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Wall Street
Journal Europe
November 1, 2001
Al Qaeda's Balkan Links
By Marcia Christoff
Kurop, a former editor of the Washington-based weekly newspaper
Defense News.
The Balkans'
uncharacteristically silent exit from the world stage as the most
prominent
international hot spot of the last decade belies its status as a
major recruiting
and training center of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. By
feeding off the
region's impoverished republics and taking root in the unsettled
diplomatic
aftermath of the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts, al Qaeda, along with
Iranian Revolutionary
Guard-sponsored terrorists, have burrowed their way into Europe's
backyard.
For the past
10 years, the most senior leaders of al Qaeda have visited the
Balkans, including
bin Laden himself on three occasions between 1994 and 1996. The Egyptian surgeon
turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps,
weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading
networks throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia.
This has gone on for a decade. Many recruits to the Balkan wars came originally
from Chechnya, a jihad in which Al Qaeda has also played a part.
These activities
have been exhaustively researched by Yossef Bodansky, the former director of
the U.S. House of Representatives' Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional
Warfare. The February testimony of an Islamist ringleader associated with the
East Africa bombings have also helped throw light on these actions.
They have however
been disguised under the cover of dozens of "humanitarian" agencies spread throughout
Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania. Funding has come from now-defunct banks such as
the Albanian-Arab Islamic Bank and from bin Laden's so-called Advisory and
Reformation
Committee. One of his largest Islamist front agencies, it was established in
London in 1994.
Narco-Jihad
Culture
The overnight
rise of heroin trafficking through Kosovo -- now the most important Balkan route
between Southeast Asia and Europe after Turkey -- helped also to fund terrorist
activity directly associated with al Qaeda and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
Opium poppies, which barely existed in the Balkans before 1995, have become
the No. 1 drug cultivated in the Balkans after marijuana. Operatives of two
al Qaeda-sponsored Islamist cells who were arrested in Bosnia on Oct. 23 were linked
to the heroin trade, underscoring the narco-jihad culture of today's
post-war Balkans.
These drug rings
in turn form part of an estimated $8 billion a year Taliban annual income from
global drug trafficking, predominantly in heroin. According to Mr. Bodansky,
the terrorism expert, bin Laden administers much of that trade through Russian
mafia groups for a commission of 10% to 15% -- or around $1 billion annually.
The settling
of Afghan-trained mujahideen in the Balkans began around 1992, when recruits
were brought into Bosnia by the ruling Islamic party of Bosnia, the Party of
Democratic Action, from Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, as well as
Italy, Germany and Turkey. They were all given journalists' credentials to avoid
explicit detection by the West. Others were married immediately to Bosnian Muslim
women and incorporated into regular army ranks.
Intelligence
services of the Nordic-Polish SFOR (previously IFOR) sector alerted the U.S.
of their presence in 1992 while the number of mujahideen operating in Bosnia
alone continued to grow from a few hundred to around 6,000 in 1995. Though the
Clinton administration had been briefed extensively by the State Department
in 1993 on the growing Islamist threat in former Yugoslavia, little was done to
follow through.
The Bosnian Embassy
in Vienna issued a passport to bin Laden in 1993, according to various reports in
the Yugoslav press at the time. The reports add that bin Laden then visited
a terrorist camp in Zenica, Bosnia in 1994. The Bosnian government denies all
of this, but admits that some passport records have been lost. Around that time,
bin Laden directed al Qaeda "senior commanders" to incorporate the Balkans into
an complete southeastern approach to Europe, an area stretching from the Caucasus
to Italy. Al Zawahiri, the Egyptian surgeon reputed to be the second in command
of the entire al Qaeda network, headed up this southeastern frontline.
By 1994, major
Balkan terrorist training camps included Zenica, and Malisevo and Mitrovica
in Kosovo. Elaborate command-and-control centers were further established in
Croatia, and Tetovo, Macedonia as well as around Sofia, Bulgaria, according
to the U.S. Congress's task force on terrorism. In Albania, the main training
camp included even the property of former Albanian premier Sali Berisha in Tropje,
Albania, who was then very close to the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Not even stalwart
NATO ally Turkey escaped the network. Areas beyond government control were also
visited by bin Laden in 1996 according to London-based Jane's Intelligence Review.
The government has been battling two terrorist groups: Jund al Islam, whose
assassinated Syrian leader was one of bin Laden's closets confidantes, and the
Kurdish PKK, whose leader, Abdullah Ocalan, merged his group's activities with
those of Iran's Hezbollah in 1998.
Furthermore,
as revealed in the February 2001 East Africa bombing trial testimony of Jamal
al Fadl -- an al Qaeda operative in charge of weapons development in Sudan --
uranium used in "dirty bombs" that release lethal radioactive material, had
been tested in 1994 by members of the Sudan-based Islamic National Front in
the town of Hilat Koko, in Turkish-held northern Cyprus. Cyprus, both its north
and southern sides, has also become a center for offshore money laundering by
Arab banks fronting al Qaeda funds into the Balkans. The CIA puts al Qaeda's
specific Balkan-directed funds -- those tied to the "humanitarian" agencies
and local banks and not explicitly counting the significant drug profits added
to that -- at around $500 million to $700 million between 1992 and 1998.
So where was
the U.S. in all this? It was not until 1995 that the Clinton administration
was forced to start pursuing the Islamist network in the Balkans. Not quite
a month after the Dayton accords had been signed in November 1995, an influx
of Iranian arms came into Bosnia with the apparent tacit approval of the
administration,
in violation of U.N. sanctions. While publicly pressing Bosnian President Alia
Izebegovic to purge remaining Islamist elements, the administration was loath
to confront Sarajevo and Tehran over their presence.
Instead, Islamist
groups went quietly underground as the windfall of weapons landed in their hands.
They later joined up with a new Islamist center in Sofia established as a kind
of rear guard by the al Zawahiri. Following the Zagreb arrest and extradition
of renowned Egyptian militant Faud Qassim, an al Zawahiri favorite, the Sofia-based
militants planned the deployment in Bosnia of terrorists capable of planning
and leading possible major terrorist strikes against U.S. and SFOR facilities,
according to al Fadl's testimony to the House Task Force on Terrorism.
Islamist infiltration
of the Kosovo Liberation Army advanced, meanwhile. Bin Laden is said to have visited
Albania in 1996 and 1997, according to the murder-trial testimony of
an Algerian-born French national, Claude Kader, himself an Afghanistan-trained
mujahideen fronting at the Albanian-Arab Islamic Bank. He recruited some Albanians
to fight with the KLA in Kosovo, according to the Paris-based Observatoire
Geopolitique
des Drogues.
Controversial
Relationship
By early 1998
the U.S. had already entered into its controversial relationship with the KLA
to help fight off Serbian oppression of that province. While in February the
U.S. gave into KLA demands to remove it from the State Department's terrorism
list, the gesture amounted to little. That summer the CIA and CIA-modernized
Albanian intelligence (SHIK) were engaged in one of the largest seizures of
Islamic Jihad cells operating in Kosovo.
Fearing terrorist
reprisal from al Qaeda, the U.S. temporarily closed its embassy in Tirana and
a trip to Albania by then Defense Secretary William Cohen was canceled out of
fear of an assassination attempt. Meanwhile, Albanian separatism in Kosovo and
Metohija was formally characterized as a "jihad" in October 1998 at an annual
international Islamic conference in Pakistan.
Nonetheless,
the 25,000 strong KLA continued to receive official NATO/U.S. arms and training
support and, at the talks in Rambouillet, France, then Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright shook hands with "freedom fighter" Hashim Thaci, a KLA leader. As this
was taking place, Europol (the European Police Organization based in The Hague)
was preparing a scathing report on the connection between the KLA and international
drug gangs. Even Robert Gelbard, America's special envoy to Bosnia, officially
described the KLA as Islamic terrorists.
With the future
status of Kosovo still in question, the only real development that
may be said
to be taking place there is the rise of Wahhabi Islam -- the
puritanical Saudi
variety favored by bin Laden -- and the fastest growing variety of
Islam in
the Balkans. Today, in general, the Balkans are left without the
money, political
resources, or institutional strength to fight a war on terrorism.
And that,
for the Balkan Islamists, is a Godsend.
End<{{{
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