sarajevo's corridors of power for months, and nowhere more than in secret police headquarters. Renamed the Agency for Investigation and Documentation (Agencija za istrazivanje i dokumentaciju-AID), the Muslim secret service was plagued by bitter political infighting after Dayton. While some of this was jockeying for postwar power, most of it concerned the Iranian factor. It was no secret that AID's leadership, carried over from wartime State Security, consisted of SDA-approved officers who in many cases were Iranian agents. Heretofore, loyalty to Izetbegovic and loyalty to VEVAK were the same thing; after Pogorelica, it wasn't quite as clear.

Under pressure from Washington, AID Director Bakir Alispahic was relieved a month after the Pogorelica raid; his replacement, Kemal Ademovic, was less close to the Iranians. Irfan Ljevakovic, a top AID official and VEVAK asset, was demoted. Enver Mujezinovic, the ex-KOS officer and wartime supporter of the jihad, was fired. The Americans also sought the dismissal of Nedzad Ugljen, the agency's deputy director, who was known to be Tehran's man. He had among the unsavoriest reputations in all Bosnia. A career State Security officer from Hercegovina, Ugljen founded the Larks in spring 1992 and led the wetwork outfit through the war. His involvement in atrocities and political crimes was unsurpassed, and no one was privy to more of the SDAs dirty secrets. Simply firing Nedzad Ugljen was out of the question.

By the spring, he knew his days were numbered. Ugljen got in contact with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the UN-chartered war crimes investigative and judicial body in the Hague. He offered to tell what he knew, which was a great deal. Necko, as he was called in secret police circles, was directly involved in every major scandal related to the Bosnian jihad: the Larks and the SDAs dirty war, Iranian intelligence, Pogorelica, al-Qa'ida and the mujahidin (he served as liaison to several top al-Qa'ida officials, including Enaam Arnaout: Ugljen got him a Bosnian passport and once freed Arnaout after he was abducted by rival mujahidin). For the ICTY, charged with researching and tracking down war crimes suspects, Ugljen was a heaven-sent gift. For the SDA, he became a nightmare.'°

Director Ademovic was trying to dig AID out from under the mass of criminality, intrigue, and corruption that was paralyzing operations. No liberal, Ademovic nevertheless felt that the secret police had grown so politicized and thievish as to be ineffective at intelligence work. He ordered investigations of wartime misdeeds, including the Larks. (He did not have the purview to look closely into the mujahidin: that was too hot even for Ademovic to touch.) Codenamed Operation Eagle, the secret AID investigation of the SDA's death squad quickly generated political heat. Ademovic ordered a small group of handpicked officers to root the worst criminals out of AID, using no-holds-barred methods-"Balkan rules."

On June 25, 1996, AID officer Nedzad Herenda was kidnapped off the streets of Sarajevo. He disappeared for four days. When Herenda's distraught wife called Nedzad Ugljen seeking advice, he told her not to report her husband's absence to the police. During his mysterious disappearance, Herenda was detained by AID coworkers who interrogated him about his work with the Larks. Under torture, Herenda admitted his large role in the elite unit's misdeeds, including the murder of innocent civilians, the attempted assassination of General Halilovic, and terror operations against non-Muslims in wartime Sarajevo, as well as involvement in smuggling and drug-dealing. He discussed how the Larks were controlled by a small cadre of SDA officials in the military and police, under the leadership of Fikret Muslimovic. Herenda's mangled body, brutally beaten and shot, was discovered on a roadside on June 29. Miraculously he survived his wounds and soon fled the country to safety. A few days later, AID officer Edin Garaplija was arrested for the abduction-he claimed he was acting under Director Ademovic's orders. A year later Garaplija was convicted and sentenced to thirteen years in prison. Someone had to be blamed for the screw-up, since Herenda survived his ordeal.' 1

Nedzad Ugljen knew the end was near. He visited his old friend Herenda at his Sarajevo hospital bed, counseling him to leave Bosnia as soon as possible. But the veteran spymaster had no illusions that he could run anywhere. Before long, Ugljen was telling friends that he would be murdered by the SDA, to whom he was an unacceptable threat. He boasted that, although his death was imminent, proof of his accusations against the SDA leadership existed on a mysterious tape that was in a safe place. It was a last will and testament, if not an insurance policy.

Ugljen's death came, as expected, at the hands of an assassin in a dark corner of Sarajevo. Mortally wounded late on September 28, 1996, as he was visiting his mistress's apartment, Ugljen died before he could testify against anyone in the Hague. Who was behind the killing was never determined; there was no shortage of suspects. The Ugljen hit caused a public sensation in Sarajevo. If one of the country's top spies couldn't be protected, who was truly safe? Kemal Ademovic quickly pointed fingers at'Iehran, claiming the existence of "serious indications" that "foreign citizens-specifically Iranian citizens-were involved."

Others weren't so sure. Sarajevo seemed to have more to hide in the case than Tehran (it was also speculated that VEVAK, consummate professionals, would have killed Ugljen less publicly). Insiders asserted that the murder was the "culmination of internal conflicts" in AID, which was something of an understatement. Ugljen's ties to Tehran were well known to Ademovic and the secret police leadership, and some AID officers speculated that the killing constituted "part of a broader plan to eliminate Iranian sympathizers from the agency."12

Although Sarajevo's smart money reckoned Ugljen's death was an inside job, and had more to do with keeping SDA higher-ups out of the Hague than any ties to Tehran, no one could ever be sure, since like every dark deed that transpired in Izetbegovic's kingdom, there was no formal investigation. Shortly after the murder, an anonymous one-line obituary appeared in one of Sarajevo's dailies: "Farewell to Nephew from the Larks." Similar messages would appear on the anniversary of Ugljen's murder ("Glory to Necko, the Larks"), without explanation. After the Larks's master was gone, the members of that select unit went to ground and laid low; certainly the SDA didn't want them found.

For Sarajevo, Ugljen's timely death seemed to close the circle on the jihadi alliance between the SDA and Iran's revolutionary regime, a story that no one-including friends in Washington-wanted to explain after Dayton. Once the Americans came to Bosnia, discussing the Sarajevo-Tehran alliance was no longer politic, and a conspiracy of silence descended on the Larks and every crime connected to them, the SDA, Iranian intelligence, and the mujahidin. Except for a few intrepid Sarajevo journalists who stayed on the Ugljen story despite threats and intimidation, insisting that the murder was "the key to all events" in wartime Bosnia, the issue faded away, as the SDA wished.13 Nedzad Ugljen, who lived by conspiratorial violence, died thus, his passing unlamented save by fellow Larks. Nobody ever found the mystery tape he promised would explain everything.

SDA: WINNING THE PEACE

Diminishing Iranian influence was only one of the items placed on the Party of Democratic Action's to-do list by Washington after Dayton. Maintaining a tolerant, multiethnic society in the Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina (as the Muslim-Croat half-state was formally titled) was something the Americans expected Izetbegovic and the SDA to achieve. Washington's support for Sarajevo had always been based on the belief-entirely incorrect, as it turned out-that the Muslims were fighting for a Western-style democracy with civil and human rights for all. To the Islamists who controlled the SDA during the war and long after, such a concept was heresy. But they were clever enough not to say so in public.

For Izetbegovic and his coterie, the saving grace of the Clinton administration's demand for a multiethnic Federation was lax enforcement. It turned out that what Washington demanded was breezy, inclusive rhetoric that made good sound bites, something Alija Izetbegovic was nearly as adept at producing as Bill Clinton. Actual follow-up from photo-ops was Sarajevo's concern.

Western media was thus treated to the same show they had swallowed during the war. The SDA's leaders mouthed platitudes about a multiethnic Bosnia, democracy, and civil society; reportage of the party's actual policies was seldom forthcoming. This was increasingly true after Dayton, as the journalists, war groupies, and Balkan hangers-on who camped out in Sarajevo during the fighting got bored with peacetime Bosnia-without the war it was just another wrecked Third World country-and headed for new instabilities. Bosnia was no longer front-page news.

This suited Sarajevo fine, as the SDA hierarchy had no intention of allowing any sort of multiethnic society to take root in its hard-won Muslim statelet. The parry wasted no time completing the expulsion of Serbs from Sarajevo. Dayton was predicated on the right of refugees to return to their prewar homes; but this, like so much else about the agreement hatched in Ohio, was a charade. The vast majority of expellees, whether Muslim, Serb, or Croat, had no intention of going back to towns and villages where they would never feel safe.

The Dayton Accords assigned several majority-Serb suburbs of Bosnia's capital to the Federation. Despite American hopes that these Serbs would remain, nearly all fled after the peace was signed, rather than be ruled by the SDA. In what they called "Serb Sarajevo," a referendum, ignored by NATO, revealed that 98 percent of residents voted against joining the Federation. The scenes were remarkable, with Serbs whose families had lived in Sarajevo for centuries departing with all their possessions; many exhumed their dead rather than leave them under Muslim control. In Grbavica, 90 percent of Serbs decamped for the Republika Srpska. Before the war, a third of Sarajevo's population of over a half-million had been Serb (versus 49 percent Muslim, 7 percent Croat, and 14 percent "other," mostly the offspring of mixed marriages). Only a small fraction of those Serbs remained in Sarajevo after Dayton, and within two years there were fewer than twenty thousand Serbs in the capital. Those who had braved the SDA's wartime reign of terror could endure no longer. Multiethnic Sarajevo, once the jewel of Yugoslavia, was no more.14

The SDA's behavior after Dayton had much to do with the flight of Sarajevo's Serbs. Although Izetbegovic publicly asked the Serbs to stay, he also stated that the people of Sarajevo "finally deserved to be freed of their murderers"-meaning of course Serb murderers. Only Serbs who had not served in the VRS were invited to stay; since the Bosnian Serbs, like the Muslims and Croats, had conscripted virtually their entire male population between the ages of eighteen and fifty during the war, very few Serb males were welcome to remain. Vogosca, a Serb industrial suburb, was the first town to be reoccupied by the Federation. When the Muslim authorities arrived on February 23, 1996, almost none of Vogosca's eleven thousand residents were left. SDA officials acted like a victorious army as they entered the ghost town, tearing down the Serb flag in front of the town hall and trampling it in the mud before TV cameras. Muslim police stopped at every Vogosca residence, ostensibly to "check for illegal weapons"-really to harass the few Serbs who stayed behind. ABiH toughs intimidated the few Serbs in Vogosca, most of them elderly, until they too fled. The SDA wanted as many houses freed up as possible, to distribute to loyal party

Although radical Muslims reserved special venom for the Bosnian Serbs, the Croats were a more pressing problem for the SDA since Dayton mandated a joint Federation with shared power, something Sarajevo had no intention of allowing. From early 1996, SDA relations with Bosnian Croat counterparts were marked by obstruction, obfuscation, and deception, and before long even the most cooperative Croats had soured on the Federation. Many now doubted the wisdom of the Washington agreement and the Muslim-Croat alliance that resulted. The Croatian Parry of Rights, which occupied the far right of the political spectrum (they were essentially Ustashas, and therefore considered Bosnia's Muslims to he not just Croats, but the best ones), had been the SDA's ally during the war-the leader of their combat forces, Blaz Kraljevic, a general in the Armija BiH, was murdered by Zagreb's agents in August 1992 for openly siding with the Muslims against the Serbs-yet by mid-1996 was denouncing the SDA and declaring "no coexistence" with Sarajevo's ruling Islamists: "They want to set up Bosnia as an Islamic state with a legal system based on the Koran."16

Bosnian Croats who had always favored warm relations with the Muslims expressed doubts and dissatisfaction with the Islamistan that Izetbegovic created and Dayton sustained. For centuries, the Franciscan order had been a voice of moderation among Bosnia's Croats; their legacy, particularly in central Bosnia, was one of interethnic cooperation and goodwill across the religious divide. Unlike many Croats, the Franciscans sincerely supported a multiethnic Bosnia. It was therefore a shock hardly more than a year after Dayton when the Order of Friars Minor denounced the Muslims as the "real destroyers of Bosnia," citing postwar acts of discrimination and terrorism by Sarajevo. The Franciscans stated that the goal of the SDA "fundamentalists" was the Islamization of the stillborn Federation.17

The Roman Catholic Church, which had been a voice for peace and harmony during the war, was having second thoughts about siding with the Muslims against the Serbs, who were fellow Christians. After years of anti-Croat injustices at the hands of the SDA, Vinko Cardinal Puljic, the Archbishop of Sarajevo and the top Catholic cleric in Bosnia, denounced the subtle but effective pressure that Izetbegovic's party put on nonMuslims in the Federation, a "very refined and treacherous discrimination" which was driving the Croatian minority into impotence and ultimately nonexistence. Backed by Saudi and Iranian money, the SDA was harassing and exploiting the Croats, according to Puljic. The first sign, he maintained, was the distribution of aid during and after the war. While Catholic aid was distributed to Bosnians of all creeds, Islamic aid was given only to Muslims, indeed Allah's NGOs were forbidden to share anything with "infidels." Although postwar Sarajevo was sprouting new mosques, thanks to Saudi donations, only a single Catholic church had been built in the city since World War II. The SDA refused all Catholic requests to add more churches, despite Puljic's pleading for over five

Many Muslim actions seemed calculated to offend and intimidate the minority Croats. In late August 1996, in the run-up to national elections, four hundred SDA supporters were bussed into Capljina, a solidly Croat town, to wave the green flag of Islam. Their banners included the Islamist slogan: "The Koran is our constitution, the Jihad is our path, our salva- tion."19 Every year, leaders of the SDA and the Islamic Community launched anti-Christmas campaigns to steer Muslims away from "unclean influences," which Croats considered as one more intimidation tactic. The ink wasn't dry on the Dayton Accords when President Izetbegovic bitterly criticized Federation TV for having a Santa Claus in the New Year's 1996 program. SDA busybodies instructed schools and kindergartens to keep Santa out of any celebrations, while Elvir Bucalo, a popular Sarajevo radio host, was beaten up for including "Santa updates" in his station's Christmas Eve broadcast aimed at children. Mustafa Ceric, the Reis ul-ulema, joined the annual anti-Christmas drive, demanding that Federation TV omit any references to Jesus Christ or the Holy Father, since they were "not acceptable" for Muslims to even hear (never mind that a sizable percentage of Federation TV's audience was Catholic). Sarajevo's mufti declared that references to Jesus's crucifixion "can be done in church but not on [Bosnian TV] because Jesus is not Christ for Muslims but only for Catholics.... I don't understand the need for such blind sycophancy." Other imams demanded that Cardinal Puljic not be allowed to appear on Federation TV, even during Lent, since Muslims "would interpret these daily speeches [by the Cardinal] as an attempt to convert Muslims in Bosnia to Catholicism."20

The problem with any public celebration of Christmas, even ornaments, explained a journal popular among radical Muslims, was "a huge frustration, spite, bare primitivism that is trying to tell Muslims: Here we are flickering, with our Christ and our Jesus right under your noses, so eat your hearts out!" "Christians have no reason or justification to tastelessly adorn their homes with colored light bulbs as soon as December comes," added Fatimir Alispahic, a Sarajevo journalist who assisted the SDAs propaganda efforts against the Croats. This, he explained, was war: "Christians do not erect crosses because of themselves or Christianity, but to show their dominance over Muslims and to offend and humiliate Muslims."21 So much for "Bosnia the Good" and Sarajevo's deep tolerance.

Muslims who believed in a multiethnic future for their country were dismayed by Sarajevo's kleptocracy, which behind a semblance of democracy and civil society pursued a fanatical and corrupt religious-based ideology. The few imams who failed to toe the SDA line were purged from the Islamic Community. Muhamed Lugavic, a popular cleric in Tuzla, was fired after twenty-seven years in the job for speaking out about discrimination against non-Muslims. Denounced as the "red imam" by the SDA (no Communist, he had a degree in shari'a from Baghdad), Lugavic had belonged to the Party of Democratic Action at first, but quit "when I saw what was going on." The cleric expressed disbelief about Izetbegovic's policies, which were calculated to shame and drive out the Federation's Christians, people the imam had never had any trouble with. Lugavic expressed affection for pre-SDA Bosnia: "I would like to see the continuation of that sort of Islam, traditional, harmless, and genuine . . . that obviously bothers someone." 22 In the aftermath of Dayton, Adil Zulfikarpasic surveyed his ruined homeland, devastated by civil war and saddled with crime, corruption, and religious hatred, thanks to "political illiterates" in Sarajevo. He professed a "very pessimistic view today of the problems of Bosnia. I don't see a force that could pull Bosnia out of the blind alley it has entered," which turned out to be an accurate assessment.23

The surge in radical Islam in postwar Bosnia can be attributed to many causes, including economic deprivation, wartime suffering, and political chaos, but the driving force was the SDA's ongoing effort to create a European Islamistan. This campaign continued to be funded by the Islamist International. The Saudis were the biggest problem, since through their "state-sponsored NGOs"-many of them fronts for mujahidin-they financed Wahhabi propaganda, mosques, and clerics in Bosnia. While some of this appeared benign, for instance major Saudi funding of mosques damaged or destroyed in the war, there was invariably a sinister catch. The renovated mosques plus many new ones-five years after Dayton, Sarajevo had considerably more houses of Islamic worship than before the civil warwere constructed in the Gulf-kitsch style beloved of Saudis but foreign to the Balkans. And the sort of Islam preached in the mosques was also an import, the radically intolerant Saudi state religion that corroded minds and promoted violent jihad wherever it appeared.24 Riyadh's agents of influence in Sarajevo included several prominent clerics, the best known being Nezim Halilovic, the hero-imam of the 4th Muslim Brigade. Postwar he became the leading Bosnian spokesman for Wahhabism, and was installed as the lead preacher at the gargantuan King Fahd mosque, the showcase Saudi-funded Islamic center in Sarajevo. Halilovic espoused a violently intolerant version of Islam that was scripted in Arabia and aimed at what his critics termed the "local fans of the Taliban." His Friday sermons, laced with populist demagogy, Koranic instructions, and anti-American (and anti-Semitic) rhetoric, were hugely popular, thanks in part to dissemination on the Internet, so Muslims from across Bosnia could receive his message of hate.25

Wartime channels for Islamist funding continued after Dayton; the civil war had ended, but the jihad was far from over. Fatih al-Hasanayn's TWRA kept dispatching the SDA funds at least until 1998, though the Sudanese bagman's whereabouts were unknown. Qatar's al-Jazeera TV network gave Sarajevo TV a million-dollar donation in early 1997. The Iranians likewise continued their largesse towards Izetbegovic, giving the party $500,000 to help it win the September 1996 general elections.26 The SDAs electioneering was schizophrenic, like the party itself, advocating superficial Western values while pushing an Islamist agenda. This was reflected in the party's two major slogans: "In our own religion, in our own country," which expressed Izetbegovic's true sentiments, and "For a sovereign, unified, and democratic Bosnia," which was for Western consumption. Regardless, it worked well enough to keep Izetbegovic and the Party of Democratic Action in office.

The SDA's hold on power in Sarajevo was cemented by the party's deep ties to leading press and business circles. SDA loyalists and functionaries controlled the leading newspaper (Dnevni avaz), the top newsmagazine (L.il an), and Federation TV and Radio. Muslim tycoons with few exceptions were in the good graces of the SDA in a mutually beneficial relationship that ensured lucrative government contracts and licenses for Sarajevo's mafia-business elite, and ample kickbacks for SDA higher-ups. Hasan Cengic, who practically created the clerical-business racket, continued to reap personal gain from the jihad, expanding his empire of intermingled front companies in a manner that amazed his friends and dismayed his critics. Thanks to fanaticism, intransigence, and corruption, the Federation remained a political and economic basket case even five years after Dayton. Despite massive U.S. backing to create a functioning Federation Army as a bulwark against the Bosnian Serbs, the ABiH and HVO never really worked together-SDA policies ensured that the Bosnian Croats would never trust the majority Muslims-and the program was plagued by large-scale theft of aid and equipment.27

After a half-decade of U.S. and NATO intervention to keep the peace and rebuild Bosnia, the benighted Balkan country was anything but healed. While war was unlikely to return soon, mountains of Western aid seemed to be doing little good. America and the Europeans were pumping $1 billion a year into Bosnia, but rampant crime and corruption undercut everything Western governments and NGOs did. Unemployment was officially 37 percent, though the real figure was more like 50 percent. Developing modern industry and banking was a fiasco; the only functioning segment of the economy was the pervasive black market. Even pro-Bosnia firms gave up in despair when they encountered the SDA's culture of limitless corruption. After Dayton, German auto giant Volkswagen AG offered to rebuild a car plant at Vogosca, the Serb town taken by the Federation; the prewar factory needed repair. But the project was a bust, and after several years' efforts, VW announced it was halting its efforts, having produced almost no cars but having learned that the SDA was more interested in lining its pockets than creating jobs or a viable economy. Western investment was no solution, explained Dieter Steinbach, VW's director in Bosnia. "No chance. You would lose your money completely."28

SDA officials had grown accustomed to shaking down Western businesses and governments, a fact of Bosnian life understood by the thousands of foreign diplomats, soldiers, and aid workers who spent time in the country. It was easy money. As long as Izetbegovic was in power, the problem defied solution. Bosnia was "the last black hole in Europe," declared Sarajevo's leading human rights activist, and by the end of the go-go 1990s, donor fatigue was setting in. Less than 10 percent of Bosnia's eight hundred thousand displaced persons had returned to their prewar homes, and ethnic and religious hatreds burned as brightly as they had during the war. Yet there was no shame in the Party of Democratic Action, and certainly no remorse. Against the odds, with Allah's help and America's backing, they had held onto power and helped establish the beginnings of an Islamist statelet in Europe. Although the SDA unquestionably won the peace, average Bosnians continued to be the real losers.

"THE KORAN IS OUR CONSTITUTION"

The most obvious indication that Izetbegovic's vision for Muslim Bosnia won out was the continuing presence of the mujahidin. To Sarajevo's holy warriors, the Dayton Accords were a disappointment and a sellout. The December 1995 agreement meant many things to them, but certainly not the end of the jihad. Sheikh Imad el-Misri, the firebrand Egyptian cleric who ran the fortyday Islamic indoctrination class required of all fighters who joined the el-Mujahid Detachment, denounced Dayton in no uncertain terms: "This is not a peace, it is humiliation. This is not peace, it is a conspiracy to destroy Islam." Radicals hated the war's ending, including Nezim Halilovic, the imamcum-commander of the 4th Muslim Brigade, who said, "I pray for Allah for this war to last longer than this generation, in order for this nation to be cleansed a little, and then, with Allah's help, for the right generation to come-a generation of real The mujahidin need not have worried, for the Islamist International, with Sarajevo's help, found plenty of ways for the Balkan jihad to continue after Dayton.

Holy warriors who wouldn't or couldn't go home-a group consisting disproportionately of fighters from North Africa-didn't. Contrary to SDA claims that Sarajevo was getting rid of the mujahidin, the truth was that Izetbegovic and his party had no intention of sending them away. The same SDA-controlled organs in the Muslim military and police that had brought the Islamist International to Bosnia were now charged with sending them home. Small wonder that nothing happened. Instead, Sarajevo's intelligence apparatus spent most of its efforts in obscuring the mujahidin's continuing presence in Bosnia.

The SDA plan to let imported holy warriors stay, over U.S. and NATO objections, was to place them in several villages in central Bosnia and hope no one would much notice. Ties between top SDA officials and mujahidin were no secret. In mid-November 1997, Izetbegovic attended a ceremony in Zenica commemorating the fifth birthday of the 7th Muslim Brigade, which was serving in the postwar Federation Army (Vojska Federacije-VF), the nominally united Muslim-Croat force dictated by Dayton. The brigade, still chock-full with holy warriors, greeted the man they called their "honorary commander" with cries of "Alija, our hawk, the Seventh Brigade is with you." Izetbegovic assured them publicly: "Nobody is going to throw you out!" Undeterred by suggestions that such appearances were unwise, Izetbegovic went back to Zenica the following November to celebrate the brigade's sixth anniversary, again accompanied by top Muslim generals.30 The SDA's relationship with the mujahidin was explained succinctly by Said Abu Hamza, a senior foreign fighter: "Izetbegovic is our president. Things will be as he says."j'

Most of the imported warriors who stayed on after Dayton settled down to quieter lives, waiting for the next outburst of armed jihad. The el-Mujahid Detachment was formally disbanded in early 1996, under pressure from Washington, but few of its fighters went home. Although the unit had a public farewell, most of its men stayed in Bosnia, including its noted leader, Abu Ma'ali, who remained in the country until July 1999, when his presence had become too much for SFOR; exactly where the wanted Algerian went thereafter was a mystery. Sarajevo was unwilling to discuss the case.32

Many el-Mujahid veterans were settled in the village of Bocinja, a place the Muslim police did their best to keep journalists away from. The newly minted Bosnian citizens were unwelcome in Bocinja, but the locals were never asked. It had been a Serb village before the war, and had been ethnically cleansed by Muslim forces. Not long after Dayton, General Sakib Mahmuljin, one of the top Muslim generals and deputy defense minister for the Federation, arranged for eighty-nine mujahidin families to move to Bocinja; most of the arrivals were Arabs with Bosnian wives, frequently more than one per fighter. More holy warriors arrived until Bocinja was a full-fledged al-Qa'ida colony.33

They imposed a reign of terror on their Lilliputian domain, enforcing a strict Salafi interpretation of Islam that was foreign and sinister to locals; those who dared to criticize the newcomers' ways were subjected to beatings and worse. Natives who didn't like the madmen in desert garb and their alien doctrine held the SDA responsible for the situation, one politician observing ruefully, "now we have criminals to teach us Islam." The chair of the local municipality's council claimed to have proof that Sarajevo's secret police was behind the settlement, and protected it from scrutiny by Bosnians or SFOR; he named General Mahmuljin as the mujahidin's highplaced protector.34

Despite international pressure to allow displaced Bosnians to return to their prewar homes, only 114 Serb families went back to Bocinja after Dayton, and were subjected to harassing efforts by foreign fighters to convert them to Islam. The mujahidin tried to erase the town's non-Muslim past, including desecration of the village's Christian cemeteries, while two Serbs who entered Bocinja in 1998 were tortured by three holy warriors, who received suspended sentences for assault from a sympathetic Muslim judge. Setting the tone, a sign on the main road into town warned visitors to "be afraid of Allah." Bocinja's mini-Jihadistan was a law unto itself, and two SFOR generals who visited in 1999, a Briton and a Norwegian, were assaulted by residents who threatened the NATO soldiers with death. NonMuslim NGO workers were subjected to attacks by local mujahidin, while a village visit by American SFOR troops was met with even greater violence. Numerous wanted holy warriors spent time in Bocinja after Dayton, the SDA's safe haven for terrorists in a country nominally occupied by U.S. and Allied troops.35

It was the same story at Guca Gora, another village in central Bosnia that had been ethnically cleansed of non-Muslims-an el-mujahid veteran admitted that the order to brutally "cleanse" Guca Gora came from General Sakib Mahmuljin, the holy warriors' advocate and protector-where mujahidin found SDA-sponsored sanctuary. Some three hundred fighters settled in the formerly Croat hamlet near Travnik. They considered it theirs, as mujahidin had "liberated" Guca Gora during the war, expelling its residents. They forced local Muslims to adopt their ways, not infrequently at gunpoint: prayer five times per day, the veil for women, no alcohol or blasphemy, no contact with "infidels." Some Bosnian Muslims, particularly the elderly who were desperate for food, accepted Salafi mores quietly, but most resisted where they could. The coercive recruitment of youths into mujahidin ranks was particularly loathed; in many cases, sons disappeared near Guca Gora, emerging months later as zombies spouting a hard-line and intolerant Islam foreign to Bosnians. As one war veteran said of the loss of a teenage son to the Guca Gora mujahidin, "I served four years in the Army and I did that for Bosnia, no one else," adding that losing a son to the foreign madmen was a crueler blow than the death of another son in the war. "There is a war worse than the one fought at the front, the war against the

Sadly for the majority of Bosnia's Muslims, who wanted nothing to do with the mujahidin once the war was over, the imported holy warriors were an SDA-protected class whose misdeeds were overlooked, indeed hushed-up by Sarajevo's security and intelligence services. In central Bosnia, thugs frequently beat locals for their "un-Islamic" behavior, for instance drinking alcohol or listening to Western music. Women who wore Western attire or visible jewelry were subjected to particular mujahidin attention. Seldom did the police do anything to enforce the law. Neither did they attempt to prevent the foreign fighters from holding field exercises with weapons, sometimes involving hundreds of mujahidin, though this too was supposed to be illegal. That newly minted Bosnians were leaving to wage jihad in Chechnya, where some became martyrs, was something Sarajevo did its best to keep quiet.37

SFOR didn't do a much better job of keeping the mujahidin on a short leash. Although NATO forces occupied the country, they usually shied away from confrontations with Islamist hotheads. Occasionally a Western protest would have an effect, particularly if the issue was small. A Sarajevo policeman whose private car had the revealing license plate BINLADEN was temporarily suspended when SFOR asked questions.38 NATO intelligence customarily displayed remarkable ignorance about facts on the ground in Bosnia, including top-priority issues like the mujahidin. Short tours of duty (never more than twelve months, often only six) ensured a lack of operational continuity, which combined with limited linguistic skills and scant knowledge of the country led to a painful lack of awareness about radical Islam in Bosnia among U.S. and Allied military personnel, even years after Dayton.39

There was ample evidence that the jihad was prospering quietly-and sometimes not so quietly. The most alarming group to surface after Dayton was the Active Islamic Youth (Aktivna islamska omladina-AIO), a Salafi front that peddled radical Islam and armed struggle. AIO was an outgrowth of the Muslim military's "special units." Established in Zenica in 1995, its hard core consisted of veterans of the el-Mujahid Detachment. Most were Bosnians, but they had adopted militant ways, and were both inspired and funded by Saudi Arabia. Within three years, AIO had expanded to several thousand members and branch offices in Travnik, Bugojno, Zavidovici, Visoko, and Sarajevo. The group's propaganda came straight from the Wahhabi playbook, and it recruited young Bosnians, mostly war veterans under twenty-five, into its ranks with appeals to jihad. AIO indoctrination included courses in shari'a and "pristine" (i.e., Salafi) Islam.40

At first the group lacked inspired leadership, but that changed in mid1997 when Adrian Pezo took over. He was an atypical Bosnian Muslim, but a very typical sort encountered in postwar radical circles. Before the fighting, Pezo had been an aviation cadet at a Communist military school, but he joined the el-Mujahid Detachment in 1993, at the age of twenty, and became a militant holy warrior. He spoke fondly of the foreign volunteers in his unit: "They have an inner peace, you can see on their faces that they are sincere and true believers." Wounded in combat, Pezo emerged from the war spouting hatred for anything other than Salafism. He explained, "There is no coexistence with the Catholics or the Orthodox, or Muslim atheists for that matter."41 AIO anathemas weren't confined to rhetoric. The group plastered Bosnia with posters urging Muslims not to celebrate "infidel" Christmas or New Year's, and in 1996 violently disrupted Christmas midnight mass at Sarajevo's Catholic cathedral.

Equal venom was shown to Muslims who were unenthusiastic about AIO's straight-from-Riyadh program. They agitated against mevlud, the celebration of the Prophet's birthday, a popular tradition in Bosnia considered heretical by Wahhabis. An A10-published book, Small Signs of Judgment Day, proclaimed the imminent conquest of Rome by the jihad, and also the reconquest of Istanbul "which today is being ruled by unbelievers." AIO's program was simple. Pezo regularly held up the Koran at public meetings and explained, "This is our constitution." A more detailed explanation of what the group stood for was made clear in March 1999 at a conference on "Women, Religion, and Society" at Sarajevo University. AIO expressed its solidarity with the women of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, noting that "the real truth about Kabul" was that the jihad had "liberated" Afghan women from "Christian-Communist aggression," thus saving them from mass rape, prostitution, and AIDS. Punctuated by shouts of "Allahu akbar!" AIO representatives, females included, elaborated that Afghan women had freely chosen their status under the Taliban, extolling its virtues as a model for the women of Bosnia.42

AIO was not a fringe organization in Bosnia, but a well funded and motivated extremist group. It had more than one media outlet. January 1997 saw the release of Saff, the AIO magazine, which carried Salafi propaganda, including customary denunciations of the West, Christians, Jews, and Americans in often violent terms, as well as the expected deploring of "the disastrous abolition of the caliphate in Turkey." Radio Naba, established in 1993 by Hasan Cengic and his father Halid, carried the AIO message on the airwaves.43

Suspicions were widespread that AIO wasn't just a propaganda outfit, but an armed jihadi group-"just in case" as Sarajevo wags put it. Pezo's group offered free vacations at its getaway camp on Lake Jablanicko; this gave like-minded Muslims the chance "to vacation as much as one pleases without doing a single thing that is haram (i.e., forbidden in Islam)." This was actually a summer camp for mujahidin, funded by Saudi money and offering Salafi indoctrination and training in weapons and small-unit tactics.44

Money from Riyadh was the key to AIO's success. The organization received over $500,000 in direct funding from Saudi Arabia, channeled through the usual fronts that had set up shop in Sarajevo: the Saudi High Commission, al-Haramayn, and Taibah International. AIO received $330,000 from al-Haramayn in 1999-2001 alone. Saudi fronts-within-fronts assisted too, for instance the Global Relief Foundation and al-Furqan, which shared a Sarajevo address; al-Furqan, established in Sarajevo in 1997 by young Bosnian radicals, was partly financed by al-Haramayn. The funding channels were intentionally obscure, but the cash reaching AIO was real and the source of its strength.45

In late 2000, AIO moved its headquarters from Zenica to Sarajevo, and Pezo was replaced by Almir Foco, a young radical of similar views. The move to the capital brought the group's leaders closer to their Saudi paymasters. Members spent a great deal of time at the Gulf-kitsch King Fahd mosque, the Saudi-sponsored outpost in the working class suburb of Alipasino Polje. The mosque was reviled by most Sarajevans for its radicalism, but for AIO it was an ideal base of operations.

Saudi defacing of Bosnian mosques was a sore point with the locals. Saudi money restored almost 200 houses of Islamic worship in the five years after Dayton (1,200 of Bosnia's 1,700 mosques were damaged or destroyed in the war), but many of the mosques were rebuilt in what one observer termed "Saudi modern shopping mall style." Rebuilding mosques was hugely important to the Saudis-critics noted that there was no money put forward for Srebrenica, and none for rehabilitation centers either-since they served as centers for the jihad, but Wahhabis hated traditional Ottoman architecture and art. Mosques were rebuilt in the garish style popular with the Saudis, devoid of traditional religious art or images. Some of Bosnia's most famous mosques were damaged more by Saudi "reconstruction" than by the fighting. When Sarajevo's treasured Begova mosque was remodeled in Wahhabi fashion, Bosnians protested, resulting in the so-called "mosque war." Yet the Saudis got their way. When a local art expert (actually a Jew) protested to the SDA, Izetbegovic's office informed her bluntly: "There's nothing we can do. They have the money and they are going to do what they want."46

Thus did imported radicalism make strong inroads in postwar Bosnia. Traditional Sufi orders, which might have offered a moderate alternative to Saudi modes of thought, had weakened under Communism and lacked their former vitality; Bosnian Islam was being steamrolled by the rich and aggressive Salafists. After Dayton, long beards on men and hijab on women-both unknown before the war in urban Bosnia-were commonly seen on the streets of Sarajevo.

Allah's NGOs continued to play a pernicious role. Islamic charities, mainly Saudi, remained linked with al-Qa'ida and other terrorist groups. There was regular movement of mujahidin between NGOs and jihadi cadres. Terrorists became "humanitarians" as needed, and returned to violent deeds with ease, as the supporting organizations were identical. Ali Ahmed Ali Hamad was a typical case. Moved by Izetbegovic's televised appeal to help fellow Muslims, the mujahid left his native Bahrain and reached Bosnia in late 1992. He was twice wounded in action, and fought alongside the warrior-imam Nezim Halilovic. After the war, Hamad returned to Bahrain but grew restless; a year later he was back in Bosnia as an employee of the Saudi High Commission. He was deeply involved with terrorist circles in the country, and was throughout an al-Qa'ida member, by his own admission.47

Dirty money was distributed freely to support the Balkan jihad long after Dayton. Bin Laden had his own Bosnian banks. Vakufska Banka in Sarajevo, established in 1992 by Yasin al-Qadi, was an al-Qa'ida front. A wealthy Egyptian, al-Qadi was one of bin Laden's top financiers, and he spent freely in Bosnia, establishing another bank, Depozitna, and the Risala NGO, with its own school, in Sarajevo. Vakufska Banka eventually absorbed Depozitna Banka and had seventy employees. It was in business in Bosnia for over a decade, distributing funds to jihadi charities-cumcadres, until the UN listed al-Qadi as a major al-Qa'ida money manager after 9/11.48

The importance of Saudi funds to the Bosnian jihad after Dayton is demonstrated by the case of Nezim Halilovic, the wartime fighting preacher and postwar rabble-rouser, who used King Fahd as his base of operations for his agitation. His Friday sermons were a big draw for Sarajevo's radical element, who were inspired by Halilovic's frequent invectives against the West, America, and Israel. The Saudi High Commission funded Halilovic and his coterie directly and indirectly, including the printing and distribution of five thousand copies of his weekly sermon, for the benefit of those unable to attend. Halilovic was noxious to secular Muslims, who found nothing funny about the imam's hosting of a "Jerusalem Day" in Sarajevo, complete with the burning of an Israeli flag and Halilovic's declaration that "the liberation of Jerusalem should not happen without Bosnian Muslims." But the mujahidin, imported and homegrown, loved their fellow veteran, and swelled the ranks of his movement which in the five years after Dayton became a real force in Sarajevo.49

Money was the heart of the matter. There was no jihad without funds, and post-Dayton Bosnia witnessed Allah's NGOs finding new ways to launder money to support their cause. As expected, the Cengic clan featured prominently in such subterfuges. In an effort to nominally distance itself from the postwar jihad, Fatih al-Hasanayn's TWRA created front organizations to distribute funds. Hasan Cengic's Foundation for Aid to the Muslims of Bosnia-Hercegovina, established in February 1996 with TWRA money, itself spawned a front in May of that year, the Bosnian Investment Organization or BIO. Subsequent investigations by Bosnian and Western authorities revealed that Cengic's new firm laundered money for terrorists as well as so-called humanitarian workers, and its origins can be traced to a "gift" of military trucks by TWRA valued at almost $2.5 million. Ever ambitious, Cengic used his postwar fronts to spend freely in support of radical Islam. In the autumn of 1997, he registered BIO Air, his own mini-airline, again with TWRA money. As was the custom with Cengic and TWRA, considerable sums went missing. Though it hardly had any aircraft, BIO Air boasted of flights to Saudi Arabia and ran ads extolling its virtues: "Thanks to Allah and BIO Tours we can now visit the sacred places of Islam!"50

Yet boasting was not the usual way of Bosnia's mujahidin after Dayton. Aware that Western intelligence was watching, Cengic and other top holy warriors took care to keep their misdeeds from public view. An exception was the gala celebration in Sarajevo in mid-July 1999 to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the Young Muslims, the vanguard of radical Islam in Bosnia. The SDA leadership was in proud attendance (save President Izetbegovic, who was a no-show due to his declining health), including a rare guest: Fatih al-Hasanayn, who had been making himself scarce at public outings since Austrian police raided TWRA's Vienna headquarters in 1995. Bosnia's wartime "minister of finance" nevertheless appeared at the Sarajevo celebration and was hailed for his munificent deeds. Yet he chose to keep quiet about his service to the jihad, addressing the audience with undue modesty: "It is an honor for me to stand before you. It is better both for me and for you that I not say much."51

TODAY BOSNIA, TOMORROW THE WORLD

Bosnia's dirty secret after Dayton was that the mujahidin by no means confined themselves to violent words and rabble-rousing. Violent deeds followed, as they invariably did-in Bosnia and abroad. After the battlefield fell silent and the armies demobilized, the Balkan jihad continued to be pursued with savagery and calculation. Although holy warriors were usually careful about attacking Western people and interests in Bosnia, local opponents of radical Islam were not so fortunate.

The targets included Muslims who objected to Salafi ways, non-Muslims who were considered anti-jihad, or who tried to return to prewar homesa process that was supposed to be under NATO protection but seldom was-and unlucky foreigners. Many attacks seemed like spontaneous crimes of religious passion, or a local grudge brought to a sinister extreme. Yet most were premeditated, in some cases with the connivance of Muslim police and politicians. This was al-Qa'ida's "Bosnian model" at work. The term was coined by Sarajevo's leading expert on the mujahidin, Esad Hecimovic, the brave journalist for the newsmagazine Danz', who examined post-Dayton terrorism in disturbing detail. The armed jihad flourished after 1995 thanks to dirty money and corrupt politicians, who at best looked the other way about where funds were really going; at worst, SDA officials aided and abetted violent holy warriors who were participating in acts of terrorism in Bosnia and abroad. The result was a benign operating environment for al-Qa'ida, and needless deaths.52

Assistance to al-Qa'ida by Bosnian Muslim security services, suspected by victims of mujahidin attacks, was revealed by post-9/11 investigations that uncovered direct links between Sarajevo's police, military, and intelligence apparatus and known extremists. Explosive devices possessed by the Muslim police found their way into mujahidin hands, and were used in terrorist attacks. Among the wetwork equipment that was "misplaced" by Sarajevo's police were car bombs and gun-umbrellas designed for discreet assassinations.53

Needless to add, the Muslim police underperformed when it came to tracking down wanted holy warriors. In leading cases, mujahidin who could no longer hide from NATO escaped the Balkans with SDA assistance. As Esad Hecimovic wryly observed, "From what I have seen, whoever is accused of terrorism in Bosnia disappears." When asked why it took Sarajevo more than four years to find and deport the top terrorist Abu Ma'ali, a hero of the Bosnian Army's radical units, Hecimovic explained, "Bosnian authorities have sheltered him for years.... No wonder there is no evidence, since all the investigations that might have proved something were stopped back in 1993."54

Little more than a year after NATO troops arrived in Bosnia to enforce the Dayton Accords, it was obvious that the country had a major problem with Islamist terrorism. By the end of 1997, there had been over a hundred acts of terrorism in the Bosnian Federation-the joint Muslim-Croat entitythe vast majority of them committed by mujahidin, a depressing fact that led Senad Avdic, the editor of the Sarajevo newsmagazine Slobodna Bosna, to pronounce that SDA-run Bosnia had become "a European dump for all kinds of scum, murderers, terrorists and adventurers of all sorts who have earned the status of equal citizens of this country with `selam' and `tekbir'."55

Much of the Islamist terror was local and underreported even in Bosnia. Around Zavidovici, a town with a good-sized and vocal AIO chapter, Serbs who tried to resettle their prewar homes, as promised by the Dayton Accords, were harassed and attacked. Several were killed by mystery mujahidin, including Jadranko Bozanovic, editor of Radio Zavidovici, who had reported on the campaign of silent terror, and was murdered by a bomb placed in front of his residence.56 Muslim police were notably sluggish in their investigations of such crimes. Neither were Western reporters much interested, as these acts of terror showed Muslims as the practitioners, not victims, of violence. NATO displayed modest interest too, as attacks on non-Muslims demonstrated the shortcomings of the Dayton process, an unflattering portrait of Western weakness and muddling through.

The Clinton administration was uninterested in bad news from Bosnia. Dayton was their diplomatic triumph, and no amount of Islamist criminality was going to undo it. In the end, it was easier to look the other way. Even attacks on Americans were seldom treated with the seriousness that seemed warranted. The murder of William Jefferson, an American UN aid worker, in Tuzla in November 1995, as American troops were readying to pour into Bosnia, went unsolved due to Washington's passive stance as the case was mishandled by Muslim authorities. There was clear evidence linking mujahidin to Jefferson's murder. Two Saudis with ties to the Islamist International were behind the crime, according to investigators, though neither was arrested for the murder. Ahmed Zuhair Handala, linked to the Saudi High Commission in Sarajevo, was at the least an accomplice; Jefferson's watch was later found in Handala's possession. Handala was reported to have participated in massacres of Croatian civilians during the war, and a witness fingered Handala as one of the mujahidin who had attacked her village in September 1993; the Saudi had threatened to kill her fourteen-year-old son with a knife. The triggerman in the Jefferson case was believed to be Faiz al-Shamberi, a veteran of the Muslim military's special units; according to local police, the gun used to kill Jefferson was found on al-Shamberi, but the mujahid disappeared after an amnesty for army veterans who were imprisoned on weapons charges.57

Most postwar terrorism in Bosnia consisted of murders and bombings that targeted specific persons, usually Croats. The mujahidin aimed to settle scores and create a climate of fear among the Muslims' Federation partners, and they succeeded. Central Bosnia was a hotbed of anti-Croat terrorism after Dayton, with mujahidin regularly shooting at and blowing up Croatian houses to scare away non-Muslims. Catholic churches and monasteries were another target for violent harassment. Croatian policemen were particularly targeted, including several attempted murders, and two killings in the summer of 1998, of Perica Bilic and Ante Valjan, predictably went unsolved. Valjan was murdered early on July 31, 1997, in Travnik by several men with "Taliban-style beards" according to eyewitnesses. The killers were eventually identified as veterans of the el-Mujahid Detachment but, as usual, no arrests followed. Although eight holy warriors were brought into custody the following year in connection with that summer's wave of terror around Travnik, seldom did the charges stick, and few Muslim courts were willing to pass guilty verdicts. It later emerged that the killers of Valjan and other Croats were mujahidin veterans acting with the knowledge and protection of the Muslim police and secret services. "I am a paid murderer" admitted one el-Mujahid veteran who fled Travnik after refusing to murder a Croatian policeman he knew. The liquidation order, he claimed, came from a locally prominent SDA official and a religious dignitary from Travnik.58

Certain mujahidin crimes were higher profile, including the March 16, 1999, assassination of Jozo Leutar, Bosnia's deputy interior minister. One of the highest-ranking Croatian officials in the Sarajevo government, Leutar had received numerous death threats, but leading investigators believed that the killing, accomplished by a professional-quality bomb inside Leutar's car, was the work of Islamists, who feared Leutar threatened the corrupt al-Qa'ida- police relationship sponsored by the SDA. Informed speculation pointed to timers and detonators supplied by the Muslim police to mujahidin, while others in Sarajevo claimed the killers had been trained by Iranians at Pogorelica. The SDA tried to place blame on Croatian extremists, who considered Leutar too soft on the Muslims. President Izetbegovic memorably stated that the murder was perpetrated by "our fools or Croatian extremists": his dismissal of the hardest-line mujahidin as mere "fools" was revealing to many. Yet the preponderance of evidence pointed to mujahidin involvement in the crime, which was the 132nd terrorist act perpetrated in the Bosnian Federation after Dayton, and the 107th such crime to go unsolved.59

Audacious "spectaculars" were within the reach of Bosnia's holy warriors. Especially daring was the April 1997 attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II during a visit to Sarajevo, a narrow miss. Although the Holy Father had frequently condemned wartime crimes against Bosnia's Muslims, he offered a tempting target for the mujahidin, who placed twenty-three landmines under a bridge along John Paul's procession route into the city. Remote-controlled antitank mines were found under another bridge on Marshal Tito Boulevard in downtown Sarajevo. It was, observed a UN police official, "a very serious attempt to blow up His Holiness" that was narrowly averted by the police, who presumably found this excessive. The attempt against John Paul II was part of a wave of anti-Catholic terrorism that spring, which included antitank rocket attacks on Kraljeva Stujeska, one of the oldest Franciscan monasteries in the Balkans.6° As usual, Western reporters found little in this story that held their interest.

Virtually all these crimes could be traced back to al-Qa'ida and its fronts. In the few arrests made by Bosnian authorities in response to postDayton terrorism, those brought into custody had ties to either AIO or the Saudi High Commission and related Islamist NGOs. Many were supposedly missionaries. As Esad Hecimovic explained, "Islamic missionaries who interpret support for terrorism as part of their mission of calling to the true faith, protecting the Muslim community, and assisting oppressed peoples, represent the true ideological roots of terrorism." 61 A typical case was Sheikh Imad el-Misri, a leading jihadi missionary and veteran of the el-Mujahid Detachment, who stayed on after Dayton, ostensibly as a preacher, receiving funds from several of Allah's NGOs while propagating hate and violence. A terrorist wanted in his native Egypt on charges of involvement in the brutal murder of fifty-eight Western tourists at Luxor in 1997 (that brutal crime was committed "in revenge for Western passivity towards the victimization of Muslims in Bosnia"), the naturalized Bosnian el-Misri was convicted in absentia by an Egyptian court in March 2001-Sarajevo refused extraditionand he was returned home only after 9/11, despite outcries by AIO and related friends-of-terrorism in Bosnia, when international pressure forced Sarajevo to hand over several of the top terrorists they had protected.

In October 1997, Saber Lahmar, employed as a librarian at the Saudi High Commission, was arrested for plotting to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo. This was an exception, as most mujahidin were wary of targeting U.S. or Western interests in Bosnia-anywhere else was fair gamebecause they appreciated that NATO gave them a de facto safe haven after Dayton. Bosnian authorities pardoned Lahmar of the crime only two years later (Sarajevo reluctantly dispatched Lahmar, a known al-Qa'ida terrorist, to U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay in early 2002). Investigations revealed that the Saudi High Commission was deeply involved with local acts of terror. Among the cases was the September 1997 bombing of a Croatian apartment building in Mostar. The mastermind of the bombing was Ahmed Zuhair Handala, one of the suspects in the murder of William Jefferson. The el-Mujahid veteran, who carried a pass for unrestricted movement issued by the Muslim military's 7th Corps, was angry at the Croats over a sixteenmonth sentence he received for terrorism. Police linked Handala and two other suspects to the Saudi High Commission. As was so often the case with mujahidin accused of terrorism in Bosnia, Handala disappeared-many believed with the connivance of the Muslim police-and was convicted in absentia. He was eventually found and after 9/11 he, too, was shipped to Guantanamo.62

In the wake of such cases, post-Dayton Bosnia developed a bad reputation for protecting wanted terrorists. Numerous states requested extradition of Islamists, often their own nationals, on terrorism charges, only to have them rejected out of hand by SDA-appointed judges. The grounds for refusal were weak, such as the case of Saleh Nedal, wanted on terrorism charges in Italy. Rome's 1999 extradition request was turned down by a Travnik court because Nedal, like nearly all mujahidin, was a naturalized Bosnian citizen.63

Yet many of Bosnia's holy warriors were traveling abroad, across Europe and around the world-not to face justice but to create more mayhem. Over a hundred veterans of Islamist special units departed Bosnia in late 1995 to wage jihad in Chechnya, and a steady stream of volunteers remained open; leading Bosnian mujahidin, including Nezim Halilovic, boasted publicly of arranging the travel of holy warriors to Chechnya, although SDA officials were careful to deny any reports of Bosnian support to the Caucasian jihad. Nevertheless, Bosnians were reaching Chechnya with help from AIO, and Russian troops regularly found Bosnian passports on the bodies of dead mujahidin in Chechnya.64

The SDA also offered substantial help to Kosovo's increasingly militant Albanians. Sarajevo covertly dispatched advisers to assist the nascent Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) in its struggle against the Serbs, while key SDA officials arranged arms shipments. As war clouds loomed in 1998, Sarajevo increased aid to the U(~K, which it saw as a brother Muslim army; the SDA called on the relatively few ethnic Albanians in Bosnia to assist the cause. President Izetbegovic ordered that only Albanians be sent to Bosnian diplomatic missions in Albania and Macedonia. A key role was played by Alija Ismet, an ethnic Albanian and ex-JNA officer, who rose to general rank in the Armija BiH, whom Izetbegovic tasked with facilitating Bosnian assistance to the UCK. The point man was Haili Bicaj, another ethnic Albanian and JNA officer, who joined the Patriotic League in 1991 and became a deputy brigade commander in Izetbegovic's army. Thanks to his close ties to the SDA leadership, Bicaj arranged gun-running from Bosnian Muslim caches, under the control of the Cengic family, to Kosovar militants. SDA support for the UcK-which proved a major boost to the Albanians as their war turned hot in late 1998-was another underreported story, though one well known to experts. NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia uncovered more than one cache of weapons bound for Kosovo; no less, Western troops serving in Kosovo after the NATO intervention found weapons and munitions bearing clear Bosnian Muslim markings. This was another story it was in neither NATO's nor the Western media's interest to over-publicize. In the end, their support for the U(~K didn't result in the outcome the SDA had hoped for, as the heavily secular Kosovar Albanians proved to be poor fodder for the global jihad, showing minimal interest in political Islam, but Sarajevo's Islamists were proud of their contribution to their Albanian coreligionists all the same.65

Although they did their best to keep their ties to al-Qa'ida under wraps, the SDA's dirty alliances on occasion came into public view. The European press noted the September 1999 arrest in Istanbul of Mehrez Amdouni, a top al-Qa'ida lieutenant. Born in Tunisia but a naturalized Bosnian, Amdouni was called "bin Laden junior" by the media-the case got hardly any attention in America-and his arrest offered a brief glimpse of Bosnia's place in the worldwide jihad. Amdouni arrived in Bosnia in 1993 and fought determinedly with the el-Mujahid Detachment under the nom de guerre Abu Talha. After the war ended, he became a senior al-Qa'ida official despite his youth, and was involved in several terrorist plots across Europe. Based for a time in Bologna, he was arrested in Spain in 1997 while driving a car filled with guns, apparently an arms shipment for Algeria's GIA. He soon returned to the Zenica area, but was wanted by Italian authorities for his leading role in a plot to blow up several top officials, including Italian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini, and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Marc Grossman, during a visit to Turkey.

At the time of his arrest, Amdouni was en route from Bosnia to Chechnya. When his flight from Bucharest arrived in Istanbul, "bin Laden junior" fell afoul of an observant Turkish customs officer. The inspector, who had emigrated from Bosnia to Turkey as a boy, felt the suspicious man didn't look Bosnian, and his command of Serbo-Croatian was limited. His passport looked doctored too-in fact Amdouni did hold Bosnian citizenship-and that was enough to run a name check, which revealed that he was wanted in Italy on terrorism charges.66

Amdouni's seemingly reckless confidence that his Bosnian passport would protect him was not misplaced. One of his associates, Khalil Yaraj, a GIA fighter and Bosnian mujahid who was also wanted in Italy, had been arrested by Italian peacekeepers near Sarajevo, but Bosnian judges nixed his extradition. Although the charges were very serious-Yaraj had plotted to blow up the World Cup in France, an operation to be staged from Bolognathe SDA didn't budge and refused to send Yaraj, a Bosnian citizen, to Italy.67

Amdouni's arrest brought speculation about whether Osama bin Laden himself possessed a Bosnian passport, as had been alleged by reputable Sarajevo sources. SDA officials fumbled the issue, refusing at first to discuss whether the world's top terrorist had been issued a passport by the Bosnian embassy in Vienna in 1993. When public outcry became too great, they fell back on the absence of paperwork to support (or refute) the claim. Bosnia's top mujahid-hunter uncovered that the SDA had destroyed all materials relating to bin Laden's Bosnian passport, and the statement by Sarajevo's foreign minister that "I do not know who he got such a passport from and I am not in a position to say anything about it, as we do not have such information," was hardly reassuring.69

At the time Mehrez Amdouni was arrested in Turkey, a group of al-Qa'ida veterans was planning a truly audacious act of terror on the United States. This gang of hardened mujahidin was operating out of Montreal, but they came from Bosnia, and had cut their terrorist teeth in Izetbegovic's army.

This was the so-called Millennium Plot, the al-Qa'ida operation to blow up Los Angeles International Airport at the end of 1999, America's nearmiss-the fateful warning before 9/11 that few Americans heeded.69 The key figure in the plot was Ahmed Ressam, an embittered Algerian immigrant and sometime holy warrior who had spent time in Bosnia and Afghanistan at al-Qa'ida training camps; he had been a suspect in the 1997 Mostar apartment bombing. Ressam and several "brothers" from GIA by way of Bosnia, lived off welfare in Montreal, hanging out in Bosnian cafes when not committing petty crimes and planning acts of terror against America. Though they disliked Canada, they appreciated that that country's liberal asylum laws and a generous benefits system for immigrants granted them pleasant refuge. The real enemy lay to the south.

Ressam's mentor in jihad was Fateh Kamel and his Montreal roommate was Karim Said Atmani; both were notable members of Islamist extremist circles who had spent their formative years as mujahidin in Bosnia. Kamel was a survivor of the Roubaix Gang, the Franco-Bosnian group of bank-robbing mujahidin led by Christopher Caze that met its fiery end in early 1996-all except Kamel. The Algerian was devoted to Caze, who had treated his wounds in Bosnia when they served together in the el-Mujahid Detachment, and who made his escape to fight again another day.

As the Bosnian war wound down, Kamel became a trusted al-Qa'ida full-time recruiter, traveling the world to establish cells in many countries. His travels between 1994 and 1997, not counting his crime spree in France and Belgium, included sojourns from Bosnia to Germany, Turkey, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, and Jordan. When a French judge inquired how the apparently unemployed Kamel funded so much travel, the Algerian replied, "A Saudi friend helped me.... "70

Canada was a regular destination, as its domestic security was lax; in Montreal, with its large Arab and Muslim population, a mujahid could operate with impunity. Kamel found Canada congenial, and soon added a Canadian passport to his Algerian, French, and Bosnian ones. He had a reputation in jihadi circles as a top-notch document forger; the Roubaix Gang's extensive array of passports was believed to have been Kamel's handiwork. When Canadian authorities finally extradited Kamel to Bosnia in October 1998-Sarajevo preferred he come to them rather than to France, which had a reputation for hard-nosed prosecution of terrorists-he was found with seven different IDs and passports. In typical fashion, Bosnian authorities proceeded to "lose track" of Kamel, who escaped to Jordan, where he was arrested and extradited to France in April 1999.71

But Kamel had done good work during his time in Montreal, and had established a cell of militants on firm ground. The men were GIA exiles, Algerian holy warriors who couldn't go home; most members, and all leading ones, were veterans of Bosnia. Kamel left the cell in the safe hands of his "brother" and fellow el-Mujahid veteran (and Bosnian citizen) Karim Said Atmani, his right-hand man. Atmani had spent much time in the Zenica area (they had also been in Bocinja, the mujahidin hideaway, together, alongside Mehrez Amdouni), and the men trusted each other.72

Al-Qa'ida had big things planned to end the twentieth century, and while the Los Angeles operation wasn't the only attraction-Khalil Deek, another mujahid with a Bosnian passport, was arrested in Jordan in late December 1999 attempting to blow up tourist sites-it was unquestionably the main event. Atmani got down to work, picking up where Kamel left off. The Moroccan selected his roommate Ressam to be the point man for the coming "big wedding." The Algerian had few big accomplishments under his belt, plenty of training but little action, yet he was eager to please alQa'ida higher-ups and, importantly, was expendable.

Between them, Kamel and Atmani provided the logistical support behind the Millennium Plot. They had the knowledge of covert living, bomb-making, and related jihad skills, learned in Bosnia, that Ressam and his co-conspirators needed for the operation they so nearly pulled off. Planning was closely coordinated with al-Qa'ida leadership, subsequent investigation revealed, including regular calls to mujahidin leadership in Zenica; the Montreal cell, though manned by North Africans, was really an extension of the terrorist infrastructure that had laid down firm roots in Bosnia under the protection of the SDA. It had links to other cells in Italy, France, and North Africa, but its home office was in central Bosnia.

Local authorities had a poor handle on the mujahidin problem in Montreal, and Canada's police and intelligence services were slow to look into the problem in a serious way. Nevertheless, Karim Said Atmani was extradited to Bosnia in October 1998-for a holy warrior, almost a vacation. Canadian authorities were unsure who Atmani really was, but Paris was pressing Ottawa to do something about all the North African terrorists operating in Montreal. Without Atmani's guidance, Ressam and his "brothers" did their best to stage the Millennium Plot. Lacking a battle-hardened mujahid to assist them, the Montreal cell was bound to make amateurish mistakes. These errors, plus the vigilance of Inspector Dean, caused the fortunate unraveling of Ahmed Ressam's "big wedding."

Sarajevo rebuffed repeated requests from Paris to extradite Karim Said Atmani, who was living openly in Bosnia under the name Said Hodzic; Bosnian officials initially denied that he was in the country. When it could no longer be denied that the wanted man was in Bosnia, as usual, SDAappointed judges asserted that Atmani was a legitimate Bosnian citizen with rights, and could not be extradited. As the investigation of the Millennium Plot gradually revealed Atmani's key role, and Bosnia's embarrassing part in the conspiracy, Sarajevo grudgingly admitted that the holy warrior was in the country and agreed to honor the August 2000 Interpol warrant for his arrest. French authorities had already tried and convicted Atmani in absentia for involvement in terrorist activities in France, Canada, and Turkey, leading to his long-delayed arrest by Bosnian police in April 2001 and his subsequent extradition to France.13

There was plenty of blame to go around in the case of the Montreal bombers. Officials in Canada, the United States, and several other countries had proved complacent and lax in their dealings with Islamist terrorists coming from Bosnia to perpetrate crimes worldwide. Worse, the Ressam case failed to shake Western governments out of their passivity in the face of rising al-Qa'ida militancy, lethality, and professionalism. But among the governments embarrassed by the would-be attack, only Sarajevo was genuinely culpable in the Millennium Plot, having given the bombers sanctuary and refusing to extradite wanted men in violation of international agreements.

CHAPTER 10

Ten years after the disaster at Srebrenica, Dick Holbrooke, the Clinton administration's Balkan fixer, published an op-ed in the Washington Post defending the pro-Sarajevo policy he had done so much to create and implement. Although the piece was rhetorically titled "Was Bosnia Worth It?" there was never any doubt how the State Department's former Balkan point man would answer the

To no one's surprise, Holbrooke defended U.S. policies towards Bosnia, alleging that good news from that region was seldom reported, while bad news invariably was; that there was a lot more of the latter than the former, particularly after 9/11, went unnoted. In Holbrooke's telling, Bosnia was a good deal better off a decade after American military intervention than the Western public, hearing of crime, corruption, and radicalism in that region, had been led to believe. "It is now universally understood that a great crime was committed at Srebrenica," he asserted, allowing no room for discussion of the controversial and still murky events that had precipitated U.S. military action in Bosnia; interestingly, Holbrooke did not mention "genocide" in connection with Srebrenica, unlike most pro-Sarajevo partisans. But his true colors shone through when he pronounced it unseemly to suggest that U.S. policies towards Bosnia had been anything other than a righteous success: "As we approach the tenth anniversary of Dayton, there should no longer be any debate." There was simply no other side to the story to discuss.

However, it was necessary in the post-9/1 I world to tie our Balkan policies to broader efforts against violent Islamism, and this Holbrooke did in a most inventive fashion. In a breathtaking exercise in revisionism, he claimed that had the United States not intervened militarily in Bosnia on behalf of the Muslims in 1995, "we would probably have had to pursue Operation Enduring Freedom not only in Afghanistan but also in the deep ravines and dangerous hills of central Bosnia, where a shadowy organization we now know as al Qaeda was putting down roots that we removed by NATO after Dayton." While it was refreshing to have Holbrooke's admission, however delayed, that the Islamist International was present in Bosnia, it was an untruth that NATO had succeeded in rooting bin Laden's infrastructure out of the country. Worse was the complete absence of any acknowledgment that it had been U.S. policy a decade earlier to allow al-Qa'ida and its allies into the country, with indirect American diplomatic and military support. How bin Laden's legions got to Bosnia in the first place, and how deep the jihad's Bosnian roots had become, were questions no one in Washington seemed eager to ask-or have answered.

BOSNIAN ISLAM AFTER IZETBEGOVIC

The beginning of the new millennium brought little good news to Bosnia. The country continued its seemingly unstoppable slide into crime, corruption, and politico-economic stagnation. Five years of rebuilding under NATO protection had failed to bring the anticipated revitalization of civil society and with it a functioning economy. Bosnia was becoming "the last black hole in Europe," rued Sarajevo's leading human rights activist. Less than 10 percent of the country's more than eight hundred thousand displaced persons had returned to their prewar homes-a key metric for the international community-and ethno-religious antagonisms appeared as vibrant as ever.2

Despite its own serious problems with criminality and extremism, the Party of Democratic Action continued to attract the bulk of political support among Bosnia's Muslims. The SDA managed this as it always had, by wearing multiple identities, sending contradictory messages, and telling each constituency what it wanted to hear. Waxing Islamic while speaking simultaneously of multiethnicity and democracy remained a specialty of the parry and Alija Izetbegovic himself. Election posters during the 2000 election campaign were revealing. A popular one for the SDA employed the memorable slogan "Beautiful like Sarajevo girls" (Lijepo kao sarajke), with a photo of three attractive female faces: two in Western makeup, one in hijab. This was the SDAs new Bosnia, forged in a terrible war, and it had many wondering which worldview-Western and secular or Islamist and radical-the party really stood for.

About President Izetbegovic there had never been any real doubt, and by 2000, his last year as party boss, even some longtime allies were wondering what the ailing leader's intentions actually were. "His attitude towards Bosnia-Hercegovina has never been defined," explained a Sarajevo observer who had grown frustrated by the SDAs consistently (in political ads, literally) two-faced image: "Defining his attitude would mean giving up a principled position which would mean a retreat in the event of giving up the principle. This is the approach of a half-hearted Don Juan who gives up a girl at the first obstacle, then goes to a cafe and gets drunk in the company of men who think women are whores

Although Izetbegovic remained evasive to the end, his last year as president was marred by reports of enormous corruption by his party, his intimates, and his own family. Even the Western media, though a much reduced presence in postwar Bosnia, had begun to report about thievish governance in Sarajevo. Chris Hedges of The New York Times in August 2000 published a groundbreaking article, "Leaders in Bosnia are said to steal up to $1 billion," that shook the SDA to its core. Based on internal reports of the Office of the High Representative (OHR), the international body charged with administering the Bosnia that Dayton had created, the piece detailed a stunning array of crime and corruption at every level in the country: of the $5.1 billion in aid spent on Bosnia since 1995, onefifth had simply disappeared, stolen brazenly by government and party officials. Importantly, Hedges' article pointed fingers at Muslims, not just Serbs and Croats. It noted that in Tuzla, the second-largest Muslim city, $200 million went missing from the 1999 budget, and in all $300 million had evaporated unaccountably over the last two years. Mehmed Alagic, mayor of Sanski Most and an SDA stalwart, was reported by international authorities to have personally stolen $450,000 in relief aid. Worst of all, Bakir Izetbegovic, the president's son, was fingered as the center of a powerful criminal syndicate in Sarajevo that was distributing apartmentsonce occupied by Serbs and Croats-to Muslims at the rate of $2,000 in kickbacks per dwelling. The younger Izetbegovic had his hand in many criminal activities, and was taking a cut of extortion paid by local businesses to Muslim organized crime syndicates, which constituted an unofficial component of the SDA.4

President Izetbegovic dismissed the allegations out of hand, pronouncing them untrue, but if they were true it was all due to the country's lack of effective borders, he explained. For the first time, unquestioned Westernparticularly American-support for the Bosnian Muslims seemed to be on the wane. The SDA's cherished status was in danger, sinking under its own crime and corruption. Awkward questions could no longer be dodged, as they had been for many years. Before long, questions about ill-gotten funds were followed by queries about war crimes and foreign fighters. Confronted with a suddenly less-pliable international press corps, Izetbegovic stepped down as president in October 2000 and assumed the position of honorary chairman of the SDA, a much reduced public role.

He continued to obfuscate before the media. When asked about questionable wartime aid, he returned to his lawyerly roots, explaining, "I think no one has complete information about it." When pressed about a September 1993 meeting where he and his old friend Fatih al-Hasanayn met in Geneva with other top Bosnian ministers to arrange Islamic money for arms and mujahidin, thereby bringing the SDA and TWRA into closer alignment, Izetbegovic professed to have no recollection of the event. He denied having ever heard of the Third World Relief Agency, refusing to answer any questions about it or even use the name, and when asked if any funds had been misplaced, he replied, "No reasonable person can rule out that possibility."5

Izetbegovic continued to deny that any Islamic terrorists were in Bosnia, or ever had been, though he was adamant that foreign fighters who possessed Bosnian citizenship could not be asked to leave, despite mounting Western pressure to do so, "for most of them had noble intentions: to help people who were endangered and attacked." Even out of office, the SDA founder continued to deny allegations that he had been a Nazi collaborator as a young man and had served in the Bosnian Muslim 13th Handzar Division of the Waffen-SS. Though no evidence had emerged to tie him directly to the Nazis, it was nevertheless significant, observed a Sarajevo pundit, that Izetbegovic continued to feel the need to publicly deny rumors that had existed for many years.6

Five years after the war's end, the SDA inner circle finally began to shed its most egregious members, and the Muslim-dominated Federation Army (VF) experienced its first major shake-up since Dayton. Of particular significance was the March 2000 departure of General Fikret Muslimovic, Izetbegovic's top adviser on intelligence and security matters since the spring of 1992. The "intelligence zombie," as he was derided by Sarajevo secularists who saw in Muslimovic the embodiment of the religious-espionage criminal nexus that imported the mujahidin and really ran the SDA, stepped down quietly, though many wondered if he had really left the scene. Skeptics considered that Muslimovic and the unofficial yet mighty Muslim Intelligence Service he created, the feared MOS, remained in business, just a bit more quietly. Demonstrating that this was a change of personnel, not a major shift in policy, several well known radicals were promoted, including General Halil Brzina, known as "Walking Islam" for his hardcore beliefs and fierce fighting record, who was placed in command of the VF's 1st Corps in Sarajevo, the most important unit in the army.7

Although the worst aspects of Izetbegovic's policies were at last under scrutiny, it was obvious that the SDA's project to "re-Islamize" Bosnia's Muslims had broadly succeeded. While most Muslims remained relatively secular, the religious-minded had become more so, and some of them had evolved into militant Islamists of a kind almost unknown in prewar Bosnia. In the five years after Dayton, Sarajevo had been transformed from a multinational and multicultural city into a hotbed of Islamic radicalism. The Islamist vanguard left over from the war and the "special units" of the ABiH moved from the Zenica area of central Bosnia to the country's capital, setting down deep roots. Islamist garb-long beards for men, hijab for women-had been invisible in prewar Sarajevo but by the new millennium was commonplace. The radicals did well among the young, poor, and alienated, who were predisposed to reject secular ways for the hardest-edged form of Islam. Wahhabi mosques, invariably Saudi-funded, had sprouted and enjoyed considerable influence.

The most notorious was the King Fahd Islamic Center in Alipasino Polje, which was filled with dynamism and hate, and there was no shortage of avid young Muslims, such as AIO recruits, in attendance (though it was observed that the mosque was paying war widows 200 marks-about $100-per month to wear hijab). There Nezim Halilovic, the leading Wahhabi imam in the country, held court, showing off his role as "the ideologist of the mujahidin revolution" in Bosnia, as he was described by his detractors. The hard-line SDA cleric who pronounced Dayton "a temporary lull in the war" and declared NATO peacekeepers had been "given a mandate to exterminate Islam in Bosnia" remained a force to be reckoned with. He denounced America and Israel and their "genocide" against Islam to adoring crowdsthough he refused to cite the latter country by name as "that place does not exist for me." His vitriol against Bosnia's Christians was equally pronounced, with regular attacks against "Crusader" Croats, though skeptics noted that Halilovic had been perfectly willing to work with the Croats during the war, when they were the ones bringing weapons and forged papers for the imam's imported holy warriors.8

9/11 AND BOSNIA

Given the extent to which Bosnia had become part of Osama bin Laden's project to spread his militant form of Islam by preaching and force, it was no surprise that the reverberations from al-Qa'ida's attack on New York and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001, were felt almost immediately in Sarajevo. It should have been no surprise too that Nezim Halilovic was among the first there to speak of the murderous crimes of 9/11 with glee, hailing them as "the recent events that destroyed the myth about this great power." When it quickly became obvious that the United States was set to embark on a worldwide campaign to defeat Islamist terrorism, the imam, touting a common Islamic slander, pronounced that 9/11 was actually a Zionist plot since "there were no Jewish casualties," adding that Washington's War on Terrorism was nothing more than America's "excuse to settle accounts with Muslims." Once American forces moved into Afghanistan to hunt down bin Laden's organization, Halilovic publicly prayed for the victory of "our brothers in Afghanistan, Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, and everywhere else where the battle for truth is being fought."

Few in Sarajevo were willing to be as bold as Halilovic, though many Bosnian Muslims were hardly displeased by the assault on the country that had saved them from their enemies only a half-decade earlier. Bosnia was set to pay the price for its alliance with radical Islam, or so it seemed. The muckraking journalist Senad Avdic was the first in Sarajevo to state the difficult truth, observing that the 9/11 attacks "concern Bosnia-Hercegovina far more than it might appear at the moment" because the country was now "marked as part of the Global Terrorist International." Perhaps the foolish polices of the recent past would end, he said, explaining that Bosnian lands "have had such a spooky status for years now, the parts that for the last decade have been controlled by the feeble-minded, suicidal, and panIslamist police of the SDA and its fundamentally irresponsible leaders."9

Avdic placed blame also on Western countries-especially Americathat had looked the other way, inexplicably, while occupying Bosnia: "The international protectors of this country have followed all this with their eyes wide shut." There was invariably an element of we-told-you-so among Croats and Serbs who had been complaining about the radicalization of Bosnian Islam for years, in vain. But the essential problem was illuminated by Vinko Cardinal Puljic, Archbishop of Sarajevo and the country's top Catholic cleric, who characterized the mujahidin issue concisely:

Many of them have married and are now citizens of our country. I don't know if they're terrorists, but I want to add something: The United States knew, since 1992, that there were foreign militias here from Muslim countries. But the U.S. didn't say anything. Then, when I pointed it out to a high U.S. official, he paid no attention to my observation. On the contrary, he accused me of narrow nationalism. Only after September 11 have they started to cry out scandalized.10

Amazingly, U.S. and NATO peacekeepers continued the same tune, at least publicly, even after 9/11. Shortly after the attacks, SFOR commander General John Sylvester, U.S. Army, stated that there was "no threat" posed by Islamic radicals in Bosnia, to the astonishment of most Bosnians, who knew the truth.

It was nevertheless obvious that something had to be done, and in the fall of 2001 Sarajevo began a belated and half-hearted effort to root the worst of the foreign fighters out of Bosnia. Yet even this was controversial in the SDA. When Federation Interior Minister Muhamed Beslic promised "hell" if any holy warriors escaping from Afghanistan tried to enter Bosnia, a feared possibility, he was assailed by fellow Muslims and forced to resign his post. Before the crackdown commenced, it was attacked by many in the SDA as a "conspiracy" against Muslims. The party line quickly formed: There are no al-Qa'ida terrorists in Bosnia, but if there are, we have no idea how they got here. "It's all nonsense," explained Esad Hecimovic, Sarajevo's leading expert on the mujahidin: "We welcomed them gladly. At the time, I told anyone who would listen that we will regret this one day. Unfortunately no one listened."11

Although Bosnia was hailed in the West as the "moderate" Muslim country par excellence, there was little moderation in evidence after 9/11. While radicals like Halilovic spoke for a minority of Bosnian Muslims, neither were there many members of the Islamic establishment willing to condemn al-Qa'ida and speak honestly about the toll radicalism was taking on Islam in Bosnia and across the world. One of the few was Senad Agic, a young and genuinely moderate cleric from central Bosnia, who spoke out publicly against Wahhabism and terrorism, finding a basic lack of Koranic literacy to be a key problem which left impressionable youths open to murderous radicals. He posed the most important question, which was seldom asked openly in the Islamic world:

Who is bin Laden? What is his education, what is his authority, what is his credibility, what is his government, what is his contribution to Islam? Nothing gives him credibility. As far as I am concerned, he is nothing but a maniac who abuses religion and the religious feelings of uneducated Muslims in Peshawar. He misleads them and pushes them to suicide.12

Unfortunately Imam Agic's vital question received no answer, not least because he had gone to America before the war to become religious leader of the Bosnian Muslim community there, and enjoyed slight influence in the country of his birth. Few clerics in Bosnia seemed equally willing to question the assumptions of bin Laden and Wahhabism.

The question that really worried Sarajevo after 9/ 11 was the one few Americans seemed eager to ask: Did the attacks have any Bosnian connection? While the plot executed by Mohammed Atta was a multinational enterprise, with links to terrorist cells in several countries, the Bosnian trail was significant. Although Sarajevo understandably wanted to obscure this story to the fullest extent, less understandable has been the Western lack of interest in the Balkan roots of 9/11.13

Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the senior al-Qa'ida operative who was the plot's mastermind since the late 1990s, had fought in Bosnia in 1992, early in the holy war, and was reported to possess Bosnian citizenship from his service with the el-Mujahid Detachment. "The model of the terrorist entrepreneur" as he was fittingly named by the 9/11 Commission, KSM-as he is known to the counterterrorist community-fought briefly in Afghanistan at the end of the jihad there (after a stint in the United States as a student in North Carolina in the early 1980s), but his time in Bosnia seems to have been more formative to his development in al-Qa'ida; he did not actually meet Osama bin Laden until 1996, when their paths crossed at Tora Bora.14

Two of the 9/11 hijackers were veterans of the Bosnian jihad, indeed they were selected for the "big wedding" by KSM precisely due to their Bosnian experience. Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, Saudis who helped hijack American Airlines Flight 77, which flew into the Pentagon, cut their jihadi teeth in Bosnia in 1995. The men, who had their initiation into holy war in battle against the Bosnian Serbs, were the most experienced mujahidin of the nineteen who participated directly in 9/11; al-Mihdhar played an important role in organizing the attack too. They served as muscle men, not pilots. Allegations that ringleader Mohammed Atta underwent terrorist training in Bosnia, near Maglaj, remain unsubstantiated.15

After fighting in Bosnia, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi became full-time al-Qa'ida operatives, traveling the world gaining expertise, including visits to Afghanistan and Chechnya, a trail that would culminate in crashing Flight 77 into the Pentagon. They entered the United States via Los Angeles in midJanuary 2000-only two weeks after Ahmed Ressam's plot to blow up that airport had been foiled-arriving from Thailand. They spent most of the next twenty months in the United States, preparing for their mission. There were detours, however, including the half-dozen trips to Las Vegas they made in the summer of 2001, stays that included ample boozing, gambling, cavorting with strippers, and related atypical mujahid behavior; in the runup to 9/11, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi lived in Laurel, Maryland, a nondescript suburb of Washington, DC, only a few miles from Fort Meade, the home of the National Security Agency.16

The two veterans of the Bosnian jihad made minimal efforts to mask their travels and activities; indeed, they frequently seemed to be courting attention (they had more than one run-in with local police in the months leading up to the attack). Of the ten "operational opportunities" identified by the 9/11 Commission as times when the 9/11 attacks might have been disrupted or prevented, eight involved al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi.17

There were other links between Bosnia and 9/11. Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a Syrian radical and naturalized German citizen since 1982, was a Hamburg-based al-Qa'ida recruiter who assisted Mohammed Atta with planning the assault on America, according to German counterintelligence. Zammar boasted frequently of his war service with mujahidin units of the Bosnian Army.18 Closer still to the 9/ 11 plot was Ramzi Binalshibh, a friend of Zammar and Atta in Hamburg, a Yemeni terrorist who missed the attack because his four visa applications to enter the U.S. were denied. Binalshibh also participated in the Bosnian jihad and was known in Balkan radical circles. He was identified by Regina Kreis, the German ex-wife of al-Qa'ida operative Reda Seyam, as the young man whom they gave a long car ride to from Bosnia to Germany in 1996. Kreis came forward after 9/11 ("now I have to talk") at the risk of her own life-she was placed in a German witness protection program-since she had been married to Seyam for fourteen years and was privy to many al-Qa'ida secrets. Seyam was a top bin Laden operative in Europe, and had lived in a mujahidin colony in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, a period Kreis recalled as harrowing, filled with violence against "infidels," including decapitations. Seyam remained in Bosnia for several years, working at the Twaik car rental agency in Sarajevo, identified by German intelligence as an al-Qa'ida front. But after their divorce, Seyam moved to Southeast Asia on behalf of al-Qa'ida and was a close associate of Hanbali, one of the architects of the October 12, 2002, bombing in Bali, Indonesia, that killed 202. Seyam was arrested in Jakarta for his support to the Bali atrocity.)9

And there was the knotty problem of bin Laden himself, who had spent time in Bosnia, was known to Izetbegovic and others in the SDA leadership, and possessed a Bosnian passport, an accusation Sarajevo denied in a halfhearted and unconvincing fashion. Senad Avdic, whose magazine Slobodna Bosna reported convincingly that the al-Qa'ida leader was the owner of a passport issued by his friends in Sarajevo, observed acidly, "If bin Laden doesn't have a Bosnian passport, then he has only himself to blame! He should have asked for it on time and he would have been granted one!" 20

Bosnia's connections to 9/11 and the country's broad and deep links to the Islamist International were issues that Western friends of Sarajevo did their best to discredit or silence. When the problem grew beyond the point of denying, they switched tactics, accusing anyone who wished to examine Bosnia's ties to bin Laden of Islamophobia or worse. Typical was the assessment released soon after 9/11 by the International Crisis Group, a prominent Western NGO with a long history of pro-SDA activism. "It is important that the issue of Islamist extremism in the Balkans, and the risk of terrorism associated with it, not be painted as a larger problem than it is," the report announced.21 While ICG couldn't deny that ties did exist, that Sarajevo had indeed issued twelve thousand passports to foreigners, many of whom were suspect, it denounced efforts to look into this as part of a "wave of anti-Islamic propaganda" based on "poorly researched and sensationally written stories in Western newspapers about terrorist hotbeds in the Balkans." Western NGOs parroted the SDA line that, while bin Laden might be an unpleasant person, the real terrorists in Bosnia were of course the Serbs. To the ICG and others of like mind, 9/11 was of no significance to Bosnia, and might as well never have happened at all.

Certainly many Serbs and Croats (like many Israelis) discreetly considered 9/11 to be an unfortunate godsend: Now, at last, the Americans will understand what we've been up against, that we've been fighting the same enemy.22 The roll-ups of Islamist radicals that occurred in Bosnia in the aftermath of 9/11 demonstrated that the problem was every bit as serious as Bosnian Serbs and Croats had been saying for years, to worldwide inattention.

Shortly after 9/11, U.S. intelligence received information about an alQa'ida plot to attack the U.S. and British Embassies in Sarajevo, in revenge for the American counterattack on bin Laden's forces about to start in Afghanistan. The interception of dozens of telephone calls between terrorists in Sarajevo and al-Qa'ida leadership in Afghanistan prompted the five-day closure of the embassies under threat, and SFOR moved into action, raiding the seedy Hotel Hollywood in Ilidza, a suburb of the capital. The predawn raid on September 25 netted five al-Qa'ida operatives, Algerians but naturalized Bosnians, under the leadership of Bensayah Belkacem, a senior representative of bin Laden's organization.

The breakup of the Belkacem ring led to additional SFOR actionsBosnian authorities were kept out of the operations, for fear of compromise-that proved an intelligence bonanza and a setback for al-Qa'ida's infrastructure in the country. Among the connections discovered was a link to Abu Zubaydah, one of bin Laden's most trusted associates, who had coordinated mujahidin recruitment for the Bosnian war. The forty-one-year-old Belkacem had arrived in Bosnia in late 1995 under an assumed name, receiving Bosnian citizenship in January 1996, only two months after arriving in the country; he paid a bribe of $1,000 to receive his passport so quickly. Habitually unemployed, Belkacem stayed in Bosnia as a missionary-cum-terrorist, claiming support from family in Yemen, but was actually on the payroll of several Saudi fronts for the jihad that were closely tied to bin Laden.23

The roll-up of the Belkacem ring demonstrated that, whatever postDayton successes U.S. authorities had achieved against the covert Iranian presence in Bosnia, they had given the Saudis a free hand, with grave consequences. As a Sarajevo skeptic observed of the Americans, "they have continued to turn a blind eye to the strengthening of the Saudi presence."24 Belkacem had been living in Bosnia, preaching jihad and plotting terror, while on the payroll of Saudi governmental organizations or NGOs that were funded by Riyadh. He had worked for the Islamic Balkan Center in Zenica, a Saudi-funded jihadi front, and had worked for al-Haramayn, the notorious Saudi "state-funded NGO" and al-Qa'ida cutout. Saber Lahmar, another Algerian and naturalized Bosnian who was part of the Belkacem ring, had also been on the al-Haramayn payroll and was an employee of the Saudi High Commission in Sarajevo; he worked at the King Fahd Islamic Center. He had been convicted in 1998 for three violent crimes committed in Zenica: two armed robberies and an attack on a U.S. military adviser to the Federation Army. Importantly, Belkacem and Lahmar had moved to Bosnia to spread the jihad after Dayton; they were not veterans of the civil war but were "missionaries" in the continuing Saudi-funded effort to infiltrate the country through preaching and terror.25

The narrowly averted attacks on the American and British Embassies coaxed NATO out of its lethargy about the local al-Qa'ida problem, and SFOR troops promptly raided the offices of several bin Laden fronts in Sarajevo, including the Saudi High Commission. Any doubts regarding what the Saudis were doing evaporated when investigators looked into SHC computers, videos, and documents and uncovered before-and-after pictures of the World Trade Center, $200,000 in cash, files on pesticides and crop dusters, and information on how to counterfeit U.S. State Department ID badges. SFOR needed several trucks to haul away the confiscated items. A raid the following day on Visoko airport, a major mujahidin transit point, found crop dusters that investigators believed were being prepared for a terrorist attack. These long-overdue raids by NATO forces on al-Qa'ida fronts in Bosnia during the fall of 2001 uncovered the disturbing fact that of the $800 million given to the Bosnian Muslims (meaning in practice to the SDA) by Saudi Arabia since Dayton, $100 million was untraceable. That enormous sum had disappeared in the maze of fronts and sub-fronts employed by the Saudis to finance the spreading of Islamic extremism and terrorism in Bosnia, their gateway to Europe.26

Many Bosnian Muslims were outraged by the U.S-led efforts to root terrorists out of the country. The SDA denounced the raids and arrests as illegal and a violation of human rights, a theme echoed by Western NGOs who seemingly didn't want al-Qa'ida's Bosnian infrastructure disbanded. The six Algerian members of al-Qa'ida arrested by SFOR in the fall of 2001, known in Sarajevo as the "Algerian Group," posed a political problem for Washington, DC. Algeria didn't want the troublemakers, who had been stripped of Bosnian citizenship after their arrest; the Americans were loath to hand the terrorists over to Bosnian authorities, who had the habit of letting bin Laden's boys escape under mysterious circumstances, and therefore had little choice but to send the Algerian Group to the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They were deported on the night of January 17-18, 2002, several anxious hours that demonstrated how deep sympathy for al-Qa'ida actually ran in certain corners of Sarajevo.

Officially, Sarajevo was open-minded about dispatching the Algerian Group out of the country. The 2000 elections had broken the SDA's unchallenged hold on power, and the Social Democratic Party was briefly holding the major ministries in Sarajevo. Avowed secularists, the Social Democrats wished to resolve what it called the `Afro-Asian factor"-i.e. the mujahidin problem-which was becoming a serious liability for Sarajevo's Western friends. Anticipating trouble, the deportation of the Algerian Group was a heavily guarded event.

However, the police were unprepared for what happened. Mujahidin and their sympathizers made threats on the lives of those involved in the deportation, including Federation Interior Minister Ramo Maslesa. Some two hundred violent demonstrators began clashing with police at 10 p.m. on January 17, beginning a fracas that lasted for hours. Shouting, "We will liberate our brothers by force" and "This is but the start of jihad," the demonstrators went on the offensive; by 1:30 a.m. it was an all-out riot that resulted in six policemen injured. When the convoy departed the prison, one holy warrior lay down in front of the lead police car, placing his neck in front of the wheel; others lay down in front of the convoy while hundreds shouted the tekbir-"Allahu akbar!" The police only broke the stalemate at 4 a.m. and the Algerians began their journey to Cuba, amidst calls for revenge by the friends-of-jihad in Bosnia.27

This was hardly the end of terrorist plots in Bosnia. In March 2002, another scheme to attack the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo was thwarted. This time the suspect was Esad Cancar, a noted Muslim cleric and hafiz (one who has memorized the Koran), who had served with mujahidin units during the war; he was also an exorcist who was said to have treated 3,500 Muslims for "attacks by jinns (i.e. evil spirits)."28 Three months later, an attempt to assassinate the SFOR commander, U.S. General John Sylvester, was narrowly thwarted. Adrian Kadric of Zenica, reported to be linked to Islamist terrorists and criminal syndicates in several European countries, was arrested only three hundred yards from where General Sylvester was to pass during a visit to Mostar, twenty minutes before the commander's arrival. Kadric was believed to have served with the Larks during the war, and when arrested was driving a stolen BMW with altered license plates and had in his possession a silenced submachine gun with a sniper scope and 10,000 marks (about $5,000).29

Nevertheless, the U.S. finally was asking hard questions and demanding action from Sarajevo. After more than a decade of looking the other way, Western governments, led by their police and intelligence services, began cracking down on mujahidin organizations in Bosnia, with some support from local authorities. Investigations revealed a complex web of al-Qa'ida fronts operating in Bosnia, including three that were added to the U.S. Treasury's list of prohibited organizations in early 2002: al-Haramayn, Taibah International Aid Agency, and Dzemijetul al-Furqan. These were interrelated and difficult to untangle. Furqan (one of the names for the Koran) was established in 1997 in Sarajevo by local radicals "to uphold truth and suppress lies" with the aim of "affirming Islam" in the country. AlHaramayn funded Furqan with a donation of 108,000 marks, allowing it to run summer camps that offered paramilitary training courses. Al- Haramayn's office in Sarajevo, which served as the financial hub of the jihad, was closed in March 2002 under pressure from Washington, DC, which was aware of its links to several terrorist fronts; however, the office soon reopened under a new name.30

Raids in late 2001 illuminated the important role of Taibah International Aid Agency in the local jihad nexus. Established in 1991 by Abdullah bin Laden, the famous holy warrior's nephew, Taibah had offices in Bosnia and Albania, and down to 9/11 served as a major financial conduit for al-Qa'ida activities in the Balkans. The raid on the Sarajevo office revealed very close ties between Taibah and the Global Relief Foundation, another bin Laden front founded by Rabih Haddad, the Lebanese founder of the Afghan Service Bureau, the group that birthed al-Qa'ida; GRF gave Taibah $60,000 in 1995 and $313,000 in 1996. As GRF was itself linked financially and operationally to al-Haramayn, it would be best to view the numerous Saudi-funded al-Qa'ida fronts operating in Bosnia as a single, diverse organization with many, often overlapping, parts (for instance, GRF's registered address in Sarajevo was identical with Furqan's); it proved very difficult for investigators to determine where one organization stopped and another started.

Taibah's longtime deputy director was Abdurahman Alamoudi, an Eritrean who became a supremely well connected figure in American Islam. The head of the American Task Force for Bosnia, a pro-SDA advocacy group, Alamoudi was founder and head of the American Muslim Council (AMC), which in 2002 was hailed by FBI Director Robert Mueller as "the most mainstream Muslim group in the United States." However, just how moderate Alamoudi and the AMC really were was, at best, open to question.

That Alamoudi was well connected was never in doubt. He met several times with both Clintons in the White House and joined President George W. Bush at prayer services for 9/11 victims; no one in American Islamic circles boasted a more impressive Rolodex. Yet in July 2004 he entered a plea agreement with federal prosecutors, admitting to serious crimes including financial schemes and being an undeclared agent of the Libyan government. Alamoudi made more than ten trips to visit Muammar alQadhafi, and in a bizarre turn of events, Alamoudi agreed to arrange the assassination of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, at the Libyan strongman's request. The AMC boss received a twenty-three-year sentence for his admitted crimes.31

Alamoudi and the AMC were linked with several unsavory Bosnian Muslims, above all Nedzib Sacirbegovic, father of the disgraced former Bosnian ambassador to the UN and Alija Izetbegovic's close associate in radical circles since the mid-1940s. Sacirbegovic (usually known in America as Sacirbey, the Turkish version of the family name), Izetbegovic's ambassadorat-large to the Muslim world, reinvented himself after 9/11 as an "American Muslim spokesman," serving as director of the AMC board, in which capacity he met with Attorney General John Ashcroft. No one in Washington, DC, seemed to know or care about his family's dubious financial connections or, more seriously, that Sacirbegovic Senior was a convicted extremist and terrorist supporter, a lifelong advocate of radical Islam.32

Investigators who looked into the activities of al-Haramayn, GRF, Furqan, Taibah, and related jihadi fronts in Bosnia found a common pattern of huge amounts of cash, a lack of financial documentation on how such sums were spent, and off-book transfers of funds to terrorists. The worst example was Benevolence International Foundation (BIF), an al-Qa'ida organization used for funding and logistics that had been devoted full-time to the Balkan holy war since 1992. Its founder, Enaam Arnaout, was a Syrian of Albanian extraction who joined the Afghan jihad and became an intimate of Osama bin Laden; in 1989, one of bin Laden's wives stayed with the trusted Arnaout.

AI-Qa'ida dispatched Arnaout to the Balkans to create a jihad support network, and BIF was established in 1992 with its first office in Zagreb; soon there were offices in Zenica and Sarajevo too (the head of the former office, known in mujahidin circles as "Omer from Algeria," was one of the Algerian Group). Arnaout came to Bosnia through TWRA channels, with help from Fatih al-Hasanayn. In Bosnia, the organization was sometimes known as Bosnian Ideal Future (also BIF), a not very intricate cover. During the war, Arnaout's organization-which was ostensibly an NGO that sponsored war orphans-established training camps at Tesanj, Zelezno Polje, and Bistircak, where foreign fighters (mostly Algerians and Pakistanis) underwent religious and military instruction before serving in ABiH "special units." Arnaout, known in Bosnia as Abu Mahmoud, produced videos glorifying the holy warriors to be used as tools for jihad recruitment and fundraising abroad. He lavished aid money on women and had several wives. BIF staff and many graduates stayed on in Bosnia after the war, obtaining Bosnian citizenship and continuing their activities under the protection of local authorities.33

Arnaout was an important player in al-Qa'ida's global network, with links to radicals in numerous countries. March 2002 raids on BIF's Bosnian offices that led to Arnaout's arrest the next month uncovered weapons plus incriminating documents and photographs, establishing Arnaout's close links with bin Laden since the late 1980s. The FBI determined that the organization was a transparent al-Qa'ida cutout. U.S. investigators connected the BIF director to Mohamed Bajazid, who attempted to procure uranium for bin Laden in the early 1990s. In May 1998, he helped Mamdouh Salim enter Bosnia on a BIF-supplied visa and funds. A senior al-Qa'ida operative, Salim had tried to obtain weapons of mass destruction for bin Laden and was a suspect in the August 1998 East Africa embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya that killed 224 and wounded over a thousand. Salim was arrested in Germany in September 1998 and extradited to the United States that December; while in Federal custody, Salim assaulted and nearly killed a corrections officer, blinding him and causing severe brain damage.34

During his decade on the Bosnian scene, Arnaout enjoyed robust ties to senior Muslim officials, particularly in the secret police. His close friend Nedzad Ugljen got him a Bosnian passport in 1994. But his best friend was Munib Zahiragic, a policeman who served at the Bosnian Embassy in Kuwait from 1994 to 1995 (he and Arnaout first met in Saudi Arabia in this period), then joined the secret police in mid-1995. During his five years with AID, Zahiragic was on Sarajevo's payroll but his loyalty was to al-Qa'ida. He passed at least several hundred classified AID documents to Arnaout, who shared the information with al-Qa'ida, which used the top secret files to warn mujahidin of investigations. How holy warriors wanted by Bosnian authorities-for instance Arnaout's good friend Mamdouh Salim-seemed to avoid capture so easily was no longer a mystery. Zahiragic also passed classified paperwork about AID's foreign relationships to al-Qa'ida. He and Arnaout formed such a tight-knit duo that in September 1999 they traveled to Turkey and Azerbaijan together (they tried and failed to enter Chechnya too) doing bin Laden's business. When Zahiragic left AID in mid-2000 he went to work for BIF full-time. He was arrested on espionage charges in spring 2002 when police raids on BIF offices revealed copies of hundreds of secret and top secret AID documents in Arnaout's files-almost everything the secret police knew about the `Afro-Asian factor."35

Penetration by al-Qa'ida was only one of the serious problems confronting Sarajevo's secret police after 9/11. Corruption and criminality were as pervasive as ever, and Federation state security (renamed FOSS) remained ineffective at rooting out terrorists and radicals. In a bold move, the ruling Social Democrats brought Munir Alibabic out of retirement. The esteemed Munja ("Lightning") had been sacked in 1994 as head of the secret police's Sarajevo office for his opposition to SDA corruption and support for the mujahidin, and was respected for his professionalism and opposition to Islamic extremism. His old-school incorruptibility was a selling point, and Munja wasted no time sharing his views with the media, explaining that fifteen leading mujahidin had been arrested in Bosnia in the months after 9/11, including some who planned the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and others "directly linked to senior commanders of al-Qa'ida." Yet there was much work to be done as "bin Laden sent a great deal of money here during and after the war." The first step, he insisted, was being honest about the extent of the problem:

I must regretfully admit that Bosnia is indeed a dangerous place. It houses a group of terrorists linked to extremist Islamic organizations all over the world and constituting a very real problem-not only to us but to the whole of Europe. They exploit the loose monitoring of borders and the fact that we have become the center of attraction for international crime and

The SDA was horrified by Alibabic's candor, and by his willingness to root out the party-based crime and corruption that allowed radicalism and terrorism to flourish in Bosnia. They loathed his outreach to foreign secret services in his battle with bin Laden, including establishing relations with Israeli intelligence. Just as bad was Alibabic's refusal to toe the SDA line on war crimes. "A crime is a crime, regardless which side commits it," he explained.37 He promised to resolve many of the country's unsolved crimes including the Ugljen and Leutar murders, which Alibabic considered the work of the mujahidin. No longer would Sarajevo investigate only Serb and Croat crimes while covering up Muslim ones.

During 2002, Alibabic seemed to be making slow but steady progress. Bin Laden's Bosnian network was in real danger for the first time. But Munja went over the line of what Sarajevo would allow when FOSS completed a report detailing the SDA's substantial role in organized crime. The study surveyed the underworld coterie around Hasan Cengic, the entrepreneurial imam, which since 1992 had monopolized crime and corruption in Muslim regions of Bosnia, and had extensive international linkages; Cengic was the boss but SDA stalwarts such as Fatih alHasanayn, Bakir Alispahic, Irfan Ljevakovic and Alija Delimustafic were named as key co-conspirators. When the report was leaked to the press, Alibabic was sacked, and his short-lived effort to root out thievery and fanaticism evaporated.-18

What made Alibabic's fall in mid-October 2002 particularly frustrating was that he was fired by Paddy Ashdown, the West's colonial governor. The British politician arrived in Bosnia in late May 2002 to take over the Office of the High Representative amidst high hopes for reform. If the OHR didn't act against corruption, extremism, and economic decline, Bosnia would be doomed. Yet Ashdown's tenure was marked from the start by astonishing naivete and arrogance.

In an incomprehensible move, he supported the nationalist parties, including the SDA, over secularists and reformers. He offended and marginalized those like Alibabic who tried hard to alter the country's disastrous course. Ashdown courted the SDA, and declared the party newspaper Dnevni avaz to be the best in the country; in exchange, the SDA paper pronounced him "personality of the year." Bosnian elections in October 2002 were a letdown for reformers, as they returned the nationalist parties to power-an outcome that Ashdown mysteriously hailed as a vote for "faster reform." The SDA was back in power and eager to settle scores with those who had tried to change the country. By now, even the Western NGOs who had greeted Ashdown's appointment with anticipation were deeply disappointed by his consistently disastrous decisions.39

By the end of 2002, it was evident that the post-9/1 I drive to run al-Qa'ida out of Bosnia and force its local supporters to heel had run out of steam. American interest in the problem had been serious but short-lived; Washington seemingly had more important things to do. The return of the SDA to power in fall 2002 guaranteed that there would be no serious efforts to solve the country's mujahidin problem, particularly if the West's interest was waning.

The long-term impact of the holy warriors and the jihad on Bosnia was made horrifyingly clear on Christmas Eve in the village of Kostajnica southwest of Sarajevo. On Christmas Eve, Muamer Topalovic, a twenty-five-yearold radical Muslim from a neighboring village, slaughtered the Andjelic family while they were putting up Christmas decorations. Among the dead were the father, Andjelko Andjelic (68), and his daughters, Mara (46) and Zorica (27); son Marinko (30) was gravely wounded when Topalovic opened fire on the family with an automatic assault rifle.

Topalovic's initial target was Kostajnica parish priest Fr. Ante Ledic, but the killer was apparently dissuaded by a police patrol near the church. The selection of the Andjelic family was no accident, as they were the first Croatian refugees to return to the village since the war. This was a coldblooded political killing; or, as the local police chief explained cautiously, the mass murder was "due to ideological and religious reasons." Despite its sensational nature, the crime got only modest attention in Bosnia and essentially none in the international media.40

It was no wonder that Sarajevo wanted to play down the killings, as Topalovic was quickly arrested at home, only two miles from the crime scene, where police discovered a Kalashnikov assault rifle, boots which matched prints at the killing, and ample Islamist literature. The young extremist admitted membership in Active Islamic Youth (A10) and Furqan, which was corroborated by documents seized by the police. Topalovic, who had received paramilitary training from Islamists, was also a member of a violent Furgan front known as Sirat (the "bridge over hell" in the Koran). It was, the local police chief said, "probably the gravest crime committed since the signing of the Dayton peace agreement."4I

Munir Alibabic stated it was "entirely clear" that the massacre had been planned in advance and was directly linked to al-Qa'ida fronts operating in Bosnia; he continued that Ramo Maslesa, the Federation interior minister, wished the crime hushed-up, and not to expect a proper investigation.42 As usual, Senad Avdic was the first to find an eloquent yet forceful reply to the Andjelic atrocity: "Tonight we burn illusions" was the title of his article, which stated simply, "The massacre was not an aberration. It did not come out of the blue." Rather, it was one more Islamist crime, perpetrated by terrorists and fanatics, that wouldn't get attention from people who professed deep concern about human rights in Bosnia.43

As Avdic predicted, although Topalovic was in custody and admitted his guilt, the Kostajnica massacre resulted in no police purge of AIO, Furqan, and other Saudi-funded terrorist organizations. AIO was on Riyadh's payroll-al-Haramayn gave the group about a $500,000 before 9/11, while Furqan received $60,000 more between 1998 and 2002-but demands by the police to review the financial books were met with the remarkable claim that there were no books to review!

For Muslims who loathed the SDA's "re-Islamization" of the country, Topalovic was a symbol for many things that ailed Bosnia: fanaticism, murderous rage, dubious links to international terror. To some, it was proof, seven years after Dayton, that the Young Muslims' decades-old agenda was finally prevailing, especially among the young. Indeed, some Bosnian Muslims viewed the murderer with sympathy, considering him a victim of an anti-Islamic witch hunt. On New Year's Day, in Bugojno, a group of Muslims was openly soliciting funds, not for the victims of mass murder, but for Muamer Topalovic.44

The heart of the matter was expressed clearly by Vinko Cardinal Puljic, whose flock had been slaughtered in Kostajnica: "The real criminal has not been arrested. The killer has been detained, but the real murderer is the one who taught the killer that one should kill in the name of religion and God."45

By 2003, there was open resentment among Bosnian Muslims over the country's modest participation in the American-led war on Islamist terrorism, and local newspapers regularly carried attacks on America and its leader "the state terrorist Bush." Sarajevo's Islamists felt more comfortable than ever declaring America a "global tyrant" who was persecuting innocent Muslims in the name of fighting bin Laden, who remained an admired figure among more than a few Bosnians.46

How difficult it was for anyone to challenge the SDA-led consensus in Bosnia was evidenced by the strange case of All Ahmed Ali Hamad, a Bahraini al-Qa'ida member and wartime mujahid serving a 120-year sentence in Zenica prison for murder. He admitted his role in three killingstwo Croats and one American-and after 9/ 11 wished to come clean to Bosnian authorities about the full extent of his involvement in war crimes and terrorism on behalf of bin Laden.

His resume was typical. All Ahmed All Hamad came to Bosnia from Bahrain in 1992 to wage holy war, arriving through TWRA channels. He was inspired to fight by President Izetbegovic's appeals on Bahraini TV. A veteran of the Afghan jihad who had met Osama bin Laden at Jalalabad, his services were prized by Sarajevo. Twice wounded in action with the Muslim army, where he served for a time alongside Nezim Halilovic, he returned home after Dayton. Yet, like so many others in the service of radical Islam, he returned to Bosnia before long as an employee of the Saudi High Commission, and was acquainted with several wanted terrorists.47

In 2004, All Ahmed All Hamad had a change of heart, however, and wanted to wipe the slate clean. He tried to tell the police about his involvement in crimes he'd not been charged with, but found no interest. "I tell them openly that I'm a terrorist and that I've committed many crimes," he explained, "and they keep telling me that I'm not, that I'm innocent."48 Frustrated, he sent letters to Bosnian authorities and to Westerners also, including two to Paddy Ashdown, to no effect or even response. Before long, he deduced that his testimony was unwanted by anyone; none, not even intelligence agencies, desired his inside knowledge of bin Laden's activities in the Balkans.49

Before long, he feared for his life. Requests to Bosnian authorities for protection went unheeded. Zenica prison was under the control of Wahhabi inmates who enforced shari'a on Muslims and inflicted beatings on Christians and insufficiently pious coreligionists alike. Those who refused to shout the tekbir and publicly hail bin Laden were beaten especially harshly, and Christian inmates lived under threat of forced conversion to Islam (there were reports of forced circumcisions of "converts").50 Eventually the Muslim police took an interest in All Ahmed's story, and AID officers came to Zenica to interview him about his specific knowledge of war crimes committed by mujahidin units. He told them what he knew, including the burial sites of their victims, but he deduced this was to enable cover-ups, not uncover the truth: "Unbeknownst to me, I helped them because I divulged to them a number of locations of mass graves containing beheaded victims."51

Something else Sarajevo wished to keep under wraps was the participation of Bosnian citizens in America's war on terrorism-on the other side. Small numbers of Bosnians had fought in Chechnya, with a few being killed in action. Most were young and fanatical disgruntled veterans of the Bosnian war who answered bin Laden's call to wage holy war against the infidel far afield. Their passage to Chechnya was assisted by AIO.

More controversial was the Bosnian role in America's brief, successful Afghan campaign, Operation Enduring Freedom. Bosnian citizens-mostly naturalized Arabs-were living under Taliban protection when the American-led counterattack arrived, and before long there were reports of Bosnian passports being uncovered on the dead and among the rubble.

One of the first found belonged to Ibrahim Hosni Abdullah Hussein, discovered in an al-Qa'ida safe house in Kabul; the owner was an Egyptian mujahid. Arar Mohammed Nadjib, an Algerian who had registered several fake Sarajevo addresses and obtained Bosnian citizenship in 1997, was killed by a U.S. strike around Kandahar in late 2001.52 In November 2001, confronted by proof that Bosnian passports were appearing in Afghanistan under dubious circumstances, Prime Minister Alija Behmen sheepishly admitted that this was true, citing two confirmed cases, though he retorted that the dead men's citizenship had been revoked. Soon more passports appeared, along with Serbo-Croatian documents and arms manuals captured in al-Qa'ida camps, clearly brought by Bosnians.

Ignoring this, Bernard-Henri Levy compared Afghanistan to Bosnia, though in a fashion consistent with his contorted logic. Izetbegovic's ardent admirer paid no attention to the verifiable links between bin Laden's network in Bosnia and its base in Afghanistan, instead hailing the rapid American victory. Why Bosnian Islamists were good while Afghan Islamists were bad was less than clear. He compared the Taliban not to the Bosnian Muslims, but rather to the Serbs, finding them both to be "paper tigers." Needless to add, BHL never cited any ties between Izetbegovic, the SDA, and radical Islam and terrorism.53

Several notable veterans of the Bosnian jihad fell to American firepower in Afghanistan, including Abdul Hadi al-Gahtani, the Saudi "missionary" who had murdered British aid worker Paul Goodall in early 1994. Bosnian police enabled al-Gahtani's escape from a staged kidnapping in March 1994, and he went on the run, rejoining the global holy war in Afghanistan until he was killed by a U.S. missile near Kabul on November 19, 2001.54

BOSNIA AND BIN LADEN: THE CONTINUING THREAT

Although Bernard-Henri Levy remained oblivious to the impact of bin Laden on Bosnia, he developed an interest in the case of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and butchered by Pakistani mujahidin in January 2002.55 Pearl was abducted while attempting to get to the bottom of the odd story behind Richard Reid, al-Qa'ida's failed shoebomber, and was decapitated in Karachi, a horrifying spectacle that was filmed and distributed on the holy warrior circuit as "The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl."

In an irony that Bernard-Henri Levy seems not to have appreciated, the ringleader behind the Pearl murder was a product of the Bosnian jihad. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh grew up in Britain, part of a comfortable family of South Asian origin, in a bourgeois environment that frowned on fanaticism; his studies at the London School of Economics indicated a promising future. His father was not pleased when his idealistic twentyyear-old son, affected by mujahidin propaganda about the sufferings of Bosnian Muslims and having made new friends who were committed to the jihad, abandoned his studies and set out for the Balkans to wage holy war. There began Ahmed Omar Saeed's path to al-Qa'ida. "That was a turning point in his life," his father recalled. "As of then he devoted himself to the Islamic struggle."56

What the Bosnian jihad meant to the butcher of Daniel Pearl, he explained exactly: "Bosnia radically changed my perspective and view of life. Until then I believed in the pillars of Western civilization-the emphasis on scientific inquiry and technological progress, capitalist-based economics.... I was left with great emptiness. An ensuing search for new pillars, new directions, new meanings in life, took me to Bosnia."57 Once in Bosnia, he found the pillars he sought, serving with a mujahidin unit filled with Pakistanis, and developed a solid reputation in al-Qa'ida circles; he would eventually be termed Osama bin Laden's "special son." Seeing potential, Pakistani intelligence, the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate, which functioned as a jihadi front, in 1994 dispatched Ahmed Omar Saeed to Afghanistan to receive more training. There his terrorist career prospered, and he was involved in several crimes, including the kidnapping of three Britons and an American in India, forging a blood-stained path leading to the abduction and murder of Daniel Pearl.

Although Sarajevo's supporters went to great lengths to deny it, there was no avoiding the reality that after 9/11, as al-Qa'ida attacks multiplied across the world, a disturbing number of the terrorists involved had close ties to Bosnia and the holy war waged there. The dedicated cadres bin Laden had first nurtured in Afghanistan and brought to fruition in Bosnia were ready for the all-out confrontation with the "apostates" and "infidels" that al-Qa'ida had promised.

Many of the post-9/11 attacks were linked. Investigation into the "Casablanca outrage," al-Qa'ida car bombings in Morocco on May 16, 2003, that killed forty-five civilians, determined it was the handwork of a local bin Laden network controlled by veterans of the Bosnian jihad. Known as the Groupe Islamique Combattant Morrocain (GICM), the organization had links to several countries but had a distinct Balkan background. Two brothers from Tangier, Slaheddine and Abdelaziz Benyaiche, both veterans of the Bosnian Army, were key players behind the Casablanca operation. Slaheddine (a.k.a. Abu Mihjal), convicted for his role in the bombings, fought in Bosnia and left the country in 1996 with a Bosnian passport; after, he traveled across Europe keeping the GICM's Bosnian-born network alive and ready. His brother Abdelaziz was linked to "the cream of European jihadists" from his time in Bosnia, according to Jean-Louis Bruguiere, France's top terrorist-hunter, who pursued the Benyaiche cases (Parisian interest was high because GICM had put down roots in France, and two French nationals were killed in the Casablanca bombings). Abdelaziz was arrested in Spain, where GICM was also active, in June 2003.58

GICM and its "Bosnians," including the Benyaiche brothers, were connected to the March 11, 2004, Madrid outrage, the so-called 3/11 attack, which killed 191 commuters and wounded some 1,800. The attack was a strategic victory for al-Qa'ida, a successful effort to peel Spain away from the U.S-led coalition fighting in Iraq. This complex operation involved more than one al-Qa'ida network; like 9/11, this was a multistage, multinational undertaking involving top terrorists-and also like 9/11, it had a Bosnian angle. Of the seventeen suspects identified by Spanish authorities, thirteen were Moroccans, several of them GICM affiliates and veterans of the Bosnian jihad. A major player was the Moroccan "Bosnian" Abdelkader Hakimi, a devoted mujahid for al-Qa'ida for half his life, although his only period of sustained combat had been in Bosnia. Madrid believed a key role behind 3111 was played by Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, the top al-Qa'ida operative in Spain, who had recruited mujahidin for the Bosnian war and called Zenica on a regular basis for years. Yarkas was also in contact with Mohammed Haidar Zammar, the Syrian-German al-Qa'ida planner and "Bosnian" who was linked to the 9/11 operation. When arrested, Yarkas had on him several maps of Bosnia showing transit routes to Europe for holy warriors.59

Yarkas had been a key facilitator of the July 2001 al-Qa'ida meeting held in Tarragon, Spain, where the leading operatives behind the attack on America, including Mohammed Atta, assembled to iron out final plans for the operation. Another who facilitated the Tarragon conference was Amer Azizi, a senior bin Laden representative in Europe and veteran of the Afghan and Bosnian jihads. Of interest to Madrid, a few months before 3/11, Azizi met in Turkey with Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, a Tunisian immigrant in Spain and a leader of one of the cells behind the Madrid bombings.6°

Italian authorities were worried by connections between 3/11 and Bosnia-linked radicals in Italy. Three months after the attack, police in Milan arrested Rabei Osman Ahmed, known in jihadi circles as "Mohammed the Egyptian," as the mastermind of the Madrid bombings. Milan's established role as a staging base for al-Qa'ida activities in the Balkans seemed to be turning into a launching pad for attacks on Western Europe. Italian investigators noted that the route used during the war to get holy warriors into Bosnia, the clandestine trail from Milan to Zenica via Ancona, now was working the other way. Worse, it became apparent that al-Qa'ida's mostly Moroccan "Spanish branch" which perpetrated 3/11 had its origins in veterans of the Bosnian jihad who after 1995 went to Spain after spending time in Italy in radical circles. To Italian investigators, there was a direct line running from Milan to Bosnia, then back to Milan and on to Madrid and the 3/11 attacks. Viewing this ominous pattern, Italian military intelligence (SISMI) warned of a "green transversal" of Islamist radicalism in the Balkans, tied to bin Laden and centered on Bosnia, directly threatening Europe. SISMI reported that the situation was deteriorating thanks to the activities of al-Qa'ida "charities" which fed the "growing militancy in certain subversive organizations" in Bosnia that now posed a serious threat to Italy.61

To those who wished to see, the Bosnian trail was visible in al-Qa'ida attacks across Europe. Among the controversial cases was Abu Hamza al-Masri, the radical imam of Finsbury Park mosque, the hotbed of bin Ladenism in London (or as they called it, Londonistan). Born Mustafa Kemal Mustafa in 1958 in Egypt, he came to Britain in 1979 to study but in the mid-1980s fell sway to Islamism and reinvented himself as a firebreathing holy warrior. He went to Afghanistan in 1991, too late to fight the Soviets, but was gravely wounded in an accident that took an eye and both hands. Undeterred, Abu Hamza recovered and went to Bosnia to take part in the holy war, an experience he regularly hailed as decisive in his life. The image of the handless, one-eyed mujahid battling the Serbs was irresistible, and it made Abu Hamza a draw in radical circles when he returned to London.62

Under his leadership. Finsbury Park mosque in the late 1990s became a focal point for al-Qa'ida in Europe, a leading site for propaganda and recruitment. Several followers, inspired by the warrior-imam, went on to perpetrate dirty deeds across the globe. Abu Hamza was an intemperate preacher even by Salafi standards, regularly inveighing against "infidels" in bloodthirsty language, and by no means was it all talk. He was directly involved in killings and terrorist training. In late December 1999, British intelligence intercepted calls from south Yemen, from a terrorist called Abu Hassan, who only an hour before had taken sixteen Western holiday tourists hostage. Abu Hassan quickly called Abu Hamza to deliver the chilling message: "We've got the goods that were ordered, sixteen cartons marked Britain and America." A subsequent rescue attempt was botched by Yemeni security forces, and the hostages were used as human shields by the terrorists; four hostages were killed. Despite this information, British authorities did nothing to shut down Abu Hamza's terrorist organization.63

Worse was to come. After 9/11, London inched towards putting Abu Hamza out of the jihad business. A January 2003 police raid on Finsbury Park mosque uncovered knives and communications gear among ample jihad paraphernalia, but also nuclear-biological-chemical (NBC) suits, a very ominous sign. Police surmised that Abu Hamza was sponsoring WMDrelated training in rural areas of Britain, in preparation for a very "big wedding." The details of the raid didn't come to light until early 2006, three years later, when Abu Hamza was convicted on eleven charges including six counts of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, crimes that netted him a sentence of only seven years.64

Before his conviction, the murderous cleric was involved in the July 7, 2005, London bombings, the so-called 7/7 attacks on London mass transit that killed fifty-two civilians. Three of the four bombers attended Finsbury Park mosque and were under Abu Hamza's sway; family members of the "martyrs" spoke of brainwashing. The uncle of Shehzad Tanweer, born in Britain in 1982 into a family of successful Pakistani immigrants, a young man who had seemed more interested in sports than religion, pointed directly at Abu Hamza: "No child could have thought of doing something like 7/7 by themselves." Did Abu Hamza commission the crimes? That was the conclusion of many investigators, a logical one based on the imam's track record. As to the question of who stood behind Abu Hamza, German intelligence, the BND, which boasted excellent information about the Balkans, determined that the terrorist cell that launched the 7/7 attacks had "contacts with Bosnia."65

It had become obvious that Western Europe was facing a serious internal security problem thanks to the presence of large, unassimilated, and increasingly alienated Muslim minorities. Previously, angry would-be mujahidin had to venture afar to wage holy war; the top al-Qa'ida operatives had the so-called ABC resume (for Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya). European police and security services noted with concern that Bosnia was the closest of those countries, and after 9/ 11 young men dedicated to the jihad didn't need to leave home to serve bin Laden.66 The Parisian intifada of fall 2005 demonstrated the depths of rage to be found in Western Europe's cities. That Europe was now home to a significant portion of bin Laden's support was borne out by a study by the Nixon Center which tracked 373 mujahidin operating in the West from 1992 to 2004. In this group, there were more men from Britain than from Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon, or Libya, and there were twice as many French nationals as Saudis. One-quarter of the sample were natives of Western Europe, many of them second- or third-generation immigrants; the appeal of jihad seemed to grow, not lessen, with time.67

Converts were becoming a serious problem too, especially in America. Though the United States unquestionably possessed an Islamist Fifth Column, a high percentage of its members consisted not of immigrants, but of alienated young men who made the decision to side with the enemy in America's war on terrorism. Consider the already cited case of Randall Todd "Ismail" Royer-the teenage convert who went to Bosnia to fight for al- Qa'ida-which ended after 9/11 in a twenty-year sentence for terrorism on behalf of bin Laden. Royer, who treasured his service in Bosnia, was headed there when arrested by Federal authorities on charges of fomenting holy war in the United States as a key player in the "Virginia Jihad

Stranger still was the story of Adam Gadahn, the onetime metal head from Southern California whose alienation took a sinister turn when the half-Jewish young man was recruited by Islamic extremists in his late teens, a jihadi path that resulted in Gadahn, as "Azzam the American," appearing in an al-Qa'ida video in October 2004, threatening that "the streets of America will run red with blood." The radical who brought Gadahn into the bin Laden fold was Hisham Diab, a naturalized American from Egypt who went to Bosnia twice during the war, in 1994-1995, and received Bosnian citizenship in December 1995. Saraah Olson, Diab's ex-wife, observed that Gadahn was "fresh meat" for the jihad; she warned the FBI about her husband's activities in the 1990s, to no effect. Diab left the United States in the summer of 2001, shortly before 9/11, and disappeared.

However, according to Bosnian authorities, Hisham Diab was murdered in Zenica on January 17, 1997; a fellow mujahid, Karray Kamel bin Ali, was sentenced to nine years in prison for the crime. The murdered man's name, date and place of birth, and Bosnian passport information corresponded exactly to Hisham Diab. But Saraah Olson has no doubt that her husband did not die in central Bosnia in 1997, and the dead man's fingerprints did not match the real Diab. Who, then, was the dead holy warrior? The "false Diab" married a Bosnian woman in an Islamic ceremony at the Iranian center in Zenica in December 1994, and according to her, that Diab stayed in Bosnia until his murder. The case appears to be an example of alQa'ida intentionally creating "multiples" of important members for purposes of security, a fact which gives rise to doubts about how many of bin Laden's men really fought in Bosnia, and how many stayed on.69

Connections to Bosnia's jihad could be found wherever there were radicals in league with al-Qa'ida. Malaysia was an outpost of a small but influential cadre of bin Laden's "Bosnians," and their influence in Southeast Asian radical circles was noteworthy. In southern Thailand, where an Islamist insurgency was building on the back of terrorist bombings, Thai security officials fingered Malaysian veterans of the Bosnian war as the source of the problem, offering training to local hotheads in terrorist tech- niques.70 In January 2006, Thai police arrested Muhamed Mahdoui, a wanted radical who was living in Thailand illegally. Of Algerian origin, Mahdoui had been a Bosnian citizen since 1996 and was an expert forger, supplying the Islamist International with top-quality fake documents for years. When arrested, he was in possession of 120 forged passports from various European countries, miscellaneous forged identity papers, and a large amount of

An interesting example of how al-Qa'ida worked its Bosnian angle after 9/ 11 was the case of Abdul Manaf Kasmuri, a retired colonel who had been booted out of the Malaysian military for his radical views. Kasmuri, a graduate of Britain's Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, served in Bosnia as a UN peacekeeper in 1993-1994 and while there established friendly ties with the mujahidin. The Malaysian government was led from 1981 to 2003 by Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamed, who took a special interest in Bosnia and whose ruling United Malay National Organization (UMNO) had Islamist sympathies. UMNO links to the SDA were robust, and Mahathir was a strong diplomatic supporter and ally of Izetbegovic. There was covert support too, and Malaysia gave sanctuary to mujahidin who had to disappear from Bosnia, including Abu Ma'ali, the emir of the el-Mujahid Detachment.

Malaysian investigators uncovered Kasmuri's links to al-Qaida cells in several countries, and determined that his Sarajevo contact was "a former Bosnian Army officer and current SDA official and imam of a mosque in Sarajevo"-presumably Nezim Halilovic. Colonel Kasmuri was arrested in February 2003 for his links to terrorists in Malaysia and around the world, and was considered a suspect in several incidents, including the October 2002 Bali bombing.72

There was a Malaysian connection to the case of one of the world's most wanted "Bosnians," the French mujahid Lionel Dumont, whose long run from the law ended in late 2003 in Germany. After his disappearance from Bosnian custody in late May 1999, Dumont entered the Islamist underground and proved impossible to locate and catch for several years. He was convicted in absentia for his role in the crimes committed by the Roubaix Gang, and a life sentence awaited him in France.

Authorities got a break in the case in late October 2004, when ten Islamists were arrested at Coquelles, on the French side of the Channel tunnel. One of those arrested was Andrew Rowe, a Briton of Jamaican background who had fought in Bosnia; indeed, he explained the presence of explosives residue on his socks because he had worn them almost a decade before in Bosnia. A militant convert who took the name Yusef Abdullah but was known to mujahidin as "Yusef the Jamaican," Rowe was linked to several al-Qa'ida plots in the West. A search of his residence revealed information on weapons, bomb-making, detonators, and codes, as well as videos of the 9/11 attacks and tapes of Osama bin Laden; a raid on Rowe's ex-wife's residence uncovered more terrorist codes, tapes such as "Jihad in Bosnia," and the living wills of two 9/11 hijackers. Rowe had traveled widely since his conversion to Islam and had held four passports in seven years. He also admitted to having met Lionel Dumont.73

Soon the police had an address for Dumont in Germany, and British police requested assistance from German counterparts in the Frankfurt area. However, the wily Dumont ran again, and was on the lam until he was arrested at a Munich hotel in mid-December. Once in custody, he detailed a remarkable saga of jihadi life on the run. After leaving Bosnia, he had moved frequently, going to East Asia, bouncing between Indonesia and Malaysia before moving to Japan in mid-July 2002, where he remained until September 2003. There was no doubt that Dumont was still an active al-Qa'ida operative. He seemed to have no shortage of alias documents-he entered Japan several times on a forged French passport-nor did he seem to lack funds.74

During the fourteen months Dumont spent in Japan with his German wife, living in Niigata and working at a used car business, he spent a great deal of time on the phone talking to al-Qa'ida operatives in several countries. He also established a local network. A key member was Islam Mohamed Himu, a Bangladeshi who ran a mobile phone store near the U.S. Navy base at Yokosuka; Himu conducted close surveillance of the base, headquarters of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, for Dumont and the two were in frequent contact. Even after he left Japan, Dumont stayed in telephone contact with the network, consisting of two Japanese and eleven Muslims.75

Dumont's time in Malaysia and Indonesia was suspicious-in 2002-2003 he made at least six visits to Malaysia alone-and French counterintelligence concluded he may have had a hand in the Bali bombing; that he was in contact with local al-Qa'ida cells, probably in a supervisory role, was not in doubt.76

By the time Lionel Dumont's jihadi career came to an end, even the Saudis had had enough of the "Bosnians." For Riyadh, this was an ironyladen case of blowback. For years, veterans of the Bosnian war had played a leading role in neighboring Yemen's Islamist movement. Mohammad Hamdi al-Ahdal, an al-Qa'ida paymaster at the head of Yemen's most wanted list, was a "Bosnian" who went on to play a major role in two local maritime attacks: the October 2000 attack on the frigate U.S.S. Cole and the October 2002 near-sinking of the French oil tanker S.S. Limburg, Hamdi was arrested by Yemeni authorities in late November 2003.77 To date, Saudi Arabia seemed to have been spared the terrorist onslaught it had helped create in Bosnia and across the globe.

Although Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef in November 2002 declared that no al-Qa'ida cells existed in the kingdom, the hollowness of that claim was soon obvious. In the spring of 2003, Saudi mujahidin went on the offensive against the "apostate" rulers in Riyadh, a bloody uprising that claimed eighty-five dead and over three hundred wounded. The domestic holy war kicked off with bombings in Riyadh in mid-May that killed nine Americans and wounded hundreds (including fourteen more Americans). The campaign simmered for a year. In early May 2004, terrorists went on a rampage in Yanbu, killing six: two Americans, two Britons, an Australian, and a Saudi policeman; one victim was tied to a truck and dragged through the streets. Four of the terrorists died in a shootout, including the leader, Mustafa Abdulqader Abed al-Ansari, a prominent veteran of the Bosnian jihad from Medina. At the end of the month, an al-Qa'ida team assaulted a foreigner-occupied compound at Khobar, killing twenty-two. The operation was led by Abdulaziz al-Muqrin, a well-known militant, onelegged due to a mine explosion, who was a veteran of the Bosnian jihad.78

In mid-2005, Sarajevo sheepishly admitted that Yunis Mohammed Ibrahim al-Hayari, said by Saudi authorities to be the leader of al-Qa'ida in the Kingdom, was a Bosnian citizen. Zaid Saad al-Shammary, the numberthree mujahid in Saudi Arabia, was one too. A Moroccan, al-Hayari was granted his Bosnian passport in 1996 on the basis of his wartime service with the Muslim military. He fought with the 4th Muslim Brigade and was captured by Croat forces in 1994, but was nevertheless remembered by his commander, the fighting imam Nezim Halilovic, as "a good soldier." AlHayari took a local wife and stayed in Bosnia for a time but eventually the jihad beckoned. He was killed in a shootout with Saudi security forces on the outskirts of Riyadh in early July 2005.79

Attacked by the secret army they had helped create, Saudi authorities took belated action, cracking down on al-Haramayn in coordination with the Americans; its offices in Bosnia and Somalia had already been designated terrorist entities. After spending billions to promote jihad and getting a taste of the unintended consequences, Saudi officials began cutting off funds to Islamic missionary organizations that were actually al-Qa'ida fronts. Radical Islamists who had once been courted by Riyadh found themselves banned from entry to the Kingdom. One ex-protege who wound up on the permanently banned list was Adnan Pezo, former head of Bosnia's Active Islamic Youth-a radical cadre created and sustained by Saudi funds. Rather late, Riyadh realized that AIO was actually a terrorist group.KU

"Bosnians" could be found in neighboring Iraq too, playing a direct role in the insurgency against the Americans and their allies. Arabs and others who had received Bosnian citizenship for their service to the SDA were hardly rare in Iraq after the U.S. invasion of spring 2003, and some nativeborn Bosnians were in action there too. Although neither Sarajevo nor Washington wished to say it openly, Bosnians had been captured by coalition forces in Iraq, a fact confirmed by Serbian Defense Minister Prvoslav Davinic, who said that senior American officers had admitted this to him during a visit to the headquarters of U.S. European Command in Stuttgart in late 2004.81

Al-Qa'ida has been less eager to conceal the role of Bosnians in the Iraq war. On the second anniversary of 9/11, Ayman al-Zawahiri called on "the veterans of jihad in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya to rise against the Americans," while Bosnian Islamists have proudly hailed the achievements of their brethren fighting in Iraq. Local outlets sympathetic to bin Laden, especially the AIO magazine Saf, have spoken of local boys recruited to fight in Iraq, including an account of an unnamed Bosnian volunteer who battled the Americans in Fallujah in spring 2004.82

German intelligence has stated that young men from Bosnia have gone to fight in Iraq, a fact confirmed by BND Director August Harming, while Croatian intelligence identified a small mosque near Sarajevo's Cobanija bridge as the local recruiting center for mujahidin bound for Chechnya and Iraq with help from AIO. A senior intelligence official in Zagreb said that 1,170 volunteers had headed to the jihad via this "Zenica link" since approximately 9/11, though most of those bound for battle were Western Europeans, not Bosnians. Sarajevo sources explained that the SDA had a hand in this due to its "espionage-religious-army-police gang" that was still functioning as the real power in the city behind the scenes, in alliance with radical groups connected to al-Qa'ida such as AIO.83

Anecdotal evidence suggests that native-born Bosnians fighting with the Iraqi insurgency are mostly from poor and devout families and fall under the sway of local radical clerics and al-Qa'ida fronts. Slightly older volunteers are invariably veterans of the Bosnian jihad and many served in the El-Mujahid Detachment during the war. "Bosnians," meaning foreign fighters, found in Iraq are a more mixed bag, though a typical case of a European Muslim mujahid would be Idris Bazis, born in France to Algerian parents; converted to radical Islam, he fought in Bosnia, then sought more training in Taliban-run Afghanistan, and eventually made it to Iraq, where he was killed in a suicide attack on U.S. forces in February 2005.84 Few reporters have uncovered the presence of "Bosnians" in Iraq, a rare exception being two French journalists captured by holy warriors in Iraq in 2004. Held captive for four months, they survived the ordeal on "Planet bin Laden," as they called it, as prisoners of veterans of the Bosnian jihad who spoke fondly of their time waging war against the Bosnian Serbs. They played Bosnian music for the French journalists and clearly considered Bosnia to be among the better venues for an al-Qa'ida operative.85

Veterans of the Bosnian jihad have played important roles in the Iraqi insurgency. The best known case is Abu Anas al-Shami, number-two to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the top mujahid in Iraq. A popular Salafi imam, alShami, a Jordanian like al-Zargawi, served in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, a jihadi excursion funded by the Saudis, and after 2003 became the lead propagandist and intellectual guide for Jama'at al-Tawhid (Monotheism and Holy War Movement), al-Zargawi's al-Qa'ida-linked umbrella group. Al-Shami produced valuable agitprop for the group, including detailed internet postings glorifying mujahidin efforts in the first battle of Fallujah, until he was killed by a U.S. missile strike in the summer of 2004.86

The Kurdish Islamist group Ansar al-Islam, which played an important role in the first phase of the insurgency, possessed Bosnian roots as well. Its al-Qa'ida-linked support network in several European cities was created in the mid-1990s to support the group's Balkan activities. Its start was ama- teurish-Ansar was known in mujahidin circles for sending inadequately trained fighters to Bosnia and generally poor operational security (including badly faked passports that raised the ire of al-Qa'ida higher-ups), but its overseas cells were robust enough to pull off several attacks outside Iraq. Ansar was behind four bombings on British and Jewish targets in Istanbul in November 2003 that killed over fifty civilians, and it attempted to blow up NATO's June 2004 summit held in Istanbul. As was the norm in alQa'ida's international network, Ansar's hardcore operatives were experienced fighters who had battled in Bosnia.87

For Bosnian radicals, the Iraq war has proved an emotive issue, rallying point, and recruiting tool. Leading the way has been Saff, the AIO magazine, which has railed against every aspect of the American counterinsurgency campaign. It denounced the "homosexual nature" of the United States and its "obsession with lechery, debauchery, and deviancy of every kind," pronouncing the Abu Ghraib scandal to be "a completely logical, expected, and natural product" of the American invasion of Iraq. There was the usual invective against the infidel, deracinated Americans: "these primitives and scoundrels, members of an instant

AIO represents a minority viewpoint in Bosnia, albeit an influential and growing one. What Saf 's readership lacks in numbers is offset by the fanaticism of ardent belief. Sarajevo secularists have been alarmed by the upswing of Bosnian Muslim nationalism after a movement that is sectarian in nature. Sarajevo's "patriotic media," usually linked to the SDA, has systematically denigrated non-Muslims, even the Serbs and Croats who were loyal to the Izetbegovic government during the war and were once hailed for their service. Prominent non-Muslims such as the Bosnian Serb journalists Gojko Beric and the war heroes Dragan Vikic (a Croat) and Jovan Divjak (a Serb and the number-two ABiH general during the war: he was fired in 1996 by the SDA without warning and reduced to nonperson status in Sarajevo; previously hailed as "Noble Jovan," he wound up driving a cab) found themselves under attack in the "patriotic media" for no reason other than their membership in the wrong ethno-religious group. This public shift has been hailed by SDA ideologists as the "Bosnian Muslim cultural revolution." Dzemaludin Latic, the party's top thinker, has expressed his joy that "Ottoman culture is being reborn in all its glory and momentum, like the sun on a cloudy day, on the European continent." The revolution's impact was obvious. In mid-2003, the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights reported that anti-Christian vandalism and assaults were on the rise, and intolerance had been institutionalized in Muslim regions of Bosnia, including in the school system. Physical attacks on Christian worshippers and churches were a regular occurrence, contributing to the rapid disappearance of non-Muslims from the supposedly multiethnic Federation. Only twenty thousand Croats remained in Sarajevo, a third of the prewar population.89

The nerve center of this revolution, Sarajevo's King Fahd mosque, continues its work. Said to be the largest mosque in Europe, with room for over five thousand faithful, it boasts computer rooms, a movie theater, an athletic center, and a luxurious library. Many locals remain unnerved by the mosque and its attendees, the veiled women termed "ninjas" by less ardent Muslims. The severe Wahhabi views emanating from King Fahd and the more than 150 other Saudi mosques built in Bosnia since the war are a source of concern to many traditional Muslims. As Resid Hafizovic, a professor at Sarajevo's School of Islamic Studies, explained, "It's enough to attend afternoon prayer on Friday at King Fahd mosque to get terrified." Ten years after Dayton, Wahhabi views have permeated Bosnian society, leaving secularists and traditionalists alike worried by the heavy-handed, extremist rhetoric propagated by Saudi-inspired preachers and their militant followers. As one average Muslim put it, "You can't enter the mosque any more because of them. They pray in a completely different way and do everything wrong. They turned Sarajevo into a black hole and now the whole world is against us.... They sowed the seed of evil and left us with it."90

Many of the "new believers," the fanatical Wahhabis who scare their neighbors, are former criminals and communists, something that doesn't help their popularity. That a large portion of the Muslim clergy collaborated with the communist secret police was a topic that Reis ul-ulema Mustafa Ceric and the leadership of the Islamic Community have done their best to gloss over. Recent revelations of the extent of their collaboration with Titoist state security were brushed off by Ceric with a blanket amnesty to all imams who "sincerely repent" for their activities.91

After 9/11 some brave Muslims publicly denounced the SDA-sanc- tioned Wahhabization of Bosnia and all the moral, political, and economic corruption left in its wake. "I'm sure there are some Arab charities in Bosnia who have nothing to do with spreading Wahhabism. We'll miss them," noted a former ABiH officer with disgust and sarcasm, adding that the Arabs must leave: "We, the pig eaters, the heavy smokers and those who appreciate the beauty of a woman's unveiled face know much more about this world of Allah than you think. We don't need your instructions. For five years you did not lift a finger to help, but now you come to colonize lands cleared of our `infidel' neighbors and stained with a mixture of our bloods."92

Regrettably the Wahhabization of Bosnia had progressed too far under the SDA's protection to be undone with some deportations and office closings. Al-Qa'ida's "charities" continued their customary game. The Third World Relief Agency, the top financier of Wahhabi "missionary work" in the Balkans, had officially closed its Vienna office in 1995 when Fatih alHasanayn fled under pressure from local police, but TWRA actually maintained an office in downtown Vienna, on the prominent Karnterstrasse, until 2002. Some activities were shifted to the Prague office, which was active until at least 2004, under the guidance of Mohammad Abbas al- Mutasim, who when asked about nefarious ties explained, "we are a humanitarian organization."93

European security services were watching such developments with concern. German intelligence, which had downplayed the Islamist issue in the Balkans in the 1990s, after 9/ 11 was stating its worries openly. BND Director August Harming in late 2003 said "we are extremely concerned" about what he termed "creeping infiltration," the slow but steady radicalization of an Islamist vanguard in Bosnia that thanks to hard work and fanaticism was gaining critical mass. BND pronouncements were seconded by German police, who were watching Bosnia-linked extremists closely. They estimated that a thousand "criminal Islamists" were active in Western Europe, many of them linked to Bosnia. This was a new and very dangerous form of organized crime, consisting of radicals, many linked to al-Qa'ida, who had gained combat experience in Bosnia and were active across Europe, spreading extremist ideas and supporting the jihad while perpetrating increasingly sophisticated crimes-a plague of Lionel Dumonts.94 To this problem there seemed to be no simple solution.

How little enthusiasm existed in Sarajevo for unraveling the Islamist criminal-terrorist nexus in Bosnia was laid bare by post-9/11 efforts to prosecute those behind the Pogorelica scandal. In April 2002, Bosnian police arrested five former Muslim secret policemen, including Bakir Alispahic, Irfan Ljevakovic, and Enver Mujezinovic, on charges of terrorism and espionage for their role in running the Iranian facility.

Predictably, SDA stalwarts denounced this as a witch hunt, declaring the accusations a hoax. Alija lzetbegovic pronounced the trial as "staged, politically motivated" before it started. In a statement, the ex-president explained, "specific military-political cooperation with the Islamic Republic of Iran started at the beginning of 1995, to my knowledge," a bald-faced lie, adding that he had never heard of Pogorelica before the NATO raid of February 15, 1996 that shut the terrorist camp down.95

The SDA and its Islamist allies went into overdrive to defend the "Pogorelica martyrs," Reis-ul-ulema Ceric stating that he "cannot sleep while Alispahic and Ljevakovic are in prison." Bosnia's top imam worked to sabotage the trial, and when Jasminka Putica, the investigative judge prosecuting the case (and also the SDA arms smuggling ring to assist the Kosovar Albanians), abruptly resigned and withdrew herself from the matter, suspicion focused on Ceric's backroom pressure. The trial itself was no better, with Alispahic, Ljevakovic, and Mujezinovic refusing to answer questions about their activities, even when international experts such as Rohan Gunaratna and Colonel David Hunt (the U.S. officer who led the raid) unambiguously explained the real purpose of Pogorelica.96 Like all Sarajevo's post-9/1 I efforts to root out extremists and terrorists and undo a decade-plus of damage wrought by al-Qa'ida and its allies, this was too little, far too late.

FORGING JIHADISTAN: LESSONS LEARNED?

Alija Izetbegovic was mendaciously defiant to the end. Down to his death on October 19, 2003, he dodged questions and denied now-obvious truths about his decade of rule over the SDA and the Bosnian Muslims. When his health began to fail in late 2001, he went to Saudi Arabia for treatment, and his public pronouncements thereafter were infrequent yet typical. His legacy for Bosnia was, at best, ambiguous. Izetbegovic was fated to remain something of a mystery, the master of obfuscation and saying one thing and doing the other. Even many in the SDA were left to wonder what motivated the intellectual manque who engineered the rebirth of Islam in Bosnia and the break-up of the country.

An intensely private man, he offered few hints during his public career about his inner feelings. There were the occasional comments about his family's proud Turkish past; that Izetbegovic mourned the passing of the Ottomans was clear. In a revealing moment, he explained a bad experience he had as a schoolboy, when a Serb teacher made fun of him because of his Ottoman background: "He didn't like me. I could feel that because he was constantly making fun of Turkish beys and agas."97 In the end, the resentful schoolboy got his revenge.

Izetbegovic's controversial legacy was barely evidenced in Western reports of his death. Most obituaries were one-sided, omitting the SDA founder's dark side, and more than a few were hagiographies. As expected, the prize was taken by his friend and admirer Bernard-Henri Levy, who began his obituary with "Power brought him sorrow." Izetbegovic was "no extremist," pronounced BHL one more time, explaining approvingly that he was "to the end a man of letters and culture."98 Here was the received wisdom among the West's chattering classes. Clearly Izetbegovic's multicultural propaganda offensive and active courting of the Western world's "beautiful people"-from humoring Susan Sontag to dispensing honorary citizenship on the likes of Bono-paid off handsomely in the end.

Bosnians were more circumspect about Izetbegovic and his legacy. Even onetime admirers conceded that the former president had been a more ambiguous figure than Westerners were willing to allow. Gojko Beric, Sarajevo's leading literary journalist and an ardent supporter of the SDA and its leader during the war despite being a Serb, conceded that Izetbegovic was "neither Ataturk nor Khomeini," not an Iranian-style fanatic but not a Western-oriented secularist either. Beric reluctantly concluded that nonMuslims had been fooled, and that Izetbegovic's exploitation of multiculturalism was a useful tactic to gain Western support, but was insincere and abandoned when it was no longer needed.99

The falsehood of many of Izetbegovic's pious claims about himself and his cause was borne out on October 22, 2003, the day of his funeral, when the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague announced that the ex-president had been under investigation for war crimes. Assertions by Reis-ul-ulema Ceric that "we and our generals have not committed any crimes" were no longer convincing, even to gullible Westerners, and the ICTY, which heretofore had looked at Bosnian Serb and Croat crimes almost exclusively, soon announced indictments against General Enver Hadzihasanovic and Colonel Amir Kubura. Prominent members of the mujahidin support network, they were the first high-ranking ABiH officers to face charges, including for the killings of at least two hundred Christian civilians in central Bosnia in 1993; "ritual beheading" was cited in the ICTY indictment.100

Western security services, particularly Germany's BND, worried that mujahidin coming to pay respects at Izetbegovic's funeral might stay in Bosnia, adding to the country's already outsized cadre of extremists. That even many Bosnian Muslims considered Izetbegovic controversial was evidenced in early 2004, when the SDA attempted to rename Sarajevo's main thoroughfare, Marshal Tito Street, after the late president. When a majority of Sarajevans objected-Tito remains a revered figure among most Bosnian Muslims-pro-SDA media denounced "obsessed communists."101 Although few Western NGOs were willing to admit the extent of al-Qa'ida's penetration and influence in Bosnia, some were beginning to cautiously question the SDA's worldview. "Is Bosnia a hotbed for international terrorism?" asked one prominent NGO. "No. But Muslim leaders remain disturbingly undisturbed by radical Islam," it replied, adding that Sarajevo's radical contingent "should not be completely dismissed as irrelevant," pointing a finger at the SDAs "lax attitude towards radical Islamic elements." 102 This was progress of a sort.

How many mujahidin were there in Bosnia after 9/11? It was a question no one could answer precisely, and Bosnian officials usually did their best to dodge, though inconvenient truths sometimes emerged. In late 2003, Almir Dzuvo, chief of the country's counterterrorism effort, told German reporters that "about 300 mujahidin" remained in Bosnia, a statement he later denied when faced with sharp criticism at home for telling foreigners a difficult truth. Several months later, Sredoje Novic, a Serb appointed to head a new Bosnia-wide State Investigation and Protection Agency aimed at curbing crime and terrorism, explained in a lawyerly fashion that al-Qa'ida operatives were probably active in Bosnia since "this is an area that could possibly contain [them]," adding the rejoinder that it is very difficult to answer this question." Privately, European security agencies estimated the number of mujahidin living in Bosnia in the low hundreds, though many more were transiting the country in the service of the

The country's lack of border security and rampant crime and corruption formed a large part of the problem. The Federation Interior Ministry in mid-2004 admitted that about 1,100 terrorists were in the country-a figure comprised mostly of Islamists but which also included Bosnian Serb and Croat extremists and war criminals-yet conceded that many terrorists were active abroad thanks to Bosnian passports.104 Hence the police had no concrete idea how many al-Qa'ida affiliates were in Bosnia. Only ten of Bosnia's border crossings were actively supervised, and the State Border Service was mired in corruption and inefficiency. The chief of border security discovered that his agency's records had Osama bin Laden entering the country via Sarajevo airport in August 2003-almost certainly a fabrication, the hushed-up investigation determined, a sick joke that indicated what some Bosnian border guards thought constitutes appropriate humor.105

Bosnian police were actively involved in smuggling large numbers of undocumented persons, including terrorists, though the country en route to Western Europe. A senior policeman in Tuzla boasted of his profitable role in smuggling humans, "No one can touch me. I'm protected by the powers that be." The military was no better, and weapons and munitions had a persistent habit of disappearing-to where, nobody seemed to know. Secret arms caches left over from the war emerged regularly, and when Bosnia shipped a tiny contingent of peacekeepers (an explosive ordnance disposal platoon) to Iraq in mid-2005, a substantial arms shipment, consisting of 50,400 rounds of ammunition, 126 grenades, and 8 antitank launchers, disappeared before it left Bosnia.106

The Bosnian security service, which might have done something about all of this, was incapable and perhaps unwilling to do so. In 2004, the country attempted to create a unified security service, known as OSA (Obavestajno-sig- urnosna agencija), by melding the Federation's FOSS and the Bosnian Serb OBS. By late 2004, months after OSA was established, it was still not functioning, and there was minimal vetting of the seven hundred officers brought in to staff the new agency. The SDA demanded the hiring of two hundred Muslims left jobless during the transition from FOSS to OSA, a group that included mujahidin and graduates of Pogorelica trained in assassination. 107

It was obvious that OSA was penetrated by al-Qa'ida. Highly classified OSA documents appeared in extremist circles and were published in the AIO magazine Saf, which denounced "domestic traitors" who spy on "Arab brothers" in the service of the infidel Americans. Among the internal documents appearing in Saff were detailed assessments on how OSA targets Middle Eastern interests in Bosnia for purposes of counterintelligence and counterterrorism. OSA personnel paperwork also went to press in Sall information that could only come from the agency's personnel department, which it turned out was led by a senior officer of Islamist inclination who had previously headed President Izetbegovic's security detail.'08

The SDA's entrenched network of extremism and corruption continued to work hard to defend its financial and ideological gains. How much money was at stake was indicated by the fact that in the Federation Ministry for Refugees alone, 14 million marks (about $7 million) were stolen in 2001-2002; up to 500,000 marks stolen in the Srebrenica area, allegedly a showcase for refugee return. Although such matters had been investigated for a decade, and Munir Alibabic's 2002 report detailed the Islamist criminal network headed by Hasan Cengic in impressive detail, nothing was done. The Western governments that administered Bosnia in semi-colonial fashion never pressed the issue. Indeed, one of Cengic's firms-cum-fronts, BIO, turned out to be a supplier to NATO forces! When the Hague, backed by Washington, at last showed some seriousness about unraveling the SDAs extremist mafia in late 2004, dispatching a team of investigators to Sarajevo led by Jonathan Schmidt, a respected American prosecutor, Cengic counterattacked with death threats, and Schmidt soon fled Bosnia in fear for his life.109

A bitter indictment of how little the West had achieved in the years after Dayton was offered by David Harland, former head of UN civil affairs in Bosnia:

Eight years after a devastating war, Bosnia and Hercegovina is a remarkable success story. Reconstruction is complete. Economic output has passed prewar levels and the republic's economy is now among the fastest growing in Europe.

Refugees have returned to their homes, wartime nationalist leaders are dead or in jail. Measured by the rate of marriage between young people of different ethnic groups, the hostility that recently led to so much blood-letting between Croats, Muslims and Serbs is receding. There is palpable optimism in the air. What was recently one of the most backward areas of Europe is moving forward.

The year is 1953.110

The unpalatable truth was that Yugoslav communists had done a far superior job rebuilding Bosnia politically, economically, and socially than the West had managed fifty years later, and the country recovered faster from the far more costly and brutal World War II than from the civil war of 1992-1995. When NATO officially ended the Stabilization Force in December 2004, handing control for peacekeeping to the European Union after nine years, its record of success was mixed, at best. While the U.S.-led effort had indeed kept the peace, it had overseen too little reconstruction and reconciliation, and had surrendered the field to radicals and extremists of all stripes, al-Qa'ida preeminently. While SFOR's inability to bring top war crimes suspects to justice-most of all Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic-got the attention of NGOs and Western governments, its refusal to take on the Islamist problem was more consequential for regional peace and security. The last American commander in Bosnia, Major General James Darden, touted the success of SFOR-holding it up as a model for such operations, silently contrasting it with Iraq today-with the statement, "If we could do it all over again, I don't know how we could do Whether this was bravado or sincere, if deluded, belief cannot be determined.

The problem with SFOR and the West's post-Dayton efforts in Bosnia wasn't just a lack of will but a lack of ability too. U.S. and NATO commanders never seemed to get a handle on local problems, and SFOR intelligence appears to have been consistently poor; as one NGO astutely noted of information regarding war criminals, "SFOR intelligence reports contain little worthwhile information and are full of spelling Bosmans had the last laugh. On December 1, 2004, a day before SFOR's official closeout, a team of five thieves wearing the uniforms of NATO peacekeepers, robbed an Austrian bank in downtown Sarajevo in broad daylight, brazenly setting up a fake checkpoint and seizing a vehicle for good measure. SFOR had no comment.113

The new European Union Force (EUFOR) displayed the predilection for denial that had marked its predecessor. The official policy of "no terrorists in Bosnia" continued. In August 2005, EUFOR commander Major General David Leakey denied that there were Bosnian mujahidin camps in a press conference that turned into a shouting match. The British officer's naivete was ridiculed in Sarajevo, including by Slobodna Bosna, which ran the headline "Of course there are Islamic terrorist training camps in Bosnia!" Leakey's successor, Major General Gian-Marco Chiarini, sang the same tune, telling reporters in early 2006 there was "no evidence" that there were terrorists in Bosnia. 114

In fairness to Western potentates who had the unenviable job of making Bosnia whole again, the deep-seated bias against seeing the country as it actually was continued after 9/ 11 in many influential circles. Richard Clarke, the Clinton administration's counterterrorism czar, assured everyone that the Bosnian jihad was "largely a failure for al-Qa'ida," a view not endorsed by Islamists, while Western journalists and activists continued to portray Bosnia as they wished it to be.115 An egregious report in the Christian Science Monitor told Western liberals what they needed to believe, hailing nonexistent economic progress and quoting a Muslim NGO activist: "If I were a terrorist group, I would think twice about coming to this country.... Bosnian Muslims are so European that the radical form of Islam has absolutely no chance of spreading here," which was news to Sarajevans. The article soothed readers by quoting Reis-ul-ulema Mustafa Ceric, "I want to assure each and every American that as far as Bosnia is concerned they can sleep safely," adding the tonic offered by an unnamed Western diplomat: "There is no evidence that there are or were al-Qa'ida camps in

Such institutionalized escapism had deep roots in the misguided advocacy journalism that took over during the Bosnian war, and seemed impossible to dislodge. Many Western NGOs simply ignored news that didn't fit their image of Bosnia, for instance not reporting when key ICTY witnesses admitted fabricating evidence.117 Cees Wiebes, the meticulous Dutch scholar who had studied the seamier side of the conflict in exceptional depth, observed, "If you do not have a black-and-white picture of the Bosnian war, then something is apparently wrong with you." Sympathy for the Bosnian Muslims among Western elites had prohibited any retrospection after 9/11, and "sometimes there is an inclination to silence things that do not fit with their view of the war."118 This willful denial of obvious truths continued to undermine any understanding of what had happened in Bosnia in the 1990s. The SDA's covert alliance with al-Qa'ida continued to be a nonstory in most Western media outlets. How the Bosnian war transformed the mujahidin into a global threat "is consistently overlooked," observed one of the few journalists to look into the story: "very few people know about it, and those who do find it prudent to pretend that it never happened." As long as Western liberals persist in viewing the Bosnian Muslim cause uncritically as an unambiguously Good Thing, the real story-"If Western intervention in Afghanistan created the mujahidin, Western intervention in Bosnia appears to have globalized it"-would be fated to obscurity. 119

Detailed information about the Izetbegovic-bin Laden connection was available after 9/11 to anyone who wished to know, and the increasing radicalization of Bosnian Islam was just as evident. Westerners paid no attention to Bosnians who tried to raise the alarm, including Esad Hecimovic, the brave Muslim journalist and the country's top expert on the mujahidin, who stated, "The number of radical Muslims has increased since the war." The problem, he explained, was that "the followers of Wahhabism are altering Islam in our country and I believe that some of the local imams are not offering as much resistance to those changes as they

Two thousand five, the tenth anniversary of the civil war's end and Western intervention in Bosnia, brought forth ample evidence of the truth of Hecimovic's warning. Italian police uncovered a plot to attack Pope John Paul II's funeral in April, and Italian security services concluded that it was an Islamist operation based in Bosnia and linked to AIO. A suspected suicide bomber, an AIO member, was arrested in Rome the day of the funeral, and Italian investigators linked him to the earlier arrest of a Bosnian extremist, an AIO member from the Bosnian village of Gornja Maoca, a known mujahidin hideout. That earlier arrest led to a raid in Zagreb which exposed a weapons cache consisting of eleven antitank launchers, detonators, and two pounds of plastic explosive; five suspected terrorists were netted by Croatian police in the raid. The ringleader of the Zagreb group also came from Gornja Maoca.121

The run-down hamlet of Gornja Maoca near Brcko in northeast Bosnia was home to a mujahidin colony that served as a terrorist sanctuary-exactly the sort of thing Western officials and journalists insisted didn't exist. A Croatian reporter who visited in the summer of 2005 discovered a hundred Wahhabis, about thirty families, living off an unpaved road in seclusion. The inhabitants, mostly Bosnians, wore extremist garb and spouted the usual invective, declaring Croats to be "the worst kind of crusader": "they are rats and should be exterminated as soon as possible." The colony's chief, Enes Mujkanovic (a.k.a. Abu Omar al-Khadab), was a veteran of the Bosnian jihad, as were many others. They made a living off chicken farming and beekeeping, although Western intelligence knew that wasn't their only line of employment. Although Mujkanovic denounced harassing European peacekeepers as "crusaders, the sons of monkeys and pigs," no one had shut the colony

July 2005 brought the tenth anniversary of the disaster at Srebrenica, what Dick Holbrooke hailed as the justification for American intervention and everything that followed. The SDA planned a public extravaganza to highlight its leadership in war and peace, but it was marred by the presence of young Muslims wearing T-shirts with the image of Naser Oric, the thuggish commander of the enclave who since spring 2003 had been in the Hague under indictment for war crimes; shouts of "Long live Naser Oric!" punctuated the ceremony. Some in the SDA were frustrated that no Arab countries bothered to send a delegation to the Srebrenica ceremony (among Muslim states, only Turkey sent representatives). Muslims who had complained so much about the sufferings of coreligionists in Bosnia seemed to have forgotten.

Those who questioned the official version of Srebrenica continued to be denied an audience, and no one in the West seemed interested in reopening the issue. Retired Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie, who commanded UN forces in Sarajevo in 1992 and had always taken a balanced view of the war, pointed out on the tenth anniversary that much of the official Srebrenica story was murky at best, and consisted as much of myth as fact, but none of the Western reporters who covered Srebrenica bothered to answer his awkward questions. The full truth could never be known, even if a will to reinvestigate existed, as the relevant records of the Bosnian Army's 2nd Corps in Tuzla, which had responsibility for Srebrenica and engaged in dubious activities that many believed included Sarajevo's collusion in the disaster, had disappeared and could not be located.123

By the summer of 2005, it was known that original estimates of war dead had been grossly exaggerated, but this too got little attention. The ICTY's meticulous November 2004 estimate of 102,622 killed between 1992 and 1995 (55,261 civilian and 47,360 military dead) was mirrored by the conclusions of Sarajevo's Research and Documentation Center, headed by Mirsad Tokaca, a Muslim. His estimate of roughly a hundred thousand killed (about 62 percent Muslim, 23 percent Serb, 5 percent Croat, and under 1 percent other), including slightly more civilian than military dead, got minimal attention in Bosnia or abroad: "they are simply not interested" was how Tokaca explained official Sarajevo's reaction to the inconvenient news. Reporters who eagerly parroted the SDA figure of a quarter-million Muslim dead during the war were nowhere to be found when hard figuresdemonstrating that initial estimates had exaggerated the numbers four- or fivefold-eventually came to light.124

Disinterest and double standards were on further display in the anniversary summer of 2005 when a video came to light depicting Bosnian Serb troops in action around Srebrenica during mid-July 1995. The two-hour footage included the execution-style shooting of six unarmed Muslims, and caused a sensation in the Balkans and the West, reigniting interest in the topic of Bosnian Serb war crimes. In contrast, when a graphic video appeared almost simultaneously depicting Bosnian Muslim crimes committed that same bloody summer, it received almost no attention. This included the decapitation of a Bosnian Serb prisoner of war named Rade Rogic by an Arab mujahid, who cut off the screaming man's head, shouted the tekbir, and picked up Rogic's severed head by the hair and displayed it to the camera. Although the Western media by 2005 had grown accustomed to seeing such images in Iraq, Western reporters showed no interest when a Bosnian version came to light.125

Events in the fall of 2005 demonstrated that, despite Western inattention and official denials, Bosnia remained a major front in the global jihad. A Sarajevo police raid on October 19 confirmed widespread suspicions that Bosnia remained a launching pad for terrorism across Europe and beyond. The raid on an apartment used by an al-Qa'ida-affiliated terrorist cellpolice were tipped off by information about a plot to blow up the local British Embassy-netted explosives, rifles and other small arms, videos hailing jihad and pledging revenge for the deaths of "brothers" in Afghanistan and Iraq, and ample documentation detailing the cell's international linkages. Four young men were arrested, a Turkish national and three Bosnian Muslims; a fifth cell member, a Bosnian Muslim living in the suburb of Hadzici, was arrested shortly after.

The ringleader was Mirsad Bektasevic, a Bosnian who held Swedish citizenship, who though only eighteen years old was an al-Qa'ida recruiter and facilitator. Operating under the cover name Maximus, Bektasevic was a recruiter for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for whom he ran a website, and he was in regular contact with extremists and terrorists in several countries. He had pictures of the White House on his computer, and Bosnian and British investigators suspected he may have been involved in planned suicide attacks in Washington, DC, against the White House and the Capitol. The Sarajevo cell was attempting to establish a training camp outside the city, and police discovered twenty pounds of explosives hidden in Hadzici (they had attempted to hide the explosives in lemons and tennis balls). Bektasevic's three contacts in Britain were arrested in early November, as were four of his contacts in Denmark.126

Bektasevic's Danish operation was a source of deep concern to officials in Copenhagen, as the cell there, consisting of young men aged between sixteen and twenty, was in the final stages of planning attacks; the police indicated that "action was imminent." Two of them had recently traveled to Sarajevo to finalize attack plans with Bektasevic. The four terrorists, hardly more than boys, were immigrants from Bosnia and the Balkans who appeared superficially assimilated to Danish life but were in truth seething with murderous rage-what the police termed "Generation Jihad." To Danish investigators, it looked unsettlingly like Atta's Hamburg cell, consisting of young Muslims who became militants while in exile and got in touch with al-Qa'ida on their own to undertake terrorist attacks in the West. Copenhagen believed there were a thousand such radical Islamists in Denmark, many with ties to Bosnia.127

Unraveling the Bektasevic ring was a turning point for many Western security officials, who saw in the Bosnia-based operation the realization of a long-held fear, "White al-Qa'ida"-young European Muslims, who didn't look like Arabs or Asian, placing themselves at bin Laden's disposal. Bosnia was key to such activities, and its role in al-Qa'ida's web was obvious. "All the conditions are present," explained a Western intelligence official: "Embittered Muslims, arms, corruption-everything underground operators need to get

And embittered they certainly were. Radical activists railed against any Western counterterrorism measures, and Saff spoke often of "so-called Islamic terrorism" and "so-called Wahhabis," stating that "jihad is the survival of Bosnian Muslims." In its pages, AIO head Almin Foco explained, "Since 11 September 2001 our organization-as an avant-garde of Islamic awakening in Bosnia and a beacon and a school for many who were in it and learned to be Muslims-has been under attack." For good measure, Safn May 2005 placed a photo of President George W. Bush on its cover, wearing a hat favored by Serb ultranationalists, under the title: "America Sharpening Chetnik Daggers."129 Muslim gratitude for all America had done to save the Bosnian Muslims was difficult to find in Sarajevo.

Mainstream Muslims weren't much more sympathetic to America's war on terrorism. Many resented that, for the Americans, fighting al-Qa'ida since 9/11 had trumped unquestioning support for Sarajevo. To the SDA, the war on terrorism was illegitimate and suspect. Karim Said Atmani, the Bosnian mujahid and ringleader for Ahmed Ressam's Millennium Plot, emerged from a French prison in early 2005, stopped briefly in Bosnia, and headed for Canada; he had the moxie to then file suit against the Canadian government for denying him a passport on security grounds. Atmani rued his fate in terms most Muslims would have endorsed: "I went to Bosnia because the media was showing a lot of atrocities against the Bosnians. We helped them and now we are war criminals. That's what hurts." 130 Similarly, the Bosnian parliament in April 2005 passed a resolution that requested the release of the Algerian Group from Guantanamo Bay detention facility, which was denied by U.S. authorities as groundless.

Even many moderates and secularists in Sarajevo seemed to still possess a soft spot for the mujahidin. Belated efforts to strip holy warriors of their ill-gotten Bosnian citizenship have met with resistance from local human rights activists, who have also protested deportations of terrorists to U.S. custody. As of early 2006, a decade after the issue first received attention, it was estimated that about 1,200 naturalized foreign fighters were still resident in Bosnia, many of whom had obtained citizenship fraudulently; however, investigations into a dozen SDA higher-ups who had facilitated the naturalization of al-Qa'ida fighters stalled when courts refused to prosecute since the statute of limitations had passed.131

Despite this, the investigation revealed that of the 740 mujahidin facing international warrants who had received Bosnian citizenship, 594 had gotten their papers from the police office in downtown Sarajevo, most using fraudulent addresses. There had been an active cover-up over years to protect wanted mujahidin and give them sanctuary. The SDAs real agenda became clear in the case of Abu Ma'ali, the emir of the El-Mujahid Detachment, who received Bosnian citizenship under an assumed identity on March 13, 1992-in other words, before the war's beginning. Nor had the SDA ceased such activities more than a decade later, despite supposedly tightened procedures after 9/11. In July 2005, police were surprised by the arrival of five Pakistani nationals at Sarajevo airport, without any ostensible purpose for their visit; they asked to go to the nearest mosque. It emerged that they had been issued valid entry visas by the Bosnian Embassy in Islamabad, at the request of Omer Behmen, a senior SDA official and the head of the Young Muslims. In a further demonstration of core values, Sarajevo was paying monthly pensions to at least a dozen foreign fighters who had received the Golden Lily, the Bosnian Army's highest decoration for valor, while serving with the El-Mujahid Detachment, even though the SDA had cut off pensions to highly decorated and aged Bosnian veterans of Tito's Partisans.132

At the end of 2005, Iran's fire-breathing President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad publicly extolled Bosnia, "a dear land for the Iranians," in a meeting with friends from Sarajevo, adding that "your country is a reminder of the blossoming of the buds of Islam and humanity in Europe." Ahmadinejad flattered his friends, noting "there are pious citizens in your country who form the most precious national asset."133 The Bosnians he had in mind made themselves felt a few weeks later, when protests erupted in Sarajevo, as across most of the Muslim world, attacking cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that had appeared months before in Denmark. The Islamic establishment in Bosnia joined the campaign, and the Congress of Muslim Intellectuals encouraged the protests, describing the cartoons as "a brutal provocation which encourages anti-Islamic ideology." In Sarajevo, a thousand protestors, many of them bearded men and veiled women, emerged to burn Danish and Croatian flags, shouting and displaying antiSemitic and anti-American slogans as well as "Go to Hell" in English and the customary tekbir. Reis-ul-ulema Ceric entered the fray, giving imprimatur to the protests by condemning the cartoons and attacking "Islamophobia."134

Not long before, Ceric had begun his second term as the head of the faithful in Bosnia and announced the institution of shari'a in the country's Islamic institutions, including the reopening of shari'a courts, which had been suppressed in 1946; the Reis-ul-ulema shared the details of his program of re-Islamization in an interview with Saff, the first interview he granted after beginning his second term. 135

Fifteen years after the SDA came to power, Wahhabism had become a major force in Bosnia, engendering radicalism and terrorism wherever it appeared, and seemed increasingly unstoppable. Derided by Senad Agic, the mufti of Bosnian Muslims in America, as "the biggest fad that has ever appeared in Islam," Wahhabism had effectively taken over the commanding heights of Islamic religious and political circles in the country. The problem was explained succinctly by a young Bosnian Muslim scholar, Jasmin Merdan, a pious hafiz who was horrified by the Saudization of his faith in his own country. "Terrorism is simply the tail on the body of Wahhabism," he stated, yet this insidious ideology was easily camouflaged and "mostly grabs people from a bad background, in the best case those who have not had strong contact with Islam." Bosnian Muslims, weak in their faith and often ignorant of their own traditions, had succumbed to Wahhabism, what Merdan called "ideological terrorism, meaning the intimidation of people who hold different views, [which] is the platform for practical terrorism." With a forthrightness few Westerners could manage, Merdan declared, "not every Wahhabi is a terrorist, but every terrorist is a Wahhabi." It is imperative, he counseled, for Bosnian Muslims to begin admitting the problem and preventing-not merely combating-terrorism by confronting Wahhabism

It is difficult to find fault with Bosnia's Muslims, who are rightly afraid of the fanatics in their midst, when Westerners cannot seem to muster the courage to confront the problem either. The continuing pernicious influence of double standards and denial was evidenced at the Hague in early February 2006, when testimony at an ICTY war crimes trial didn't go as planned. British journalist Eve Ann Prentice, a longtime Balkan correspondent who had reported about Bosnia for The Times, testified that she, too, had seen Osama bin Laden in Sarajevo in 1994, corroborating identical German accounts. Prentice stated that she encountered the al-Qa'ida leader at President Izetbegovic's office. The prosecutor immediately objected and the judge cut off her testimony at once, declaring it "irrelevant."

To assist Bosnians who want to rid their country of al-Qa'ida and related extremists, and prevent the radicalization of other Islamic societies, Westerners must first admit the extent of the problem, and their persistent inability to see the enemy as he is. There isn't violent and nonviolent jihad, there is only jihad, as bin Laden's legions of murderous missionaries have demonstrated across the globe. The distinction between violent and nonviolent Islamist radicalism exists only in Western minds, and governments that wish to stem the radical tide must adopt the viewpoint of German intelligence, which describes the Muslim Brotherhood as "one part of the intelligence network of the

The global war on terrorism, what the Pentagon has recently begun to call the Long War, is still in its early stages. It will be a long struggle indeed, and it is perhaps wise to heed the counsel of Jean-Louis Bruguiere, France's arch-counterterrorist, when he says, "Our struggle may become the modern edition of the Hundred Years' War."138

Al-Qa'ida as it existed before 9/11 is no more. American-led counterattacks have taken their toll. No longer do bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, holed up in caves in Waziristan, exercise meaningful command and control over a dispersed network of trained operatives. Instead, there has emerged a new jihadi organization, dispersed and decentralized, which draws its inspiration from al-Qa'ida and its glorious raids. This rising threat, truly a global jihad in the making, is potentially deadlier than bin Laden's secret army; it exists wherever there are angry Muslims, and it feeds on the "virtual jihad," what some term

To win the Long War, America must assault this global Islamist insurgency head-on with every weapon at Washington's disposal: military force, diplomacy, propaganda, economic leverage, espionage, and covert action. Winning the war against the mujahidin will require fighting more in secret than in the open on countless fronts. Defeat is not a realistic option, though few Americans realize how protracted a struggle this is likely to be. They are no more comfortable with the fact that bin Laden's legions and imitators will only retreat when they feel themselves defeated, which they certainly do not.140

For the Long War to end successfully for the West, Muslims must reexamine the concept of jihad and find it wanting for the twenty-first century, a process which we can only influence indirectly. The problem has been defined succinctly by the French philosopher Jacques Ellul:

Indeed, many Muslim governments try to combat the Islamist trend, but to succeed would require a total recasting of mentalities, a desacralization of jihad, a self-critical awareness of Islamic imperialism, an acceptance of the secular nature of political power and the rejection of certain Koranic dogmas.141

The bitter irony of the story told here is that in 1990, no Islamic society on earth was better positioned to reject jihad and realize a modern, reformed version of Islam than Bosnia.

The fate of Bosnia since 1990 stands as a cautionary tale as America and the West embark on a decades-long campaign to defeat armed Islamism. In that Balkan country, a Leninist-style vanguard of Islamists, a tiny coterie of extremists who masked their actual agenda, succeeded in taking political power through democratic elections, by promising each group what it wanted to hear. When in power, it attempted and largely succeeded in re-Islamizing a Muslim society that had grown pronouncedly secular; Bosnia at communism's end was probably the most Western-oriented component of the umma. The Islamist vanguard helped bring about an unpleasant and destabilizing war which destroyed decades of socioeconomic progress and opened the door to increased radicalization and the entry of al-Qa'ida and related mujahidin groups into Europe. Bosnia thereby became a major venue in the global jihad, as it has remained thanks to Sarajevo's deceit and the West's willingness to look the other way.

The role of the West in the fate of Bosnia cannot be underestimated. The willful blindness of Western elites, the dishonest and mendacious representations of Bosnia and its war presented by intellectuals, academics, entertainers and journalists, decisively influenced the course of the conflict, to the benefit of radical Islam. The promising multicultural society that was prewar Bosnia cannot be rebuilt, but Westerners ought to heed the lessons of what happens when governments are overly influenced by "public intellectuals" who have no idea what they are talking about. In the future, what entertainers and celebrities say about complex international issues, particularly ones involving deep-seated ethnic and religious conflicts, should be discarded out of hand, and probably considered the converse of the truth.

If Bosnia, the most pro-Western society in the umma, can be converted into a Jihadistan through domestic deceit, violent conflict, and misguided international intervention, nowhere in the Muslim world can be judged safe from dangerous radicalization. The lesson of Bosnia is that it happened.

On Spellings
and Sources

The Serbo-Croatian language-known today as Serbian, Croatian, or Bosnian, depending on one's nationality-has many diacritical marks unfamiliar to those outside the Balkans. Rather than add confusion to an already intricate story, I have deleted most diacritics from names of places and people. I have retained a few in the text, for instance when citing native language phrases, where their absence would not increase clarity. In addition, I have retained proper diacritical marks in the endnotes to assist anyone who wishes additional information. In the use of language, I have striven to steer clear of political or ethnic favoritism of any sort, and any errors in this regard are unintentional and mine alone.

While the topic of Islamist terrorism in the Balkans has received some press attention, particularly since 9/11, most of what is available, particularly in English, is highly biased, scantily sourced, and frequently unreliable. Therefore I have avoided certain publications and authors whose ability to speak authoritatively without undue political, ethnic, or religious bias is questionable. To the extent possible, I have based the work on reliable sources-inasmuch as these can be said to exist on this controversial topicand have authenticated controversial claims. I have steered clear of sensationalism in favor of solid analysis and verifiable facts. It should be noted that certain Serbs and Croats shout "bin Laden" at Bosnian Muslims as carelessly as the Muslims denounce Serbs and Croats with "genocide." If certain sources are notable only by their absence in this work, the reader may draw his own conclusions.

Notes

Chapter 1: Islam in Bosnia: Myths & Realities

1. Adil Zulfikarpa~id, The Bosniak (London: Hurst & Co, 1998), xv, 141; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 27 Jan 2000, 3 Feb 2000.

2. The country's formal name is the Republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina-the latter being the onetime Duchy of Hercegovina in the south; for simplicity, this work will refer to Bosnia, meaning both, and cite Hercegovina when that region is meant.

3. Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia's War (New York: St Martin's, 1994), 63-64.

4. Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (2nd ed.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 103.

5. Robert J. Donia and John V. A. Fine Jr., Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 11-12. The titles of chapters 1 and 2 are revealing: "A Misunderstood Society: Bosnia's Tolerant Past Betrayed" and "Religious Toleration and Distinctiveness of Medieval Bosnia."

6. Ibid., 9.

7. For a counterpoint to Western wishful thinking about Bosnia see "The Nation That Wasn't" by the Yugoslav scholar Aleksa Djilas in The Black Book of Bosnia: The Consequences of Appeasement (N. Mousavizadeh, ed.) (New York: New Republic, 1996).

8. For instance, Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of "Ethnic Cleansing" (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 1995), 178.

9. Rusmir Mahmutdehajid, Bosnia the Good: Tradition and Tolerance (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000), 55.

10. For a solid explanation of this, including a necessary debunking of the Bogomil hypothesis, see Noel Malcolm, "The Islamicization of Bosnia" in Bosnia: A Short History (London: Macmillan, 1994). Although Malcolm is not to be trusted when discussing Bosnia in the modern period, his analysis of premodern Balkan history is frequently insightful.

Lewis. The Political Language of Islam (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), 73.

12. Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople From the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of independence (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), 189-190.

13. An informed and balanced discussion of Ottoman religious policy in Bosnia can be found in Mitja Velikonja, Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in Bosnia-Herzegovina (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 2003), Chapter Three "Pax Ottomanica."

14. Lewis, Political Language of Islam, 77.

15. Bat Ye'or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From jihad to Dhimmitude: Seventh-Twentieth Century (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson Univ. Press, 1996), 243-244.

16. Ibid., 77-79.

17. Charles and Barbara Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1803-1920: A History of East Central Europe Vol. VIII (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1977), 5-6; Ye'or, Decline, 81, 91-93.

18. Runciman, Great Church, 203-205.

19. For instance, Donia and Fine, Bosnia and Hercegovina, 11-12.

20. See Ye'or, Decline, 113-115 for a concise description.

21. For example Malcolm, Bosnia, 46.

22. No Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984), 41.

23. Ye'or, Decline, 187.

24. Ibid., 412-415, 423-427.

25. Ibid., 430.

26. Typical is Noel Malcolm's dismissal of the 1878 campaign: "it is barely an exaggeration to say that the Austrian army conquered Bosnia in the time it took to walk through the country."-Bosnia, 135. For an accurate assessment see this author's "Defeating Balkan Insurgency: The Austro-Hungarian Army in BosniaHercegovina, 1878-1882," Journal of Strategic Studies, Sep. 2004.

27. Banac, National Question, 367.

28. Fikret Karcic, The Bosniaks and the Challenges of Modernity: Late Ottoman and Hapsburg Times (Sarajevo: El-Kalem, 1999). 119-125. From ra'is in Arabic (reis in Turkish), meaning head or chief.

29. Hajrudin &rid, Muslimansko skolstvo u Bosni i Hercegovini do 1918. godine (Sarajevo: Veselin Maslea, 1983), 189-286.

30. For the impact of education and the creation of the Bosnian intelligentsia see Ste ko M. Dzaja, Bosnien-Herzegowina in der osterreichisch-ungarischen Epoche (1878-1918): Die Intelligentsia zwischen Tradition and Ideologie (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994). The rise in Catholic population in Bosnia from 1878 to 1910 can be attributed to the presence of Habsburg military and civil officials, nearly all of whom were Catholics; very few Austrian subjects settled in Bosnia permanently.

31. Karcic, Bosniaks, 140-147; on the origins of Pan-Islamism see Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 149-150.

32. For a drum-and-trumpet treatment of Bosnians in the Habsburg military: Werner Schachinger, Die Bosniaken kommen!: Elitetruppe in der k.u.k. Armee 1879-1918 (Graz: Styria, 1989).

33. See Vladimir &rovid, Crna knjiga: patnje Srba Bosne i Hercegovine za vreme prvog svetskog rata (Belgrade: Jugoslovenska dosje, 1989).

34. On interwar Yugoslavia see Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars.

35. Malcolm, Bosnia, 167.

36. The definition can be found in the insightful introduction to Montasser al- Zayyat's The Road to Al-Qaeda: The Story of bin Ladens Right-Hand Man (London: Pluto, 2004), xiii.

37. For a brief history see Youssef H. Aboul-Enein, "Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimeen: The Muslim Brotherhood," Military Review, Jul-Aug 2003; see also Dilip Hiro, Holy Wars: The Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism (New York, Routledge, 1989), 61-63.

38. Sead Trhulj, Mladi Muslimani (Zagreb: Globus, 1992), 11; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 10 Feb 2000; Danz' (Sarajevo), 19 Apr 2002.

39. On the roots of the Ustashas and the NDH, see Jozo Tomasevich's magisterial War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001), 30-38, 335-379.

40. Malcolm, Bosnia, 185.

41. The official position was that Croats, and Bosnian Muslims too, were descended from Goths, since it was impolitic to be Slavs in Hitler's deeply Slavophobic Thousand Year Reich.

42. Tomasevich, Occupation and Collaboration, 380-415.

43. Marko Attila Hoare, "Whose is the Partisan Movement? Serbs, Croats and the Legacy of a Shared Resistance," Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Vol. 15, No. 4, Dec. 2002, 26-27.

44. The Chetnik movement is detailed well in Jozo Tomasevich's War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: The Chetniks (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1975).

45. For the detailed account see Enver Redzk, Muslimansko autonomastvo i 13. SS divizija: Autonomija Bosne i Hercegovine i Hitlerov Treci Rajh (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1987).

46. Enver Redzid, Bosna i Hercegovina u Drugom svjetskom ratu (Sarajevo: OKO, 1998), 169-179.

47. Handiar in Serbo-Croatian, from the term for a local sword of Turkish origin.

48. Sredko M. D~aja, Die politische Realitdt des Jugoslawismus (1918-1991): Mit besonderer Berucksichtigung Bosnian-Herzegowinas (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002), 226-227; this controversial unit's history is handled, from a German perspective, in George Lepre's Himmler's Bosnian Division: The Waffen-SS Handschar Division 1943-1945. (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 1997).

49. Svijet (Sarajevo), 18 Apr 1999.

50. Dani (Sarajevo), 16 Jul 1999.

51. Lepre, Himmler's Bosnian Division, 223-231, 317.

52. For an overview see Wolfgang Hopken, "Yugoslavia's Communists and the Bosnian Muslims" in Muslim Communities Reemerge: Historical Perspectives on Nationality, Politics and Opposition in the Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (A. Kappeler, G. Simon, G. Brunner, E. Allworth, eds.) (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1994).

53. Tone Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995), 220-224.

54. A look inside the files of the Bosnian secret police after 1991 revealed that the IZ was under firm State Security control throughout the Communist periodsee Aries Alic, "Spy Scandal," Transitions Online (Prague), 19 Nov 2003.

55. Zachary T. Irwin, "The Islamic Revival and the Muslims of BosniaHercegovina," East European Quarterly, XVII, No. 4, Jan 1984, 440-441.

56. The inaugural edition of El-Mudiahid is reprinted in Trhulj, Mladi Muslimani, 147-156.

57. D~aja, Die politische Realitdt, 232-233.

58. Trhulj, Mladi Muslimani, 57-70, 286; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 10 Jan 2002. There is also some suspicion that Izetbegovic avoided a longer sentence because Halida Repovac, his girlfriend whom he would marry in 1949, had family connections to the Communist Party.

59. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 10 Jan 2002.

60. Trhulj, Mladi Muslimani, 27-32, 383-390.

61. Dani (Sarajevo), 9 Jul 2004.

62. Smail Balid, Das unbekannte Bosnien: Europas Brucke zur islamischen Welt (Cologne: Bohlau, 1992), 21.

63. Most of the rest were Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo- Metohija (Kosova to the Albanians), while there were also Slavic Muslims living in the Serbian region of Raka, known in modern times as San&ak (from sancak, meaning banner in Turkish); Sandkak Muslims are historically, culturally, and linguistically very close to Bosnia's Muslims.

64. D~aja, Die politische Realitdt, 235-246.

65. Irwin, "The Islamic Revival," 447.

66. Serbo-Croatian, encompassing its Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian variants, was Communist Yugoslavia's main official language; although there are differences of vocabulary and script (for instance, Serbian is traditionally written in Cyrillic, while Croatian and Bosnian use the Latin alphabet), all dialects are mutually comprehensible, and are no further apart than American and British English. Declaring Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian to be separate languages-as happened in the 1990s with the fall of Tito's Yugoslavia-is a political, not a linguistic, matter.

67. Sabrina P. Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991 (2nd edition) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1992), 184-185.

68. Ibid., 185; Irwin, "The Islamic Revival," 449-451.

69. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 20 Dec 2001.

70. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 27 Sep 2001, 10 Jan 2002.

71. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 20 Dec 2001.

72. Alija Izetbegovid, Islamska deklaracija (Sarajevo: Bosna, 1990), see especially p. 32. For the interesting perspective of a State Security insider on the trial, see Munir Alibabid, Bosna u kandiama KOS-a (Sarajevo: Behar, 1996), 20-26.

73. Dani (Sarajevo), 15 Oct 1999, 22 Oct 1999; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 20 Dec 2001.

74. Svijet (Sarajevo), 18 Apr 1999.

75. Dani (Sarajevo), 18 Jun 1999; Sabrina P. Ramet, "Primordial Ethnicity or Modern Nationalism: The Case of Yugoslavia's Muslims, Reconsidered" in Muslim Communities Reemerge: Historical Perspectives on Nationality, Politics and Opposition in the Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (A. Kappeler, G. Simon, G. Brunner, E. Allworth, eds.) (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1994), 130; for an overview of the issues of the early 1980s, including the trial, see Alexandre Popovic, "Islamic Movements in Yugoslavia," in the same volume.

76. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 27 Jan 2000.

77. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 12 Aug 2004.

78. 1zethegovi(, Islamska deklaracija, 3-4.

79. Ibid., 19.

80. Ibid., 37, 33.

81. Ibid., 53.

82. Ibid., 54.

83. Malcolm, Bosnia, 219-221.

84. Alija Izetbegovic, Islam Between East and West (Indianapolis, IN: American Trust Publishers, 1984); Fouad Ajami, "In Europe's Shadows," in The Black Book of Bosnia: The Consequences of Appeasement, ed. N. Mousavizadeh (New York: New Republic, 1996), 51.

85. Alija Izetbegovic, Izetbegovic of Bosnia and Hercegovina: Notes from Prison 1983-1988 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002).

86. Dani (Sarajevo), 18 Jun 1999; for more detail on the rise of the SDA see Xavier Bougarel, "L Islam bosniaque, entre identite culturelle et ideologie politique," in Le nouvel islam balkanique: les musulmans, acteurs du post-communisme (1990-2000), eds. X. Bougarel and N. Clayer (Paris, Maisonneuve, 2001).

87. Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way, especially 18-23, 23-30, 149-154 for discussions of views in rural Bosnia; the author studied a Central Bosnian village populated by Muslims and Croats in 1987-1988.

88. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 3 Feb 2000.

89. Sloboda Bosna (Sarajevo), 27 Jan 2000.

90. Vreme (Belgrade), 9 Jun 1990.

91. The truth about the Agrokomerc scandal has never been revealed. It is possible that Belgrade's secret police did conspire to bring down Abdic's empire, but it is beyond doubt that the company and Abdic were engaged in bank fraud of a kind that was commonplace in Communist Yugoslavia, albeit in this case on a grand scale.

92. Mark Thompson, A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 98.

93. Ibid., 122.

94. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 10 Jan 2002.

95. Lucic, "Bosnia and Hercegovina and Terrorism," 123.

96. IRNA (Tehran), 27 Apr 1991.

97. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 10 Feb 2000, 30 Mar 2000.

98. Dani (Sarajevo), 16 Jul 1999.

Chapter 2: Framing Bosnia

1. For the full story see Pero Simi, Tito agent Kominterne (Belgrade, 1990); he was usually referred to as WALTER in Comintern messages, though also as "the Yugoslav friend"-e.g., National Security Agency Records, ISCOT 1192, 13 Nov 1943.

2. On wartime OZNa, see particularly Milovan Delebdid, Obavestajna sluz- ba u narodnooslobodilackom ratu 1941-1945 (Belgrade, 1987), 13-26, 132-142, 162-183, 266-269; also Gojko Miljanid, Rukovodjenje i komandovanje u oslobodilackom ratu 1941-1945 (Belgrade, 1980), 119-127.

3. See for instance Branislav Kovacevid, "0 Informbirou u Crnoj Gori" in 1948-/ugoslavija i Kominform: Petdeset godina kasniji, ed. R. Petrovic (Belgrade, 1998), 127-148.

4. Dennison Rusinow, The Yugoslav Experiment 1948-1974 (London, 1977), 183-190; or in more detail: Selim Numid, Dobra zemljo, Lazu: Do istine u brionskoj aferiprislulkivanja (Belgrade, 1989).

5. For a detailed examination of this problem from an official viewpoint see Milenko Doder, Jugoslavenska neprijatel ska emigracija (Zagreb, 1989).

6. Munir Alibabid, Bosna u kandzama KOS-a (Sarajevo: Behar, 1996), 18-19.

7. Domovina (Zagreb), 29 Jun 1993.

8. Adil Zulfikarpa§id, The Bosniak (London: Hurst & Co., 1998), 140; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 27 Jan 2000.

9. On these often lurid debates see Ljubo Boban, "Jasenovac and the Manipulation of History," East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 4, No. 3, Fall 1990.

10. The best discussion of the Milosevic phenomenon is Robert Thomas, The Politics of Serbia in the 1990s (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999), 32-51.

11. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 3 Feb 2000.

12. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 10 Feb 2000.

13. Mitja Velikonja, Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in BosniaHerzegovina (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 2003), 277.

14. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 18 Apr 2002.

15. See Aleksa Dijlas, "The Nation That Wasn't" in The Black Book of Bosnia: The Consequences of Appeasement, ed. N. Mousavizadeh (New York: New Republic, 1996).

16. Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (New York: Penguin, 1997), 213. This standard book, which offers a serviceable chronology of events through 1995, suffers from the usual bias of discussing Serbian nationalism at length, and placing blame exclusively with Karadzic and Milosevic, while ignoring Muslim radicalism altogether.

17. Tanjug (Belgrade), May 23, 1991.

18. Slovenia's phony war is summarized well in the CIA's unclassified history: Balkan Battlegrounds: A Military History of the Yugoslav Conflict, 1990-1995, Volume I (Washington, DC: CIA, 2002), 41-76. It should be noted that this is an exclusively military history that does not substantively address political or ethnic issues.

19. The background to the JNA's Croatian campaign is covered, unsympathetically but in detail, in Martin Spegelj, "The First Phase, 1990-1992: The JNA Prepares for Aggression and Croatia for Defense," in The War in Croatia and BosniaHercegovina 1991-1995, eds. B. Magag and I. Zanid` (London: Frank Cass, 2001). Spegelj, a retired JNA three-star general, was independent Croatia' first defense minister. See also Balkan Battlegrounds, 79-113.

20. Izetbegovic's double game is admitted even by Silber and Little, Yugoslavia, 217.

21. NIN (Belgrade), 12 Jun 1992.

22. Delo (Ljubljana), May 11, 1993. The best-placed KOS agent in Sarajevo appears to have been Alija Delimustafic, the Interior Minister, i.e. the head of Bosnia's police and security services. Delimustafic's loyalty had long been considered suspect by fellow SDA higher-ups, but this did not prevent Izetbegovic from relying on him for important tasks.

23. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 24 Feb 2000; for more see Alibabid, Bosna u kandzama KOS-a, 37-43: though the author overstates the impact of RAM, most of the details are correct.

24. Milisav Sekulik, Jugoslaviju niko nije branio a Vrhovna Komanda je izdala (Belgrade, 2000), 332-333.

25. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 27 Sep, 2 Oct, 5 Oct 1991.

26. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 10 Feb 2000.

27. For instance Norman Cigar's Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of "Ethnic Cleansing" (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 1995), a detailed account of Serbian complicity, completely avoids discussion of SDA and Muslim actions that caused the war.

28. Globus (Zagreb), 13 Aug 1993; Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995 (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2003), 158.

29. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 2 Mar 2000.

30. Dani (Sarajevo), 4 Aug 2000.

31. Bosnian Serbs were falling behind demographically in the Drina valley; for instance, between 1971 and 1991, the Serbian population relative to the Muslim in the neighboring municipalities of Srebrenica and Bratunac fell by a third and by a half, respectively, a decline many Serbs felt was attributable to Muslim pressure-see NIN (Belgrade), 13 Sep 1991.

32. Barba (Belgrade), 13 Sep 1991.

33. For a detailed account of the JNA's collapse in Bosnia, see Sekuli4, Jugoslaviju niko nije branio, 285-314.

34. NIN (Belgrade), 12 Jun 1992.

35. Tanjug (Belgrade), 19 Mar 1992.

36. Silber and Little, Yugoslavia, 219-220. Zimmermann seems to have been taken in by Izetbegovic's assurance that he didn't want a Muslim state in Bosnia: "We want a civil state based on the individual rights of citizens and the constitutional protection of minority rights."-Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 17 Feb 2000.

37. Dani (Sarajevo), 4 Aug 2000.

38. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 17 Feb, 24 Feb 2000.

39. Jovan Divjak, "The First Phase, 1992-1993: Struggle for Survival and Genesis of the Army of Bosnia-Hercegovina," in The War in Croatia and BosniaHercegovina 1991-1995, eds. B. Maga~ and I. Zanid (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 157.

Chapter 3: The Great Deceit

1. See Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, "America and Bosnia," The National Interest, Fall 1993, a level-headed piece on the war that received insufficient attention at the time.

2. On the murky and sinister alliance between the Milosevic regime, the Serbian SDB, and the paramilitaries see Robert Thomas, The Politics of Serbia in the 1990s (New York, Columbia Univ. Press, 1999), 93-106.

3. Aleksandar Vasiljevic, who has been remarkably forthcoming about KOS activities in Bosnia, debunked any notion of a JNA "plot" in the May 2-3, 1992 Sarajevo airport incident-Vreme (Belgrade), Jan 10, 1998.

4. Even pro-Sarajevo writers concede this was not the SDA's finest moment, though most present it as a "mistake"-see Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (New York: Penguin, 1997), 231-242.

5. Reporter (Banja Luka), May 21, 2002.

6. Vreme (Belgrade), Jul 27, 1992; Delo (Ljubljana), Apr 24, 1993; NIN (Belgrade), 16 Apr 1993. Vasiljevic was later fully rehabilitated and in the late 1990s became an intelligence adviser to Slobodan Milosevic, whose motivations for framing the KOS chief in 1992 have never been made clear.

7. See Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001), 751-788, for a balanced discussion of "cleansing" operations by Tito's forces in the spring of 1945. For a nasty example see this author's "Yugoslavia's First Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of the Danubian Germans 1944-1946" in S. B. Vardy and T. H. Tooley (eds.), Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2003).

8. Balkan Battlegrounds: A Military History of the Yugoslav Conflict, 1990-1995.Volume II (Washington, DC: CIA, 2003), 306.

9. A good example of the overheated coverage of "ethnic cleansing" can be found in Silber and Little, Yugoslavia, 244-257.

10. Balkan Battlegrounds: A Military History of the Yugoslav Conflict, 1990-1995, Volume I (Washington, DC: CIA, 2002), 145-147.

11. Milisav Sekul4 Jugoslaviju niko nije branio a Vrhovna Komanda je izdala (Belgrade, 2000), 305.

12. The Foggy Bottom backstory is told well in George Kenney, "How Media Misinformation Led to Bosnian Intervention," Living Marxism, Apr 1997.

13. Ibid.

14. George Kenney, "The Bosnia Calculation," The New York Times Magazine, 23 Apr 1995.

15. "102.000 drept in Bosnia," NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corp.), 14 Nov 2004.

16. Reuters, 10 Dec 2004.

17. Bosnia's 1941-1945 deaths included 209,000 Serbs, 79,000 Croats, 75,000 Muslims, and 19,000 others, mainly Jews-Jozo 7omasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001), 737-739.

18. Kenney, "Media Misinformation."

19. This wisdom is from Gen. Charles G. Boyd, USAF, who served as Deputy Commander of U.S. European Command from late 1992 to mid-1995; see his "Making Peace With the Guilty," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 74, No. 50, Sep/Oct 1995.

20. For a good example of shoddy, poorly researched work on this topic: Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996). There is of course no men tion of crimes committed against Serbs. Bosnian Serb accounts featured horrors such as fathers forced to rape their daughters, but received no media attention. In December 1992, Patriarch Pavle of the Serbian Orthodox Church informed members of the Swiss parliament and representatives of European religious movements that eight hundred Serb women had been documented as repeat-rape victims in twenty camps whose locations had been identified; although this was formally reported to the UN, the story received no attention in the West.

21. Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both, Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime (New York: Penguin, 1996), 79.

22. Borba (Belgrade), 15 Apr 1995.

23. Silber and Little, Yugoslavia, 265-267.

24. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 27 Apr 2000.

25. Sarajevo rarely referred to their enemies as Serbs and Croats, but as Chetniks and Ustashas; for their part, the Serbs called the Muslims "Turks," as they had been known until only a century before; soon the Croats called them Turks too. An important subtext to the debate was the urban-versus-rural aspect of the war. The mainly rural Bosnia Serbs were seen by urban Sarajevans-who were mostly but not exclusively Muslims-as a bunch of uncouth hicks, while the Serbs saw their enemy in Bosnia's capital as city slickers. This was a motif immediately understood by Western intellectuals, nearly all secular urbanites whose contempt for simple country folk was undisguised.

26. Dusko Doder and Louise Branson, Milosevic: Portrait of a Tyrant (New York: Free Press, 1999), 91.

27. Tucker and Hendrickson, "America and Bosnia," has several such quotes from people who really ought to have known better.

28. David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 12.

29. For instance Sabrina Petra Ramet, "The Yugoslav Crisis and the West: Avoiding `Vietnam' and Blundering into 'Abyssinia'," East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 8, No. 1, Winter 1994, 203.

30. Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia's War (New York: St. Martin's, 1994), 291; Ramer, "The Yugoslav Crisis," 217-218. The strange alliance between Western Leftists and radical Islamists dates to the 1970s, when Michel Foucault inexplicably praised the Iranian revolutionary regime as "democratic" and even hailed Tehran's reactionary policies on gender-Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, "The Seductions of Islamism: Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution," New Politics, Vol. 10, No. 1, Summer 2004.

31. Adil Zulfikarpasic, The Bosniak (London: Hurst & Co., 1998), 160.

32. The Yale Daily News (New Haven), 15 Oct 1998. Vulliamy became such an SDA partisan that he later testified at the war crimes tribunal in the Hague, though he rued that he'd actually done too little: "We wrote about it, but it was not enough."

33. For the full ethical debate: Ann Grier Cutter, "Journalists: Must They Remain Neutral in Conflict?" United Nations Chronicle, Vol. 36, No. 2, 1999.

34. See Peter Brock, "Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press," Foreign Polity, No. 93, Winter 1993-1994.

35. Ibid.

36. John Burns of the New York Times, who received a Pulitzer for his Bosnian reportage, on November 26, 1992, published an article based on a account given by Borislav Herak, a VRS soldier who confessed to multiple rapes and murders. What Burns failed to report was that Herak made his allegations while in Muslim custody, and furthermore the prisoner included astonishing revelations such as the rape of several Muslim women by General MacKenzie-the last was deemed too odd, and was omitted from the article. Why Burns considered everything else Herak said credible was never clear.

37. A rare exception was Leonard Doyle's "Muslims `Slaughter Their Own People'," The Independent (London), 22 Aug 1992.

38. Alexandre del Valle, Le totalitarianisme islamiste: a l'assault des democraties (Paris: Syrtes, 2002), 341-323.

39. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 26 Oct 2001; also Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand.- The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington, DC: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001), Chapter 3.

40. Le Monde Diplomatiyue (Paris), May 15, 2002.

41. See Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand, Chapter 3, for a dissection of Esposito's work. As one commentator noted of Esposito's The Islamic Threat.- Myth or Reality?, "The book is based on the same dishonesty as soft-core pornography. Despite its apparently daring title, it promises more than it can deliver, and we know in advance what its answer will be without opening the book."-Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), 12.

42. John Esposito, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2002), 151.

43. Some Orthodox and their defenders asserted that the Roman Catholic Church had been not overly concerned about the fate of Balkan Christians under Ottoman rule, seeing the Vatican's behavior in the 1990s vis-a-vis Bosnia to be more of the same-Bat Ye'or, "Myths and Politics: The Origin of the Myth of a Tolerant Pluralistic Islamic Society," paper presented at the International Strategic Studies Association (Chicago), 31 Aug 1995.

44. Reprinted in NIN (Belgrade), 19 Jun 1992.

45. "Virtuous Muslim State" was reprinted in its entirety in Front slobode (Tuzla), 23 Aug. 1996.

46. Doder and Branson, Milosevic, 92.

47. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 23 Aug 2004.

48. Novi list (Zagreb), 16 Apr 1993.

49. Dani (Sarajevo), 2 Jul 1999.

50. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 17 Aug 2002; Dani (Sarajevo), 2 Jul 1999.

51. This conflict is outlined clearly, albeit with detectable sympathy for Sarajevo, in Balkan Battlegrounds, 189-207.

52. AFP (Paris), 12 Nov 1993.

53. The quote is from Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of "Ethnic Cleansing" (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 1995), 137.

54. Nedje jna Dalmacija (Split), 12 Dec 1997; Slobodna Dalmacija (Split), 8 Sep 2000.

55. Dnevni list (Mostar), 10 Jun 2004.

56. See the image of Jesus with an oversized phallus at Dossier: Zlocini musli- manskih postrojbi nad Hrvatima is BiH 1993-1994 (Mostar: Centar za istra~ivanje i dokumentaciju, 1999), 88.

57. Vjesnik (Zagreb), 24 Jul 1996.

58. Nedjeljna Dalmacija (Split), 12 Dec 1997.

59. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 24 Oct 2000; Globus (Zagreb), 7 Apr 2000; Dossier, op. cit., has detailed coverage of all documented Muslim crimes against Croats; Grabovica is found on 110-115.

60. Jovan Divjak, "The First Phase, 1992-1993: Struggle for Survival and Genesis of the Army of Bosnia-Hercegovina," in The War in Croatia and BosniaHercegovina 1991-1995, eds. B. Maga§ and I. Zanid (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 160-162.

61. Vreme (Belgrade), 10 Jan 1994.

62. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 27 Apr 2000.

63. Dani (Sarajevo), 7 Jan 2000.

64. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 8 Mar 1996, 20 Apr 2000, 27 Apr 2000.

65. Munir Alibabid, Bosna u kandiama KOS-a (Sarajevo: Behar, 1996), 62-77; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 20 Apr 2000.

66. Vreme (Belgrade), 29 Aug 1994.

67. Dani (Sarajevo), 18 Jul 2003.

68. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 13 Apr 2003; Nezavisne novine revija (Banja Luka), May 21, 2001.

69. John E. Sray, "Selling the Bosnian Myth to America: Buyer Beware," Ft. Leavenworth, KS, Oct 1995. Lieutenant Colonel Sray, who served in wartime Sarajevo with the UN, published several articles questioning U.S. policy in Bosnia though the Army's Foreign Military Studies Office.

70. See Brock, "Dateline Yugoslavia" for details of Sarajevo's PR strategy.

71. This wasn't Mo's first run-in with New Orleans police, with whom he had a record dating to his time as a student at Tulane University-Emir Kaganovich, "Taking Out the Trash: The Scandal of Bosnia's First Family," Sobaka (diacritica.com), March 23, 2002; U.S. News & World Report, May 15, 2000.

72. See the analysis in David Binder, "Thoughts on United States Policy Towards Yugoslavia," The South Slav Journal, Vol. 16, No. 61-62, Autumn/Winter 1995.

73. Ramet, "Yugoslav Crisis," 197.

74. Ibid., 205.

75. See the diplomatic background presented in John Mearsheimer and Stephen Van Evera, "The Partition That Dare Not Speak Its Name: When Peace Means War," The New Republic, 5 Dec 1995.

76. Vreme (Belgrade), 27 Jun 1994.

77. Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995 (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2003), 61.

78. Ramet, "Yugoslav Crisis," 206-210.

79. Silber and Little, Yugoslavia, 287.

80. Wiebes, Intelligence, 63-64.

81. Ibid., 64-65.

82. Ibid., 65.

83. See Tucker and Hendrickson, "America and Bosnia," for an analysis of these underlying themes.

84. A well-reasoned critique of "lift and strike" is found in Kenney's "Bosnia Calculation."

Chapter 4! With Koran and Kalashnikov

1. Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), 72-73.

2. Emir Kaganovich, "Jihad on Jihad: Theology Goes Tabloid," Sobaka (diacrit- ica.com), 19 Dec 2001.

3. Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 32.

4. Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), 11-12.

5. Tanjug (Belgrade), 12 Apr 1993. As observed by the French scholar Jacques Ellul, "the jihad is an institution and not an event, that is to say it is part of the normal functioning of the Muslim world"-Bat Ye'or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude: SeventhTwentieth Centuries (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson Univ. Press, 1996), 19.

6. Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 131.

7. The history and beliefs of the Salafi movement are encapsulated in The Encyclopedia of Islam, Vol. VII (C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs, G. Lecomte, eds.) (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 900-908.

8. See James Bruce, "Arab Veterans of the Afghan War," Jane's Intelligence Review, Apr 1995.

9. On the roots of the Islamic Group, see Barry Rubin, Islamic Fundamentalism in Egyptian Politics (New York: St Martin's, 199), particularly Chapter 4.

10. The Afghan origins of al-Qa'ida are explained in Malise Ruthven's excellent A Fury For God: The Islamist Attack on America (London: Granta, 2002), 202-212. Additionally, Chapter 3 tells the story of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Islamist and militant hater of all things Western, who ought to be considered the spiritual godfather of al-Qa'ida and other like-minded Islamist groups.

11. Vecernji list (Zagreb), 23 Oct 2001. It is frequently difficult to determine the fate-or even true identity-of senior mujahidin due to the widespread use of noms deguerre, for reasons of both bravado and security.

12. Esad Hecimovic, the leading expert on the international jihad waged in Bosnia, considers that the use of the term al-Qa'ida to describe the diverse Islamist organization that fought in the Balkans may be misleading, except when referring to top leadership-Yedi'otAharonot (Tel Aviv), 21 Dec 2001.

13. Glas srpske (Banja Luka), 1 Dec 2004.

14. Danas (Zagreb), 19 Feb 1993.

15. Interview with ESC TV (Cairo), 16 Aug 1995.

16. Al-Sharq al-Awsat (London), 10 Sep 1992.

IT The New York Times, 23 Aug 1992; Newsweek, 5 Oct 1992.

18. Rose al-Yusuf (Cairo), 20 Nov 1992; on Rahman and his influence see Paul Wilkinson, "Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiyya-Egypt and the Challenge of Islam," Jane's Intelligence Review, Jun 1993.

19. The Dallas Morning News, 22 Jul 2004; "Al-Qa'ida Recruited U.S. Servicemen," Intelwire.com, 6 Jan 2004. Phillips remains active in jihadi circles, and currently runs the Islamic Online University.

20. Vecernji list (Zagreb), 18 Apr 2001.

21. Dani (Sarajevo), May 14, 2004. Until 9/11, Abdullah bin Laden was in the Washington, DC, area, managing the local office of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), another al-Qa'ida front whose U.S. headquarters were located in Herndon, VA. After 9/11, WAMY was blacklisted by the U.S. government for its ties to al-Qa'ida.

22. Glas srpske (Banja Luka), 4 Dec 2004; MENA (Cairo), 12 Jul 1995; Tanjug (Belgrade), May 24, 1996; Rose alYusuf (Cairo), 20 Nov 1992.

23. Al-Sharq al-Awsat (London), 8 Jun 2000; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 15 Jan 2004.

24. Al-Ahram al-Masai (Cairo), 14 Jun 1993.

25. Der Spiegel, 15 Sep 2001; Politika (Belgrade), 5 Oct 2001.

26. Globus (Zagreb), 12 Oct 2001. A photo of bin Laden and Izetbegovic meeting has been published in the magazine Slobodna Bosna; it is fuzzy but appears to be genuine.

27. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 20 Sep 2001.

28. Zavrta (Moscow), No. 52, Dec 1996. Interestingly, Raduyev took a dim view of Izetbegovic, whom he described as "a schizo."

29. To cite Bernard Lewis's helpful "imaginary parallel": "Imagine that the Ku Klux Klan or some similar group obtains total control of the state of Texas, of its oil and therefore of its oil revenues, and having done so, uses this money to establish a network of well-endowed schools and colleges all over Christendom, peddling their peculiar brand of Christianity."-The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 129.

30. Montasser al-Zayyat, The Road to Al-Qaeda: The Story of bin Laden's RightHand Man (London: Pluto, 2004), 11.

31. Al-Sirat al-Mustaqeem (The Straight Path online), Aug 1994.

32. Dani (Sarajevo), 13 Dec 2002.

33. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 2 Feb 2002; Dani (Sarajevo), 2 Nov 2001.

34. The term (les ONG d'Allah) was coined by Alexandre del Valle, Le totalitarianisme islamiste: a l'assault des democraties (Paris: Syrtes, 2002), 140-143.

35. From the IIRO's Arabic name-Al-Hay'at al-Igatha al-Islamiyya al- Alamiyya (World Islamic Relief Organization).

36. Intelligence Online (Paris), 12 Sep 2002; The Wall Street Journal (New York), May 11, 2004.

37. Al-Quds al-Arabi (London), 18 Mar 2005, 19 Mar 2005.

38. U.S. News -World Report, 15 Dec 2003; Dani (Sarajevo), 12 Sep 2003; see also Jerome Bellion-Jourdan, "Les reseaux transnationaux islamiques en Bosnie- Herzegovine," in Le nouvel islam balkanique: les musulmans, acteurs du post-communisme (1990-2000), eds., X. Bougarel and N. Clayer, eds. (Paris: Maisonneuve, 2001), 440-446, 451-455.

39. Dani (Sarajevo), 6 Dec 2002.

40. Vecernji list (Zagreb), 16 Oct 2001.

41. There was only one significant exception to the hysteria about Bosnia throughout Islam: the ever-unpredictable Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddhafi told Izetbegovic he should keep Bosnia in Yugoslavia and avert a civil war.-Vecernji list (Zagreb), 19 Sep 1992.

42. Bellion-Jourdan, "Les reseaux transnationaux islamiques," 434; Danas (Zagreb), 23 Jul 1993.

43. A term coined by Antoine Basbous in his useful LArabie Saoudite en question: Du Wahhabisme a Bin Laden, aux origins de la tourmente (Paris: Perrin: 202), 21. His discussion of Morocco as a case study on the export of Wahhabism into a religiously moderate society, found on pages 146-159, is especially good.

44. Nacional (Zagreb), 1 Nov 1996.

45. Dilip Hiro, Holy Wars: The Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 218-219.

46. Jomhuriye eslami (Tehran), 3 Jun 1990.

47. Dani (Sarajevo), 8 Jun 1998.

48. The Tehran Times, 16 Jun 1993.

49. Iran's Bosnian adventure is outlined in Alireza Bagherzadeh, "L'ingerence iranienne en Bosnie-Herzegovine," in Le nouvel islam balkanique: les musulmans, acteurs du post-communisme (1990-2000), eds., X. Bougarel and N. Clayer (Paris: Maisonneuve, 2001).

50. Der Spiegel (Hamburg), 10 Oct 1994; for background see Carl Anthony Wege, "Iranian Intelligence Organizations," International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 10, No. 3, Fall 1997.

51. From Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enghelab-e Islami.

52. Mohammad Mohadessin, Islamic Fundamentalism: The New Global Threat (Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press, 1993), 102.

53. See Al Venter, "Iran still exporting terrorism to spread its Islamic vision," Jane's Intelligence Review, Nov 1997; also Time Europe, 11 Nov 1996.

54. Edgar O'Ballance, Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorism, 1979-95: The Iranian Connection (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1997), 146-147, 159-161; Mohadessin, Islamic Fundamentalism, 117-118; AFP (Paris), 16 Jul 1989; Die Tageszeitung (Berlin), 20 Dec 1993; on Ahmedinejad see Profil (Vienna), 11 Jul 2005.

55. Belfield escaped and fled abroad, winding up in Iran and fighting in the Afghan jihad. Bizarrely, he seems to have acted in the Iranian film Kandahar, an acclaimed 2001 release-TIME, 19 Dec 2001.

56. O'Ballance, Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorism, 153-155; James Bruce, "Iran's covert acts proving intolerable," Jane's Intelligence Review, Aug 1996.

57. For the background: Paul Wilkinson, "Hezbollah-A Critical Appraisal," Jane's Intelligence Review, Aug 1993. The financial figure comes from Venter, "Iran still exporting terrorism."

58. The Jerusalem Report, 25 Mar 2002; Al-Sharp al-Awsat (London), 18 Feb 2003.

59. Versiya (Moscow), 29 Apr 2002; Yedi'otAharonot (Tel Aviv), 19 Oct 2001.

60. La Naci6n (Buenos Aires), 12 Apr 2003; The Jerusalem Post, 12 Feb 2004; 0 Globo (Rio do Janeiro), 19 Sep 2001; Ha'aretz (Tel Aviv), 11 Mar 2003; The Toronto Star, 23 Jul 2003.

61. See Thomas Hunter, "International terrorist training camps," Jane's Intelligence Review, Mar 1997.

62. Le Quotidien d'Oran (Oran), 10 Sep 2000.

63. London Press Association, 1 Jun 1994.

64. Dani (Sarajevo), 12 Sep 2003; Globus (Zagreb), 30 Jan 2004.

65. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 18 Apr 2002; Tom Hunter, "The embargo that wasn't: Iran's arms shipments into Bosnia," Jane's Intelligence Review, Dec 1997.

66. Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995 (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2003), 159-160.

67. Ibid., 158-159.

68. Ibid., 160; Hunter, "The embargo that wasn't."

69. For instance Delo (Ljubljana), 29 Jan 1993, which had early coverage of the Iranian arms pipeline into Bosnia.

70. Wiebes, Intelligence, 164.

71. Ibid., 166.

72. Dani (Sarajevo), 4 Apr 2003.

73. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 18 Apr 2002.

74. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 28 Mar 2002.

75. Al-Safer (Beirut), 10 Jun 1996.

76. See Nimrod Raphaeli, "Radical Islamist Profiles (3): Ayman Muhammad Rabi' AI-Zawahiri: The Making of an Arch-Terrorist," Middle East Media Research Institute (memri.org), 11 Mar 2003.

77. IRNA (Tehran), 4 Jun 1993.

78. Dani (Sarajevo), 4 Aug 2000.

79. The Guardian (London), 16 Jun 1994; Radio BH (Sarajevo), 31 Jan 1994; Dani (Sarajevo), 8 Mar 2002; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 12 Dec 1998.

80. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 28 Sep 2000.

Chapter 5: MOS and Mujahidin

1. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 20 Dec 2001; Dani (Sarajevo), 1 Oct 1999.

2. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 20 Dec 2001, 19 Feb 2004.

3. Nezavisne novine (Banja Luka), 26 Nov 2004; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 19 Feb 2004; Focus (Berlin), 30 Nov 1996.

4. Substantial portions of the report are published in Dani (Sarajevo), 13 Sep 2002, with analysis by Esad Hecimovic, the leading reporter investigating the Bosnian jihad and its finances. See Veeernji list (Zagreb), May 21, 2004, for addition details on the report.

5. Nezavisne novine (Banja Luka), Nov. 25, 2004.

6. Mlada fronta dnes (Prague), 9 Dec 2003, May 15, 2004.

7. Dani (Sarajevo), 8 Dec 2000; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 2 Nov 1997; Profil (Vienna), 24 Sep 2001.

8. See for instance Nezavisne novine (Banja Luka), 26 Nov 2004, 30 Nov 2004.

9. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 19 Feb 2004.

10. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 2 Nov 1997; Dani (Sarajevo), 13 Sep 2002.

11. Transcripts of financial conversations between Sahinpasic and SDA leaders, including Izetbegovic, apparently taken from wartime telephone intercepts by German and Austrian intelligence, were published in Reporter (Banja Luka), 19 Jan 2005.

12. Dani (Sarajevo), 12 Sep 2002; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 30 Mar 2000, 8 Apr 2004.

13. Kurier (Vienna), 8 Oct 1995, 6 Oct 1996; Profil (Vienna), 24 Sep 2001; Dani (Sarajevo), 13 Sep 2002.

14. See Milan Vego, "The Muslim Defence Industry in Bosnia and Herzegovina," Jane's Intelligence Review, May 1994.

15. The South Asia Tribune, 22 Dec 2002; Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995 (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2003), 180-181.

16. L'Europeo (Milan), 20 Apr 1994; Danas (Zagreb), 6 Aug 1993.

17. Nacional (Zagreb), 13 Aug 2002; Globus (Zagreb), 13 Aug 1993; Kurier (Vienna), 8 Oct 1995.

18. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), May 22, 2003; Vecernje novosti (Belgrade), 26 Nov 1996. Msgr. Antun Benvin of the Vatican College of San Girolamo-the Croatian Catholic institute behind the 1950s "ratline"-was reported to have died by hanging, under mysterious circumstances, in October 1996, when his involvement with Trieste Credit Bank and its Bosnian jihad connection came to light.

19. Tanjug (Belgrade), 21 Jan 1990.

20. Munir Alibabid, Bosna u kandzama KOS-a (Sarajevo: Behar); Sefer Halilovid`. Lukava strategija (Sarajevo: Mar al, 1997), 70, 76-77 (General Staff Order 13/37-65 is reprinted on p. 221); Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 8 Aug 1998, 24 Jul 1999; Dnevni avaz (Sarajevo), 5 Mar 2000. Alibabid, head of the Sarajevo State Security office during most of the war, advocates the view that Muslimovi was a Belgrade plant, and was under KOS control throughout the conflict.

21. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 5 Apr 2001; Delo (Ljubljana), 17 Jul 1993, 23. Nov 1993. In 1993, a Slovene journalist, taken on an official tour of a mujahidin camp near Tuzla populated by Arabs, saw Muslimovic and other SDA notables onsite, making no effort to hide their presence.

22. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 12 Dec 1998.

23. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 29 May 1996.

24. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 26 Jun 1999, 24 Jul 1999, 4 Oct 2001.

25. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 5 Apr 2001, 20 Dec 2001.

26. The Chicago Tribune, 31 Mar 2004.

27. The Los Angeles Times, 28 Sep 2003; The Chicago Tribune, 22 Feb 2004; The Financial Times (London), 11 Sep 2003; Nezavisne novine (Banja Luka), 20 Mar 2003; The Miami Herald, 19 Feb 2003.

28. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 5 Feb 2004, 19 Feb 2004.

29. For instance Vecernji list (Zagreb), 10 Apr 1996.

30. For a detailed first-person account by a fighter with the small group of Russian mercenaries serving with the VRS: M. M. Gorymov, Russkie dobrovol'tsy v Bosnii 1992-1995 gg. (Moscow: Vestnik, 1997).

31. Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell.' Understanding Bosnia's War (New York: St Martin's, 1994), 65; Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed.- Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (2nd edition) (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998), 101.

32. No Lucic, "Bosnia and Hercegovina and Terrorism," National Security and the Future, Vol. 3-4, No. 2, 2001, 126.

33. Dani (Sarajevo), 13 Dec 2002.

34. Dani (Sarajevo), 30 Mar 1998; The Sunday Times (London), 28 Oct 2001.

35. Corriere delta Sera (Milan), 18 Oct 2001; Il Giornale (Milan), 20 Mar 2004.

36. II Giornale (Milan), 7 Nov 2001; Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 24 Mar 2004; La Repubblica (Rome), 23 Sep 2004.

37. Nacional (Zagreb), 27 Sep 2001.

38. Dani (Sarajevo), 20 Aug 1999.

39. It should be noted that Muslims, especially radical ones, dislike the term convert, preferring "new Muslim," as they believe all people are Muslims; some of us just don't know it yet.

40. The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, 28 Jun 2003; Joe Kaufman, "Conversations with a Terrorist," frontpagemag.com, 8 Jun 2004.

41. Hrvatski obzor (Zagreb), 1 Nov 1997; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 15 Jan 2004; Dnevni avaz (Sarajevo), 23 Mar 2005.

42. Bild am Sonntag (Hamburg), 19 Sep 2004.

43. Nacional (Zagreb), 18 Sep 2001; Glas javnosti (Belgrade), 30 Sep 2001.

44. Radio Bosne i Hercegovine (Sarajevo), 16 Nov 1993.

45. Dani (Sarajevo), 29 Nov 2002; Vecernji list (Zagreb), 16 Oct 2003.

46. The Times (London), 21 Oct 1994.

47. The Daily Telegraph (London), 29 Dec 1993; Wiebes, Intelligence, 78.

48. Dnevni avaz (Sarajevo), 7 Feb 1997. The unit's designation in Bosnian is sedma muslimanska brigada; many sources, including CIA publications, erroneously refer to a "7th Muslimski Brigade."

49. Radio Bosne i Hercegovine (Sarajevo), 11 Nov 1993.

50. Bosnjak (Travnik), 28 Nov 1995.

51. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 5 Apr 1996; Bosnjak (Travnik), 28 Nov 1995.

52. The Times (London), 21 Oct 1994.

53. Wiebes, Intelligence, 211.

54. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 27 Oct 2000, 28 Feb 2002.

55. Globus (Zagreb), 7 Apr 2000.

56. Slobodna Dalmacija (Split), 12 Sep 2000.

57. For an only moderately sanctimonious account of this celebrated doublemurder: Slavenka Drakulic, "Love Story," in The Black Book of Bosnia: The Consequences of Appeasement, ed. N. Mousavizadeh (New York: New Republic, 1996).

58. Globus (Zagreb), 7 Apr 2000.

59. See Halilovi is memoir, Lukava strategija, 45-53; also Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 31 Oct 1998, 2 Mar 2000.

60. Novi list (Rijeka), 12 Jul 2000.

61. Vjesnik (Zagreb), 5 Jan 1994; Vreme (Belgrade), 10 Jan 1994; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 11 Sep 2003.

Chapter 6: Not-So-Secret Secrets

1. Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995 (LIT Verlag: Munster, 2003), 192.

2. The Daily Telegraph (London), 20 Apr 1997.

3. Le Figaro (Paris), 7 Dec 1994.

4. David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 38.

5. Ljiljan (Sarajevo), 24 Oct 2003.

6. AFP (Paris), 22 May 1994, 27 May 1994.

7. See Charles G. Boyd, "Making Peace With the Guilty," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 74, No. 50, Sep/Oct 1995 for an informed dissection of this viewpoint.

8. Wiebes, Intelligence, 163.

9. Ibid., 164. For a U.S. military critique of the Clinton Administration's prejudices: John E. Stay, "U.S. Policy and the Bosnian Civil War: A Time for Reevaluation" (U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office: Leavenworth, KS, 1995).

10. Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the U.S. Role in Iranian Arms Transfers to Croatia and Bosnia ("The Iranian Green Light Subcommittee') Report, Committee on International Relations, U.S. House of Representatives, October 1996, 164-167.

11. Wiebes, Intelligence, 166-168; Final Report, 167, 177.

12. The details of the State-CIA struggle over the "green light" is dissected in admirable detail in U.S. Actions Regarding Iranian and Other Arms Transfers to the Bosnian Army, 1994-1995, Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. Senate, November 1996.

13. Wiebes, Intelligence, 167-168.

14. Ibid., 169.

15. Ibid., 170-171.

16. Ibid., 173-174, 192, 197.

17. Ibid., 185-187; Dani (Sarajevo), 17 Aug 1998.

18. Wiebes, Intelligence, 193-197.

19. Final Report, 167-169, 175-178.

20. Wiebes, Intelligence, 66-69.

21. Ibid., 198-205.

22. Ekspres (Belgrade), 20 Mar 2002.

23. Vjesnik (Zagreb), 5 Sep 1994.

24. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 2 Nov 1997.

25. Slobodna Dalmacija (Split), 15 Nov 1994.

26. A good example of this is Sabrina Petra Ramet, "The Yugoslav Crisis and the West: Avoiding `Vietnam' and Blundering into Abyssinia'," East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 8, No. 1, Winter 1994, 209-213, a detailed explanation and critique of U.S. policies which fails to mention the Islamic factor altogether.

27. Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 96.

28. Ibid., 136-137. Even Steve Emerson, the truth-telling head of the Investigative Project, the Washington, DC-based independent think thank that studies radical Islam and terrorism, adheres to the "good Bosnians, bad mujahidin" hypothesis, presumably based on inadequate study and no capacity to read Balkan languages. Even the experts generally give the Bosnian jihad short shrift, to include the otherwise worthy Emerson.

29. See the whole story in H. K. Roy, "Betrayal in the Balkans," The World and I, Aug 2001.

30. Vecernji list (Zagreb), 12 Nov 2001.

31. Alison Freebairn, "`No Trace' of Mujahidin," Institute for War and Peace Reporting, 28 May 2004.

32. This basic, if unfortunate truth is summarized well in an article by the intelligence scholar Richard Aldrich in The Guardian (London), 22 Apr 2002.

Chapter 7: Bosnia: The Real War

1. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 7 Aug 1999.

2. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 2 May 2002, 29 May 2003.

3. Maktouf was arrested in June 2004 in Sarajevo, after returning from Canada-Dani (Sarajevo), 7 Jun 2002; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 17 Jun 2004.

4. Dani (Sarajevo), 18 Jun 1999.

5. Dani (Sarajevo), 2 Jul 1999.

6. Dani (Sarajevo), 25 Jun 1999.

7. A photo of this strange event, including Alija and Halida Izetbegovic and a burqa-clad "model," appeared in Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 23 Aug 2004.

8. Globus (Zagreb), 13 Oct 1995.

9. Vlach is an insult roughly equivalent to Mark Fuhrman's infamous Nword-Dani (Sarajevo), 23 Jun 2000.

10. Dani (Sarajevo), 26 May 2000.

11. Mitja Velikonja, Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in BosniaHerzegovina (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 2003), 277-278; Adil Zulfikarpasic, The Bosniak (London: Hurst & Co, 1998), 161.

12. Republika (Ljubljana), 18 Dec 1994.

13. Slobodna Dalmacija (Split), 20 Oct 1993.

14. Munir Alibabicd, Bosna u kandiama KOS-a (Sarajevo: Behar, 1996), 117.

15. Dani (Sarajevo), 3 Mar 2000, 5 Jan 2001.

16. Marko Attila Hoare, "Civilian-Military Relations in Bosnia-Hercegovina 1992-1995," in The War in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina 1991-1995 (B. Maga and I. 2anic, eds.) (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 198-199.

17. Dani (Sarajevo), 2 Jul 1999-Anyone who has spent any time among Bosnians knows the absurdity of Izetbegovic's statement. Bosnians of all ethno-religious backgrounds have an exceptionally robust and inventive vocabulary of obscenities involving God, the F-word, and usually someone's mother.

18. Marko Attila Hoare, "Whose is the Partisan Movement? Serbs, Croats and the Legacy of a Shared Resistance," Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Vol. 15, No. 4, Dec 2002, 39.

19. Dani (Sarajevo), 23 Apr 1997.

20. SRNA (Belgrade), 10 Jul 1995.

21. Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 38.

22. Gojko Beric, "The State Religion," Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Apr 1996.

23. Die Tageszeitung (Berlin), 8 Feb 1995.

24. See Christopher Collinson, "Bosnia this Winter-A Military Analysis," Jane's Intelligence Review, Dec 1993.

25. See Emir Kaganovich, "Fragments from the Fire: Surviving Tuzla, 1992-1995," Sobaka (diacritica.com), 19 Apr 2002.

26. Dani (Sarajevo), 25 Jun 1999.

27. Globus (Zagreb), 26 Feb 1993.

28. Vecernji list (Zagreb), 21 Sep 1993.

29. See Charles G. Boyd, "Making Peace With the Guilty," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 74, No. 50, Sep/Oct 1995.

30. George Kenney, "The Bosnia Calculation," The New York Times Magazine, 23 Apr 1995.

31. Vreme (Belgrade), 29 Aug 1994.

32. Republika (Ljubljana), 18 Dec 1994.

33. Al-Sharq al-Awsat (London), 20 Nov 2001.

34. Rose al-Yusuf (Cairo), 20 Nov 1992; Dani (Sarajevo), 20 Aug 1999; Thomas Hunter, "International terrorist training camps," Jane's Intelligence Review, Mar 1997.

35. Al-Quds al-Arabi (London), 24 Jun 1996; Al-Bilad (Amman), 22 Jun 1994.

36. Wprost (Warsaw), 6 Jun 2004.

37. Al-Watan al-Arabi (Paris), 8 Mar 1996.

38. AFP (Paris), 16 Dec 1993.

39. L'Fxpress (Paris), 5 Jun 1996.

40. Le Monde (Paris), 31 May 2000.

41. Liberation (Paris), 19 Aug 1995.

42. Le Soir (Brussels), 6 Mar 1998.

43. Le Soir (Brussels), 25 Oct 1996; Al-Hayah (London), 28 Nov 2001.

44. La Libre Belgique (Brussels), 22 Nov 1999; Le Figaro (Paris), 10 Feb 2004.

45. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 24 Mar 2004; Liberation (Paris), 4 Oct 2001.

46. Le ViJIL'Express (Brussels), 15 Nov 1996; Le Figaro (Paris), 2 Apr 1996.

47. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 1 Oct 2004; AFP (Paris), I Mar 1997; Le Figaro (Paris), 10 Feb 2004, 10 Feb 2005.

Chapter 8: From the Drina to Dayton

1. Dnevni list (Mostar), 8 Mar 2002. The strange war waged around Bihac, the most complex corner of the Bosnian conflict, is explained in Brendan O'Shea's Crisis at Bihac: Bosnia's Bloody Battlefield (Stroud: Sutton, UK, 1998).

2. See Jane Mayer, "Outsourcing Torture," The New Yorker, 14 Feb 2005.

3. Vecernji list (Zagreb), 10 Apr 1996, 2 Nov 2000; Corriere della Sera (Milan), 18 Oct 2001; Monitor (Sofia), 9 Feb 2004; Jutarnji list (Zagreb), 23 Jan 1999.

4. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 6 Jun 2002; Veeernji list (Zagreb), 12 Nov 2001, 10 Apr 2004.

5. Globus (Zagreb), 21 May 1993.

6. Vjesnik (Zagreb), 7 Jul 1993; Veeernji list (Zagreb), 21 Sep 1993.

7. Abdic's controversial relations with the Serbs are explained fairly in Milisav Sekulic, Knin je pao u Beogradu (Bad Vilbel: Nidda Verlag, 2001), 89-96.

8. Vreme (Belgrade), 11 Jul 1994.

9. Roderick de Normann, "Dudakovic and the Miracle of V Corps," Jane's Intelligence Review, Oct 1996.

10. Dani (Sarajevo), 18 Feb 2000.

11. Hrvatski obzor (Zagreb), 15 Apr 1996; The New York Times, 24 Apr 1996; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 26 Jan 2006.

12. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 18 Apr 2002; HINA (Zagreb), 23 Apr 2002.

13. No Lucic, "Bosnia and Hercegovina and Terrorism," National Security and the Future, Vols. 3-4, No. 2, 2001, 137.

14. The Krajina Serb debacle is explained in Sekulic, Knin je pao u Beogradu, 97-120.

15. Politika expres (Belgrade), 20 Mar 2001.

16. The Serb debacle of August 1995 is elaborated in Sekulid, Knin je pao u Beogradu, chapters 9 and 10, a withering insider's account that places blame squarely on Belgrade. For a detailed if moderately biased recounting of Operation Storm see Balkan Battlegrounds: A Military History of the Yugoslav Conflict, 1990-1995: Volume I (Washington, DC: CIA, 2002), 367-377.

17. A solid account of Croatia's two mid-1995 offensives, from Zagreb's viewpoint, is Ozren 2unec's "Operations Flash and Storm," in The War in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina 1991-1995, eds. B. Magag and No 2anic (London: Frank Cass, 2001).

18. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 25 Sep 1999.

19. The Sunday Times (London), 28 Oct 2001.

20. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 13 Sep 2001.

21. Dani (Sarajevo), 20 Aug 1999.

22. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Van Evera, "The Partition That Dare Not Speak Its Name: When Peace Means War," The New Republic, 5 Dec 1995-a cogent analysis of the Dayton deception.

23. The military aspects of the Srebrenica operation are explained lucidly, albeit with detectable pro-Muslim bias, in the CIA's Balkan Battlegrounds, 316-340.

24. That over three-thousand Serbs had been killed by Srebrenicds garrison is cited even by pro-Sarajevo sources, e.g., David Rohde, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe's Worst Massacre Since WWII (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 16.

25. Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both, Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime (New York: Penguin, 1996), 79.

26. Glas javnosti (Belgrade), 15 Apr 2004.

27. Many of the atrocities that would get Oric sent to the Hague in April 2003 to face war crimes charges are elaborated in Nezavisne novine revija (Banja Luka), 21 May 2001.

28. Velernje novosti (Belgrade), 24 Feb 1995.

29. Slobodna Bosnia (Sarajevo), 8 May 1998; Dani (Sarajevo), 11 Jul 2003; Rizvanovic, a former JNA officer, did "certain work" for Belgrade's secret police abroad during the 1980s, and eventually became a rogue agent whose ultimate loyalties were never clear; he was accused in court of direct involvement in the unsolved Palme assassination, though Rizvanovic only admitted to being "abroad" when the Swedish prime minister was murdered-see Der Spiegel (Hamburg), 18 Sep 1989.

30. For a brief but telling portrayal of Oric see Mark Danner, "Bosnia: The Great Betrayal," The New York Review of Books, 26 Mar 1998.

31. For instance Veeernje novosti (Sarajevo), 2 Mar 1995.

32. Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995 (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2003), 216-217.

33. The narrative of the battle and ensuing massacres found in Balkan Battlegrounds, 324-354, is biased towards pro-Muslim sources but helpful.

34. Emir Kaganovich, "July 12, 1995: Through My Eyes, the Fall of Srebrenica," Sobaka (diacritica.com), 12 Jul 2002.

35. Wiebes, Intelligence, 288.

36. Ibid., 294-297, 311; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 11 Jul 1998 has the 2nd Corps SIGINT transcripts.

37. Dani (Sarajevo), 9 Jul 1999.

38. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 29 Apr 2004.

39. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 14 Jul 1996.

40. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 1 1 Jul 2003.

41. Dani (Sarajevo), 22 Jun 1998.

42. Front slobode (Tuzla), 15 Aug 1995.

43. Knack (Brussels), 20 Oct 2004.

44. Al-Sh'ab (Cairo), 8 Aug 1995.

Chapter 9: Whose Wdory?

1. Dnevni avaz (Sarajevo), 11 Dec 1995; Svijet (Ljubljana), 7 Mar 1996.

2. Dani (Sarajevo), 29 Mar 1999; Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 139.

3. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 25 Sep 1999, 20 Sep 2001, 29 May 2003, 8 Jan 2004; Jutarnji list (Zagreb), 3 Jan 2003.

4. His account is a gripping and disturbing read-H. K. Roy, "Betrayal in the Balkans," The World and I, Aug 2001.

5. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 17 Apr 2002.

6. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 23 Nov 2000.

7. Dani (Sarajevo), 15 Mar 2002; ONASA (Sarajevo), 25 Jun 2003.

8. The New York Times, 24 Apr 1996; Globus (Zagreb), 30 Jan 2004.

9. The New York Times, 29 Nov 1997.

10. Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995 (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2003), 101; Dnevni avaz (Sarajevo), 7 May 1996; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 20 Jun 2002.

11. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 13 Jul 2000, 28 Feb 2002; Slobodna Dalmacija (Split), 12 Sep 2000.

12. Vreme (Belgrade), 21 Dec 1996.

13. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 28 Feb 2002.

14. Louis Sell, "The Serb Flight from Sarajevo: Dayton's First Failure," East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 14, No. 1, Winter 2000, 200.

15. Ibid., 183, 193-194.

16. SRNA (Bijeljina), 24 Jun 1996.

17. Vjesnik (Zagreb), 5 Mar 1997.

18. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 7 Oct 2002; "Cardinal Puljic Cautions About Islam," ZENIT.org, 7 Oct 2002.

19. AFP (Paris), 24 Aug 1996.

20. Hrvatska rijec (Sarajevo), 16 Jan 1999; Tanjug (Belgrade), 22 Dec 1996.

21. Saff (Sarajevo), 15 Dec 2004.

22. Dani (Sarajevo), 26 May 2000.

23. Globus (Zagreb), 31 May 1996.

24. See Stephen Schwartz, The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror (New York: Doubleday, 2002), Chapter 7. Schwartz, a convert to Sufi Islam, spent considerable time in the Balkans, and his account of the insidious spread of Wahhabism is cogent and perceptive, though his effort to fully separate "bad" Saudi Islam from "good" Islam everywhere else is too simplistic.

25. Dani (Sarajevo), 16 Nov 2001.

26. Nezavisne novine (Banja Luka), 6 Oct 2004; Slobodna Bosna (Sara)evo), 28 Oct 2004; Alireza Bagherzadeh, "L'ingerence iranienne en Bosnie-Herzegovine," in Le nouvel islam balkanique: les musulmans, acteurs du post-communisme (1990-2000), eds. Xavier Bougarel and Nathalie Clayer. (Paris: Maisonneuve, 2001), 405.

27. See John Schindler, "Bosnia: Five years after Dayton," Janes Intelligence Review, May 2000.

28. See John Schindler, "Bosnia prepares for life after Izetbegovic," Jane's Intelligence Review, Feb 2001.

29. Dani (Sarajevo), 7 Sep 2001, 29 Nov 2002.

30. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 20 Nov 1997, 18 Nov 1998.

31. Globus (Zagreb), 21 Sep 2001.

32. Dani (Sarajevo), 20 Aug 1999.

33. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 22 Mar 1996, 6 Jul 2000.

34. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 23 Aug 2000.

35. Vjesnik (Zagreb), 28 Sep 2003; The Washington Post, 11 Mar 2000.

36. Dani (Sarajevo), 19 Jan 1998; Vecernji list (Zagreb), 30 Nov 2001.

37. Globus (Zagreb), 31 Dec 1999.

38. Vjesnik (Zagreb), 15 Sep 2001.

39. Five years after Dayton, I was startled to discover that no one in the American G-2 (military intelligence) office at Tuzla, the main U.S. base in Bosnia, had heard of General Sakib Mahmuljin, the Federation's deputy defense minister and the highest-ranking mujahidin protector in Sarajevo, who had been a leading SDA figure for nearly a decade at that point.

40. Globus (Zagreb), 31 Dec 1999; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 25 Jan 2001.

41. Novi list (Rijeka), 30 Dec 2002.

42. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 2 Feb 2002; Dani (Sarajevo), 16 Mar 1999.

43. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 25 Jan 2001.

44. See the ad for AIO's "summer camp" in Saff(Sarajevo), 1 Jul 2002; Vecernji list (Zagreb), 21 Jul 2002.

45. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 9 Jan 2003.

46. See two articles by Stephen Schwartz: "Islamic Fundamentalism in the Balkans," Partisan Review, Vol. 64, No. 3, 3/2000; "The Arab Betrayal of Balkan Islam," Middle East Quarterly, Vol. IX, No. 2, Spring 2002.

47. Dani (Sarajevo), 16 Jul 2004.

48. BETA (Belgrade), 23 Oct 2004.

49. Veiernji list (Zagreb), 11 Feb 2001.

50. Dani (Sarajevo), 4 Apr 2003, 6 Jun 2003; Nezavisne novine (Banja Luka), 23 Nov 2004.

51. Dani (Sarajevo), 16 Jul 1999.

52. Dani (Sarajevo), 29 Nov 2002, 12 Dec 2002.

53. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 5 Dec 2002.

54. Nedeljni telegraf (Belgrade), 18 Dec 2002.

55. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 13 Sep 2001.

56. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 23 Jan 2003.

57. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 8 Mar 2002.

58. Slobodna BiH (Split), 24 Feb 1999; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 12 Dec 1998.

59. Dani (Sarajevo), 29 Mar 1999, 12 Apr 1999.

60. The Telegraph (London), 13 Apr 1997.

61. Dani (Sarajevo), 13 Dec 2002.

62. Dani (Sarajevo), 8 Mar 2002; Veeernji list (Zagreb), 30 Aug 2002.

63. Dani (Sarajevo), 7 Sep 2001, 19 Sep 2003.

64. Al-Watan al-Arabi (Paris), 8 Mar 1996.

65. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 2 May 2002.

66. Il Giornale (Milan), 18 Sep 1999; Dani (Sarajevo), 24 Sep 1999.

67. Vjesnik (Zagreb), 7 Oct 1999.

68. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 7 Oct 1999; Dani (Sarajevo), 24 Sep 1999.

69. The best overview of the Millennium Plot is found in a seventeen-part special series, "The Terrorist Within," published by The Seattle Times between 23 June and 7 July 2002.

70. Le Figaro (Paris), 28 Sep 2001.

71. LeMatin (Algiers), 29 Sep 2001; Liberation (Paris), 24 Dec 1999.

72. Le Figaro (Paris), 27 Sep 2001.

73. Dani (Sarajevo), 7 Sep 2001.

Chapter 10: Europe's Afghanistan

1. The Washington Post, 18 Jul 2005.

2. For the details: John Schindler, "Bosnia prepares for life after Izetbegovic, " Jane's Intelligence Review, Feb 2001.

3. Svijet (Sarajevo), 18 Apr 1999.

4. The New York Times, 17 Aug 2000.

5. Dani (Sarajevo), 13 Sep 2002.

6. Panorama (Bijeljina), 20 Oct 2000; Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 4 Mar 2003.

7. Dani (Sarajevo), 3 Mar 2000; Dnevni avaz (Sarajevo), 5 Mar 2000; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 5 Apr 2001.

8. Globus (Zagreb), 28 Jun 2002.

9. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 13 Sep 2001.

10. "Cardinal Puljic Cautions About Islam," ZENITorg, 7 Oct 2002.

11. YediotAharonot (Tel Aviv), 21 Dec 2001.

12. Dani (Sarajevo), 2 Nov 2001.

13. A rare exception: Brendan O'Neill, "The Bosnian Connection," New Statesman, 2 Aug 2004, which points out that 9/11 connections to Iran have been equally relegated to "nonstory" status.

14. The Washington Post, 27 Jul 2004; Blic (Belgrade), 30 Nov 2004.

15. Ve/ ernji list (Zagreb), 11 Sep 2004.

16. "Terrorists Moved Freely in U.S." Human Events, 18 Jun 2004.

17. The Dallas Morning News, 22 Jul 2004.

18. Der Spiegel (Hamburg). 15 Jul 2002.

19. Bild am Sonntag (Hamburg), 19 Sep 2004; Der Spiegel (Hamburg), 22 Mar 2004; The Chicago Tribune, 31 Mar 2004.

20. Nacional (Zagreb), 27 Sep 2001.

21. "Bin Laden and the Balkans: The Politics of Anti-Terrorism," ICG Balkans Report No. 119, 9 Nov 2001.

22. For instance Miroslav Lazanski, Bin Laden protiv Amerike (Belgrade: Komerc, 2001), an insta-book that elaborates in semi-sensationalist fashion certain al-Qa'ida's links to the Balkans.

23. Dani (Sarajevo), 21 Dec 2001; The Sunday Times (London), 28 Oct 2001; The New York Times, 23 Jan 2002.

24. Dani (Sarajevo), 5 Oct 2001.

25. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 13 Jun 2002.

26. The Wall Street Journal (New York), 9 Jan 2004; Yediot Aharonot (Tel Aviv), 21 Dec 200 1.

27. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 22 Jan 2002; for the composition of the U.S. detention facility see John Daly, "The people of Guantanamo," Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst, Mar 2004.

28. Dani (Sarajevo), 29 Mar 2002.

29. Dnevni list (Mostar), 9 Jul 2002.

30. Dani (Sarajevo), 14 May 2004.

31. The New York Sun, 3 Aug 2004 has a detailed expose by Daniel Pipes (this and several other articles by Pipes on the Alamoudi affair can be found at danielpipes.org).

32. Emir Kaganovich, "Taking Out the Trash: The Scandal of Bosnia's First Family," Sobaka (diacritica.com), 23 Mar 2002.

33. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 6 Jun 2002, 20 Jun 2002.

34. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 3 May 2002; Dani (Sarajevo), 10 May 2002; Chris Smith, "Justice Delayed," New York Magazine, 17 Mar 2003.

35. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 28 Mar 2002; Agence France Presse (Paris), 2 Aug 2002.

36. Yedi'ot Aharonot (Tel Aviv), 4 Jan 2002.

37. Vecernji list (Zagreb), 9 Nov 2002.

38. Nezavisne novine (Banja Luka), 24 Nov 2004.

39. For instance "Ashdown Celebrates Lonely Anniversary," Institute for War and Peace Reporting, 2 Apr 2004.

40. Veeernji list (Zagreb), 31 Dec 2002; a rare example of English-language reportage is Stephen Schwartz, "A Crime in Bosnia," The Daily Standard, 19 Jan 2003.

41. Dani (Sarajevo), 14 May 2004; HINA (Zagreb), 26 Dec 2002.

42. Dani (Sarajevo), 10 Jan 2003; Jutarnji list (Zagreb), 3 Jan 2003.

43. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 26 Dec 2002.

44. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 4 Feb 2003; Dani (Sarajevo), 17 Jan 2003.

45. Glas javnosti (Belgrade), 3 Jan 2003.

46. For instance Novi horizonti (Zenica), 27 Feb 2003; see also the interview with Faruk Visca, head of IslamBosna, in Le Figaro (Paris), 9 Jan 2002. In a typical case, the fanatic Visca, a regular denouncer of America and "Zionists," was the only actually devout Muslim in his family.

47. Dani (Sarajevo), 16 Jul 2004.

48. Glas srpske (Banja Luka), 30 Nov 2004.

49. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 1 Jul 2004; Dnevni list (Mostar), 30 Jun 2004.

50. Vjesnik (Zagreb), 4 Feb 2003; Vecernji list (Zagreb), 9 Jun 2005.

51. Glas srpske (Banja Luka), 2 Dec 2004.

52. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 8 Jan 2004; Le Figaro (Paris), 9 Jan 2002.

53. Le Monde (Paris), 21 Dec 2001.

54. Dani (Sarajevo), 1 Mar 2002.

55. BHL's research into the case resulted in a meandering and impressionistic book, published in English translation as Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (Melville: Hoboken, NJ, 2003).

56. Dani (Sarajevo), I Mar 2002; for early coverage of this mujahid see The Guardian (London), 8 Nov 1994.

57. Newsline (Karachi), 19 Apr 2005.

58. Assabah (Casablanca), 17 Mar 2004; Le Figaro (Paris), 1 Apr 2004, 8 Apr 2004. A third Benyaiche brother was killed fighting alongside bin Laden in late 2001 at Tora Bora.

59. Dani (Sarajevo), 16 Apr 2004.

60. The Washington Post, 12 Apr 2004. Spanish police considered a twentythree-year-old Bosnian, Sanel Sjekirica from Mostar, a suspect in the 3/11 outrage; Sjekirica shared an apartment with one of the bombers but denied any involvement in the crime, and no charges were filed against the Bosnian.

61. Corriere delta Sera (Milan), 8 Jun 2004; Il Giornale (Milan), 22 Mar 2004; La Raz6n (Madrid), 19 Aug 2004.

62. The Times (London), 17 Jan, 7 Feb 2006.

63. The Times (London), 9 Feb 2006.

64. The Times (London), 7 Jan 2006.

65. The Times (London), 9 Feb 2006; ado (Berlin), 12 Sep 2005.

66. On the psychology of European Muslim alienation leading to radicalism and jihad, see Mohamed Sifaoui's insightful Mes freres assassins: comment jai infzltre une cellule dAl-Qaida (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 2003).

67. For the short version: International Herald Tribune (Paris), 15 Jul 2005; for the extended version: Robert S. Leiken, "Europe's Angry Muslims," Foreign Affairs, Jul/Aug 2005.

68. See Joe Kaufman, "Conversations with a Terrorist," frontpagemag.com, 8 Jun 2004.

69. Dani (Sarajevo), 14 Jan 2005.

70. The Thai Post (Bangkok), 22 Aug 2004.

71. Nezavisne novine (Banja Luka), 28 Jan 2006.

72. Dani (Sarajevo), 25 Jul 2003; "First Bali, now Davao," TIMEAsia, 10 Mar 2003.

73. Rowe received a fifteen-year sentence in September 2005 for his involvement in terrorism-The Guardian (London), 24 Sep 2005; Le Figaro (Paris), 10 Feb 2004.

74. The Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo), 19 May 2004; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 1 Oct 2004.

75. Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo), 28 May 2004; The Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo), 27 May 2004.

76. The Star (Kuala Lumpur). 21 Oct 2004.

77. Al-Hayah (London), 6 Dec 2003.

78. The New York Times, 5 May 2004; The Washington Post, 8 Jun 2004; The Observer (London), 6 Jun 2004; Abha al-Wotan (Abha), 1 Jun 2004.

79. Nezavisne novine (Banja Luka), 2 Jul 2005.

80. Dani (Sarajevo), 1 1 Nov 2005.

81. Tanjug (Belgrade), 14 Dec 2004.

82. Dani (Sarajevo), 19 Sep 2003; Vecernji list (Zagreb), 13 May 2004.

83. Nezavisne novine (Banja Luka), 28 Jan 2004; Vecernji list (Zagreb), 31 Oct 2004; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 1 1 Sep 2003.

84. Vecernji list (Zagreb), 25 Sep 2004; International Herald Tribune (Paris), 15 Jul 2005.

85. Tanjug (Belgrade), 29 Dec 2004.

86. Al-Ghadd (Amman), 22 Sep 2004.

87. The Wall Street Journal (New York), 14 Apr 2004; The Los Angeles Times, 4 May 2004.

88. Saff (Sarajevo), 27 May 2004.

89. Dani (Sarajevo), 23 May 2003; Nezavisne novine (Banja Luka), 18 Jan 2005; HINA (Zagreb), 25 Jun 2003.

90. Dani (Sarajevo), 13 Dec 2002; Vecernji list (Zagreb), 2 Jun 2005; Nezavisne novine (Banja Luka), 18 Jan 2005.

91. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 13 Apr 2005; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 30 Jan 2003; the 2003 publication of the book Cuvari Jugoslavije (Guardians of Yugoslavia), based on secret Bosnian SDB files, revealed that hundreds of Muslims, including many prominent figures, collaborated with the secret police during the last twenty years of Communist rule: see Aries Alic, "Spy Scandal," Transitions Online (Prague), 19 Nov 2003.

92. Emir Kaganovich, "No Arabs, No Yanks, No Samaritans: A Fumigation for Bosnia," Sobaka (diacritica.com), 11 Feb 2002.

93. Die Presse (Vienna), 30 Mar 2004; Mlada fronta dnes (Prague), 15 May 2004.

94. Der Spiegel (Hamburg), 8 Dec 2003; Die Welt (Berlin), 9 May 2003.

95. Dnevni avaz (Sarajevo), 16 Feb 2003.

96. Slobodna Dalmacija (Split), 8 Aug 2002; Dnevni avaz (Sarajevo), 23 Apr 2003; ONASA (Sarajevo), 25 Jun 2003.

97. SRNA (Belgrade), 30 Sep 1996.

98. Ljiljan (Sarajevo), 24 Oct 2003-for a balanced Western obituary see the write-up by David Binder, a longtime Balkan correspondent, in The New York Times, 20 Oct 2003.

99. Dani (Sarajevo), 20 Oct 2003.

100. BBC News (London), 2 Dec 2003; Dnevni avaz (Sarajevo), 26 Sep 2004.

101. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 25 Dec 2003; Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 9 Mar 2004.

102. "Radicalism as a Commodity," Transitions Online (Prague), 31 Oct 2005.

103. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 25 Dec 2003; Dnevni avaz (Sarajevo), 28 Sep 2004.

104. Veeernji list (Zagreb), 25 Jul 2004.

105. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 3 Jun 2004.

106. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), 23 Aug 2005; Nezavisne novine (Banja Luka), 8 Jan 2006.

107. Nezavisne novine (Banja Luka), 26 May, 22 Sep 2004.

108. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 20 Jan 2005; Veeernji list (Zagreb), 20 May 2005; Saff (Sarajevo), 8 Jul 2005.

109. Nezavisne novine (Banja Luka), 28 May 2004; Dani (Sarajevo), 3 Dec 2004; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 18 Nov 2004.

110. International Herald Tribune (Paris), 27 Jan 2004.

International Herald Tribune (Paris), 14 Sep 2004.

1 12. "Karadzic Raid: Not Even Close," Institute for War and Peace Reporting, 2 Apr 2004.

113. Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 9 Dec 2004.

114. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 24 Aug 2005; NIN (Belgrade), 15 Sep 2005; AFP (Paris), 2 Feb 2006.

1 15. Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (New York: Free Press), 139-140.

116. Christian Science Monitor (Boston), 24 Mar 2004.

When the Bosnian Serb Momir Nikolic, a star ICTY witness, admitted he committed perjury and invented atrocities, hardly anyone paid attention-see Cali Ruchala, "Institutional Breakdown: Censorship, Bias and Politics at the IWPR," Diacritica (sobaka.com), 12 Jun 2003, which includes the acid explanation, "Advocacy journalism isn't hard to spot. It is to real reporting what a transvestite is to a woman. All you have to do is look for the razor burn and the Adam's Apple to know you're being sold a false bill of goods."

118. See the interview at Brendan O'Neill, "You are only allowed to see Bosnia in black and white," spiked-online.com, posted 23 Jan 2004.

119. Brendan O'Neill, "How we trained al-Qa'eda," The Spectator (London), 13 Sep 2003.

120. Nezavisne novine (Banja Luka), 21 Nov 2005.

121. Corriere della Sera (Milan), 26 Aug 2005.

122. Vecernji list (Zagreb), 17 Sep 2005.

123. The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 14 Jul 2005; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 29 Apr 2004.

124. Dani (Sarajevo), 23 Dec 2005.

125. Vecernje novosti (Belgrade), 1 1 Jun 2005.

126. The Washington Post, 1 Dec 2005; The Sunday Times (London), 6 Nov 2005; Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo), 27 Oct 2005; Nezavisne novine (Banja Luka), 8 Jan 2006.

127. Berlingske Tidende (Copenhagen), 29 Oct, 6 Nov 2005.

128. The Washington Post, 1 Dec 2005.

129. Saff (Sarajevo), 14 Oct, 2 Sep, 17 May 2005.

130. Vecernji list (Zagreb), 20 Aug 2005; The National Post (Toronto), 20 Jan 2006.

131. Dnevni list (Mortar), 27 Jan 2006; Vecernji list (Zagreb), 5 Jan 2006.

132. Dani (Sarajevo), 12 Aug 2005; Vecernji list (Zagreb), 30 Sep 2005.

133. Mehr News Agency (Tehran), 9 Dec 2005.

134. Dnevni avaz (Sarajevo), 4 Feb 2006; ONASA (Sarajevo), 7 Feb 2006; Dnevni list (Mortar), 9 Feb 2006.

135. Saff(Sarajevo), 30 Sep 2005

136. Dani (Sarajevo), 10 Feb 2006; see also a detailed interview with Senad ef. Agic in Dani, 7 Jul 2002.

137. The Chicago Tribune, 19 Oct 2003.

138. Corriere della Sera (Milan), 29 Feb 2004.

139. Corine Hegland, "Global Jihad: No End in Sight," National Journal, May 2004; see also Rohan Gunaratna, "Al Qaeda adapts to disruption," Jane's Intelligence Review, Feb 2004.

140. See John Schindler, "Defeating the Sixth Column; Intelligence and Strategy in the War on Islamist Terrorism," Orbis, Fall 2005.

141. Bat Ye'or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude: Seventh-Twentieth Century (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson UP, 1996), 21.

Index

The full text is available in Arabic and English translation at the website of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence (dni.gov).