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The Coming Balkan Caliphate: the Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West

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The Coming Balkan Caliphate: the Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West Christopher Deliso PRAEGER SECURITY INTERNATIONAL THE COMING BALKAN CALIPHATE Praeger Security International Advisory Board Board Cochairs Loch K. Johnson, Regents Professor of Public and International Affairs, School of Public and International Affairs, University of Georgia (U.S.A.) Paul Wilkinson, Professor of International Relations and Chairman of the Advi- sory Board, Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St. Andrews (U.K.) Members Eliot A. Cohen, Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies and Director, Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University (U.S.A.) Anthony H. Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy, Center for Strategic and International Studies (U.S.A.) The´re`se Delpech, Director of Strategic Affairs, Atomic Energy Commission, and Senior Research Fellow, CERI (Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques), Paris (France) Sir Michael Howard, former Chichele Professor of the History of War and Regis Professor of Modern History, Oxford University, and Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History, Yale University (U.K.) Lieutenant General Claudia J. Kennedy, USA (Ret.), former Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Department of the Army (U.S.A.) Paul M. Kennedy, J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History and Director, International Security Studies, Yale University (U.S.A.) Robert J. O’Neill, former Chichele Professor of the History of War, All Souls College, Oxford University (Australia) Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland (U.S.A.) Jusuf Wanandi, co-founder and member, Board of Trustees, Centre for Strategic and International Studies (Indonesia) Fareed Zakaria, Editor, Newsweek International (U.S.A.) THE COMING BALKAN CALIPHATE The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West Christopher Deliso Foreword by Loretta Napoleoni PRAEGER SECURITY INTERNATIONAL Westport, Connecticut • London Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deliso, Christopher, 1974– The coming Balkan caliphate : the threat of radical Islam to Europe and the West / Christopher Deliso ; foreword by Loretta Napoleoni. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–275–99525–6 (alk. paper) 1. Terrorism — Balkan Peninsula. 2. Islam — Balkan Peninsula — History. 3. Islam and politics — Balkan Peninsula. 4. Balkan Peninsula — Ethnic relations. I. Title. HV6433.B35D45 2007 305.6’9709496—dc22 2007014360 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2007 by Christopher Deliso All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2007014360 ISBN-13: 978–0–275–99525–6 ISBN-10: 0–275–99525–9 First published in 2007 Praeger Security International, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10987654321 Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The author and publisher will be glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowledgments in subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime extend their apologies for any omissions. Contents Foreword by Loretta Napoleoni vii Preface xi Acknowledgments xv Abbreviations xix Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Bosnia: Clinton’s Gift to Fundamentalist Islam 4 Chapter 2 Hotel Tirana and a Strange Enough Jihad 28 Chapter 3 A Plain of Black Beards? 50 Chapter 4 The Macedonian Enigma 73 Chapter 5 The Ottoman Legacy and Turkey’s Deep Shadow 92 Chapter 6 Fixin’ to Lose 114 Chapter 7 Global Economics, “Certain Foreign Relations,” 136 and the War on Terror Chapter 8 The Next Generation: Jihad, the Balkans, and the Threat to 153 the West Notes 175 vi Contents Bibliography 193 Index 205 Foreword The Balkans is the cultural and historical bridge between East and West. It is a region where the seeds of many civilizations have been sown, as well as a land that has witnessed endless wars fought to enhance different visions of history. It is the geographical divide between two worlds, which at times have merged, as during the Roman Empire, and at others have collided violently with each other, as during the Crusades. Historically and strategically, the Balkans are to- day as important for the future of Europe as they were a century ago, when an anarchic fanatic in Sarajevo offered the casus belli for World War I. This is the message encrypted in Christopher Deliso’s seminal work, in his detailed reconstruction of the genesis of jihadist and fundamentalist movements in the region. Right from the beginning the author shows how major political mistakes have boosted the spreading in the region of the most reactionary and backwards inter- pretations of Islam, particularly Wahhabism. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former Yugoslavia has disintegrated, being replaced by several small states, all seeking independence from one another and all eager to compete with each other over territorial enclaves. To legitimate such claims, religion became synonymous with ethnicity and nationality. In a region where races and creeds had mixed for centuries, this phenomenon triggered new strife. Ethnic cleansing became the appalling weapon to clear the way to territorial conquest. Neighbors killed each other, and families were torn apart. Deliso superbly and almost scientifically unveils the political mistakes and blindness that fostered the most recent Balkan wars. As early as the 1980s, the peculiar geography and history of Yugoslavia appealed to emerging Islamic viii Foreword powers. Saudi Arabia and Iran saw in the Balkans an ideal hub from where to challenge Europe. They targeted the region, which became part of a master plan to proselytize radical Islam in areas where Muslim minorities lived. Thus Wah- habi religious colonization was planned across a wide frontier stretching from Central Asia to the Balkans. As with the Caucasus during the Chechnya conflict, the Balkans became a region where the type of fighting that led to the victory of the Afghan-Arab jihad could be reproduced. The religious fervor that legitimized the vicious war against the Soviet “nonbelievers” was transplanted, after Afghanistan, to Chechnya, other Russian Caucasus republics, and the Balkans. For the jihadis, Russian and Serb nationalists became replicas of the Soviets, peo- ple without a God. Paradoxically, President Clinton’s schizophrenic foreign policy facilitated such a process. Mujahedin who fought in the anti-Soviet Jihad flocked to the Bal- kans and ended up fighting on the same side as U.S. and European troops. This should not come as a surprise considering that a decade earlier the United States and Saudi Arabia had bankrolled the mujahedin in Afghanistan in the first place. The key question that Christopher Deliso poses is this: “Did the West believe that another war by proxy could be fought along the Adriatic Sea, just a few miles from the coast of a founding member of the European Union?” Using language accessible to a general readership, and presenting a wealth of shocking recent examples, the author answers such an uncomfortable question. No, the West was simply dragged into the conflict, hence its schizophrenic behavior. Today, new emerging powers are eager to promote the proliferation of con- flicts in areas where Muslims live. The aim is simple: Religion is the ideological cloth that disguises wars of economic conquest. Deliso explains how, during the 1990s, Saudi charities bankrolled the jihadi brigades that acted as the vanguards of the Wahhabi ideological colonization movement in the Balkans. Their task was to conquer new territories, wielding Arab money and religious ideals to do so. Funds flooded the region to build mosques and madrasahs where young Mus- lims especially could be indoctrinated. However, while until the 1990s such indoctrination was aimed at strengthening the jihadi fight in distant lands, such as Kashmir or Afghanistan, since 1998 the target has changed. With methodical vigor, Christopher Deliso reconstructs the links between al Qaeda and the Bal- kans. He shows the importance that the region played prior to and leading up to the 9/11 plot, as well as in the tragic transition of Europe from just a financial hub of al Qaeda to a main target in and of itself. What is next? This is the question that the author addresses at the end of the book. Having presented the background and revised the main strategies pursued by the West and the East on the Balkan chessboard, he attempts to outline the possible outcomes. Above all, the Balkans should not be ignored or erased from the world’s political agenda. Current media indifference projects the wrong con- clusion; Western publics remain under the false impression that the region has been pacified. Far from it, it is instead brewing more violence. If Europe contin- ues to turn away from and ignore this threat, fundamentalist movements, such as Foreword ix the Wahhabis and jihadist followers of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al- Zawahiri, will succeed in transforming the region into a hub for radical activity and even terrorist plots against Europe and the West. Their growing network has already forged key alliances with Italian organized crime, and has entered strategic joint ventures with local Balkan criminal organizations. It is only a mat- ter of time until an attack on European soil will be launched from Balkan enclaves controlled by the foreign-directed fundamentalists, the author warns. To back up this warning, Deliso lists in his book several plots, some of them major, which have been foiled since 9/11.
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