Bill Clinton’s Balkan intervention of the 1990s will go down in history, if that history is written by free people, as one of the earliest of a series of disastrously ill-considered U.S. foreign policy initiatives that were born of a false, politically correct view of Islam, and ended up aiding the global jihad.
“Once magnet for foreign mujahedeen’, Bosnia now exports them,” by Rusmir Smajilhodzic, AFP, April 29, 2015:
A magnet for foreign jihadists during its 1990s war, Bosnia is now grappling with the threat from home-grown extremists wooed by the conflicts in Iraq and Syria.
While most Bosnian Muslims are moderates, a few thousand have adopted the ultraconservative Salafist brand of Sunni Islam introduced by the fighters who flocked to Bosnia from North Africa, the Middle East and Asia during the 1992-1995 conflict between Serbs, Muslims and Croats.
Most of those foreign fighters, or “mujahedeen”, left Bosnia when the war ended.
But the seed had already been sown. Twenty years on, the radical preachers giving fiery sermons in “mesdzids”, or improvised prayer halls, are no longer foreigners.
Those taking up arms are also local men.
On Monday, a gunman shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is greatest” in Arabic) opened fire on a police station in the eastern town of Zvornik, killing one officer and wounding two others before being killed in a shootout.
The assailant, identified as 24-year-old Nerdin Ibric from a village near the northeastern town of Zvornik, was suspected of links to radical Islamist groups. Another man, said to have travelled to Syria, was arrested Tuesday over the attack.
Suspected Islamist extremists had made their presence felt before in the Balkan country.
In October 2011, a gunman opened fire on the US embassy in Sarajevo, wounding a policeman before being injured himself and arrested.
In June of the previous year, a man set off an explosive device at a police station in the central town of Bugojno, killing one officer and wounding six others in what the government called a “terrorist act”.
– Prayer room recruitment –
Would-be jihadists are suspected of being recruited by radical preachers, operating through a network of informal prayer rooms.
“There is no doubt that the recruitment process is possible due to the existence of a network of such places of worship,” Esad Hecimovic, a local journalist who has reported extensively on the subject told AFP.
Hardliners, whose numbers are estimated by the authorities at around 3,000 followers, represent just a fraction of Bosnian Muslims, who make up around 40 per cent of the population of 3.8 million.
But their ranks are suspecting of supplying scores of fighters to the wars in the Middle East….
EYESOPEN says
The lies that the United States – and the world – were fed about what was happening in Bosnia contributed to that clvsterfvck. This is what happens when the enemedia, not just here but throughout the world, have been bought and paid for the the hilariously-named “progressives”.
EYESOPEN says
Re: above comment.
“… bought and paid for the the hilariously-named “progressives”.
Should be “bought and paid for BY the hilariously-named “progressives”.
Shane says
The USA should never take the side of Muslims against Christians. Muslims are loyal to Islam first and are told only to take Christians as allies when the Muslims are weak and it need of help. We should have stayed out of that conflict, and the conflict in Libya too.
Peggy says
Muslims have to step up their campaign because time is running out for Obama and Hillary is not a certainty.
Papa Whiskey says
While I hold no brief for the Bosnian Muslims, our intervention on their behalf during the 1990s war was justified on humanitarian grounds. The “Christian” Serb forces were acting in a decidedly un-Christian manner. They needed to be stopped, and they were.
Peggy says
I see. When Muslims are terrorizing western world and even their own they are rabid and need to be stopped but when they do the same to an Eastern country the other guys are bad.
So only the Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo were good and the rest are evil. Have got tha right?
How much do you know about the conflict in the Balkans, apart from what CNN and BBC have told you?
Peggy says
Forgot to ask you this question. Do the Serbs need to be stopped again? A Muslim carries out a terrorist attack and you think the Serbs are bad guys?
Unbelievable.
Gart says
The orthodox Serbs and Catholic Christians between them committed crimes against humanity, and they were found guilty in a court of law.
Peggy says
Your point being?
We are talking about Muslims in Bosnia being a breeding ground for terrorism and you are telling us how Serbs and Croatians committed crimes against humanity. Tell me who hasn’t committed crimes during any war?
Islam has committed the worst crimes and continues to.
So I ask again, what’s your point?
Gart says
I’m talking about innocent people getting whacked Peggy, for no other crime than being born a muslim in Yugoslavia at a particular time, where history records and reads a litany of rape torture and death. It’s called genocide by the way.
The court at The Hague, Netherlands, The International Criminal Court, jumped up?
If you follow the laws of Islam to the letter, you will be in conflict with everyone who is not just like you. It was not a revelation from God. A crime is a crime though, we should never forget that, Bosnia was in cahoots with a depth of depravity not so unlike The Shoah. Whats adds to the woe of the Bosnian tragedy is that we could have acted sooner, when we knew was was going on.
Beagle says
Gart,
Srebrenica’s graves notably contained men and fighting age teens. As genocides go, that one was remarkably selective. One bad month of IS outdoes the entire Serbian output. Yet, strangely, the international community avoids using the word genocide when Muslims are the perpetrators.
Gart says
I agree with you that IS’s villainy is worse.
Charli Main says
So, when the Bosnian, Kosovan and Albanian Muslim militias were burning ,raping women and children, blowing up Christian churches and murdering the Serb population that was ok, was it ????? Just the good old moderate, peace loving Muslims practicing their religion.
But when the Serbs fight back and defended themselves, by giving the Muslims a dose of their own medicine, they are war criminals that had to be stopped.
You are either a Muslim apologist or have swallowed the ” poor Muslim victim” card hook, line and sinker.
Truth Seeker says
Jihad operations will rise in Geometric Progression to the Arithmetical Strength of self claimed Supremacistic Religion. All Methods of Jihad in Full Swing to Achieve World Caliphate and implement Sharia.
Opinions this way and way will not give any Respite.
Theo Prinse says
Indeed Bill Clinton’s Balkan intervention of the 1990s was one of the earliest of a series of disastrously ill-considered U.S. foreign policy initiatives that were born of a false, politically correct view of Islam, and ended up aiding the global jihad… but certainly not the first.
Given Max von Oppenheims advice to Kaiser Wilhelm to ally in WWI with the Ottoman empire against the British colonial power in the Arab world and again between Hitler and Haj Amin Al-Husseini in WWII it was the US governments newly formed CIA under Allen Dulles to absorb hundreds of Nazi’s in project MKUltra and after 1975 under advice of Zbigniew Brzezinski to ally with the Mujahedeen, Pakistan Taliban and even Osama bin Laden against the former Soviet Union.
The Cold war against the S-U and the current attempt of Brzezinski, Nuland, Pyatt etc. for a neo cold war against Christian orthodox Russia and the islamization of the west by the political elites of Washington is one and the same policy.
shabeer_hassan says
SERBIAN CHRISTIAN TERRORIST KILLED THOUSANDS OF MUSLIM BOSNIAN:
Srebrenica massacre, slaying of more than 7,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) boys and men, perpetrated by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica, a town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, in July 1995. In addition to the killings, more than 20,000 civilians were expelled from the area—a process known as ethnic cleansing. The massacre, which was the worst episode of mass murder within Europe since World War II, helped galvanize the West to press for a cease-fire that ended three years of warfare on Bosnia’s territory (see Bosnian conflict). However, it left deep emotional scars on survivors and created enduring obstacles to political reconciliation among Bosnia’s ethnic groups.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia—established before the massacre to scrutinize ongoing military conduct—concluded that the killings at Srebrenica, compounded by the mass expulsion of Bosniak civilians, amounted to genocide. It pinned principal responsibility on senior officers in the Bosnian Serb army. But the United Nations (UN) and its Western supporters also accepted a portion of the blame for having failed to protect the Bosniak men, women, and children in Srebrenica, which in 1993 the UN Security Council had formally designated a “safe area.” In a critical internal review in 1999, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan wrote, “Through error, misjudgment and an inability to recognize the scope of the evil confronting us, we failed to do our part to help save the people of Srebrenica from the [Bosnian] Serb campaign of mass murder.”
Joseph says
@ shabeer_hassan
This wouldn’t be where you got part of your name; would it????????
Jeff says
Check out the documentary “A Town Betrayed” on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnALEecbZ-k
Ferdinand (@StFerdinandIII) says
For the Bosnian Moslem sympathizers who imbibed the Kook aid that ONLY Serbs and Croats murdered those fuzzy warm Muzzies – get your head screwed on straight. Moslems had been killing non Moslems in Bosnia which was NOT a Moslem statelet pre 1980, for 100 years.
The atrocities in fact were STARTED by Moslems, not by the Serbs.
“Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was by no means one-sided, and deaths by nationality were not far off from population proportionality; [60] the Serbs claim and have documented thousands of deaths at the hands of the Bosnian Muslims and their imported Mujahedin cadres, and by the Croatians, and they have their own group examining and trying to identify bodies at an estimated 73 mass graves. [61] This victimization has hardly been noticed by the Western media or ICTY—the distinguished Yugoslav forensic expert Dr. Zoran Stankovic observed back in 1996 that “the fact that his team had previously identified the bodies of 1,000 Bosnian Serbs in the [Srebrenica] region had not interested prosecutor Richard Goldstone.“ [62]
Also http://pamelageller.com/2011/06/mladics-record-distorted.html/
Peggy says
Sarajevo is almost all cleansed of Serbs now.
There are areas there where no alcohol is allowed to be sold nor pork.
Is this what the US fought for?
Srebrenica was hoped for by Izetbegovic for that was the only way to drag US and NATO into fighting for them fully.
Yes, Srebrenica was supposed to be a safe zone but only for Muslims? Muslims led by Naser Oric were killing Serbs of the surrounding villages with UN just looking on.
When they got a taste of their own medicine the world had a problem all of a sudden.
Yes, Muslims were expelled from Srebrenica. Woman and children were allowed to leave and only men and ‘boys’ who fought were killed. We all know that Muslims drag young males into a conflict so they were a legitimate target.
I wish people would research this a bit more before just regurgitating the same old propaganda the west spat out.
If people take shabeer’s version of this then they are still just as naive.
Wars a bloody and brutal and every side has to do what they have to do to survive and win but just like in a Hollywood movie we have to have the good guys and the bad guys and because of US interests and Clinton’s stuff ups the west identified the Serbs as the bad buys and that’s what is being written in history now and text books for our children to study. It will take decades for any truth to be finally realized.
You know the saying…..a lie is half way around the world by the time truth puts his pants on.
Maria says
Whiskey
While I hold no brief for the Bosnian Muslims, our intervention on their behalf during the 1990s war was justified on humanitarian grounds. The “Christian” Serb forces were acting in a decidedly un-Christian manner. They needed to be stopped, and they were.
there was no justification for your intervention as the Serbs where defending themselves from your funded Islamic terrorist you never went there on humanitarian Ground it was to break up Yugoslavia because its allied with Russia you trying to do same thing to Russia with Chechnya there but its not working I bet you where crying that your precious Chechen terrorist failed to break up russia
Dee says
Not familiar with this war, but every time moslems are slaughtered, I have to wonder “What did they do this time? Same ole tricks?”