The Lost Hegemon: Whom the Gods Would Destroy by F. William Engdahl

Author:F. William Engdahl [Engdahl, F. William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Radical Thought, Politics & Government, Ideologies & Doctrines, Specific Topics, Politics & Social Sciences, Terrorism, Radicalism
Publisher: mine.Books
Published: 2016-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

Osama and the Bosnian Mujahideen

With Izetbegović, a Jihadist autocrat, as their man in Bosnia-Herzegovina, US intelligence began to secretly redeploy veterans of the Afghan Mujahideen war against the Soviets and other Jihadist volunteers around the world into Bosnia-Herzegovina to fight on the side of Izetbegović’s Muslim forces against the Serbs.

Foreign Jihad fighters were brought in by US and other NATO intelligence, largely via Croatia, into Bosnia-Herzegovina. Islamic countries sent trainers and “volunteers” to fight with Muslim forces in Bosnia and established secret training camps there. In addition to Afghanistan, the fighters came from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Sudan, Iran, and Syria—forming a veritable seed crystal of the emerging Global Jihad.30

The US encouraged and covertly facilitated the smuggling of arms to the Muslims via Iran, Turkey, and Eastern Europe, a fact which Washington denied at the time, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. The Clinton Administration used NATO and UNPROFOR, the United Nations Protection Force, as its policy instruments and blocked all peace moves— of which there were several between 1992 and 1995—until they were good and ready.31

Reliable estimates put the number of foreign Islamic Jihadists who fought alongside and within Izetbegović’s Bosnian Army against Serbs, in the war that lasted from 1992 to its forced end in 1995, at somewhere between 4,000 and 20,000 fighters, most of them Saudi veterans of Afghanistan, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt, or Pakistan. They were smuggled in mainly through Zagreb in Croatia, the so-called Croatian Pipeline.32 Croatian President Franjo Tudjman was also arming the Bosnian Croatian minority population and saw an armed Muslim force as a de facto ally in his drive to remove as many Serbs as possible from Croatia’s Krajina region, as well as from her Bosnian border regions.33

While their numbers were relatively small in comparison with the size of the Bosnian Army, the battle-hardened Mujahideen played a catalytic role in spreading fanatical Jihad radicalism to the regular Army during the war. The Izetbegović regime revamped its entire security and military apparatus to reflect the Mujahideen Islamic revolutionary outlook. It created Mujahideen units throughout the Army; some members of these units were designated shaheed (“martyr,” or suicide bomber), with special white garb symbolizing a shroud. The foreign Muslim Jihadist fighters were given Bosnian citizenship, allowing the Clinton Administration to claim that very few of the fighters were “foreigners.”34

During the war, there were three principal Mujahideen units in the Bosnian army, the first two of which were headquartered in the American IFOR/SFOR zone—the 7th Muslim Liberation Brigade of the 3rd Corps, headquartered in Zenica, and the 9th Muslim Liberation Brigade of the 2nd Corps, headquartered in Travnik. And the 4th Muslim Liberation Brigade of the 4th Corps was headquartered in Konjic in the French zone.35

In addition to those three Mujahideen units in the Bosnian Army of Izetbegović, there was the elite Bosnian Muslim Handschar (“scimitar”) Division, a 6,000-strong special unit that gloried a fascist culture, imitating the SS Handschar division formed by Bosnian Muslims in 1943 to fight for the Nazis against the Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies.

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