Islamic jihad to target Balkans next, Israeli foreign minister says

Islamic Jihad organisations that already had infiltrated countries in Africa and South America intended doing the same in the Balkans, through similar methods including huge transfers of funds and the establishment of cells, Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman said.

Lieberman was speaking after meeting visiting Macedonian prime minister Nikola Gruevski on January 5 2009.

Intelligence services had evidence that Islamic terrorist organisations were already recruiting in the Balkans, Lieberman said, according to Israeli media reports.

Islamic and Saudi charities were continuously transferring funds to Muslims of Bosnian and Albanian origin, the Jerusalem Post reported him as saying.

Part of the evidence for infiltration in Africa was that two recent attempted crimes, the bid to blow up an aircraft travelling from Amsterdam to Detroit, and an attempt to murder Danish caricaturist Kurt Westergaard, had involved people from Nigeria and Kenya, Lieberman said.

Citing Israeli intelligence sources, Lieberman said that Muslim militants planned to exploit tensions between Muslims and Christians in the Balkans. Bosnians and Albanians had been recruited for terrorist training camps in preparation for being sent home to foster an Islamic revolution, according to Lieberman.

The issue of militant Islamic fundamentalist activities in South Eastern Europe has been the subject of continuous study and debate by various intelligence services, scholars and investigative journalists for several years, especially after the conflict that ended with the 1995 Dayton Accord, and further after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks.

Among the more recent episodes was the sentencing in September 2009 by a court in Serbia of four Muslim men who, the court found, had planned to carry out terrorist acts in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia. Found guilty of terrorism, illegal possession of weapons and links to foreign terrorist groups, the men were jailed for up to eight years each.

More recently, in December 2009 Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, one of two men jailed by a US court for filming landmarks to assist future terrorist attacks was found by US officials to have been in contact with Mirsad Bektasevic, a Balkan-born Swede convicted in 2007 of plotting to blow up a European target to make foreign troops withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Those who have portrayed Balkan countries as targeted for the propagation of Wahhabi, a militant variety of Sunni Islam, including authors such as Christopher Deliso and Shaul Shay. In a 2008 article, Deliso listed a long series of terrorist incidents either planned or carried out that involved people from various countries in South Eastern Europe, from Albania to Turkey.

Critics of such theses describe them as unduly alarmist and of failing to make distinctions among the diverse strands within Islam – even fundamentalist Islam – and that most Muslim communities in South Eastern Europe adhere to a mainstream, moderate form of the faith.

However, others have claimed that the problem is much more extensive. In 2008, Darko Trifunovic, of the faculty of security studies at the University of Belgrade, quoting sources including the US treasury department, alleged that Al-Qaeda was establishing a fully-operational terrorist financing and logistical network in the Balkans.

Like several others, Trifunovic said that it was common practice for money to be funnelled into the Balkans through front organisations operating as charity, humanitarian or educational institutions.

One aspect of the narrative that is debated arises from the Dayton Accord provision that Mujahedin foreign fighters who supported Bosnian Muslims in their conflict with Serbs and Croats should leave the region. Some authors allege that not all left, especially given that they had married locally and been given passports, while others say that "quietly" Bosnia had evicted all the fighters from the country.

In a number of countries in South Eastern Europe, money – often emanating from Saudi Arabia – has been provided to build mosques and Muslim schools. Muslim organisations and news services insist that this is conventional religious and educational work and that there is nothing sinister about it. However, some of the organisations involved in sending money have been listed by the US and others as terrorist organisations.

Reacting to Lieberman’s statement, Gruevski said that the warning was "not something new" and there had been several media reports about a year ago about such a threat.

"We should be prepared for all possibilities in this direction; services in all countries should be ready to stop such actions if they occur," Gruevski said, Macedonia’s A1 television reported.

Sofia Echo