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they grabbed four young men in a village, cut their throats, and collected the blood so as to tip it back over the victims’ heads.48 Western aid workers became targets too, notoriously when three British men were kidnapped, which resulted in the execution-style killing of Paul Goodhall, and the shooting of two of his friends as they fled the same fate at the hands of the jihadists. Tensions between the Bosnian army and their indispensable foreign friends led to the formation of a separate Battalion of Holy Warriors, whose semi-suicidal propensities were in evidence in several major battles. They were owed a debt of blood by the Bosnian government. This explains why that government ignored warnings that the networks that sustained these foreign fighters were simultaneously engaged in acts of terrorism. In 1995, Algerian jihadists were sent from Bosnia to blast with shotguns an imam of a Paris mosque who had co-founded the Islamic Salvation Front, which by then had fallen foul of the more extreme Armed Islamic Group or GIA. Others connected to the ‘charity’ Human Concern International were responsible for two bomb attacks on the Paris Métro—the first of which killed ten and injured 116—as well as a failed attempt to derail a high-speed TGV near Lyons, an early indication that the jihadists were bent on indiscriminate mass casualties.

Warnings from Egypt about this viper’s nest in Europe’s midst were also ignored by most European governments. After an attempt was foiled to assassinate Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptians decided to strike back. They had the Croatian police arrest Talal al-Qasimy, simultaneously the patron of the Bosnian jihadists and the international spokesman of Al-Gama’at, the terror organisation which had co-operated with Al Qaeda in a bid to murder the Egyptian leader in Addis Ababa. In an early example of CIA-supervised rendition under US president Bill Clinton (for George W. Bush did not patent the policy), al-Qasimy was ‘de-territorialised’ by being moved to a US warship, and then handed over to the Egyptians. After a spell in the so-called ghost villas maintained by the Egyptian secret service, he was executed in accordance with a death sentence passed in 1992.49 A decade before major terrorist atrocities in Europe, the Egyptian government issued a clear warning in Al-Ahram:

His [al-Qasimy’s] arrest proves what we have always said, which is that these terror groups are operating on a worldwide scale, using places like Afghanistan and Bosnia to form their fighters who come back to the Middle East … European countries like Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, England and others, which give sanctuary to these terrorists, should now understand it will come back to haunt them where they live.

Virtually every European government, with the honourable exception of the French, ignored a warning whose chill truth is evident a decade later.

As sixty thousand NATO peacekeepers descended on Bosnia in the wake of the Dayton Agreements to halt the carnage, the Bosnian government enabled many of the Arab jihadists, including those who had married locally, to become citizens by issuing them with batches of blank passports. This got around the provision in Dayton that the jihadists had thirty days to leave the country. The villages where they settled acquired roadsigns warning ‘FEAR ALLAH’. Since the jihadists regarded the peace deal as a sell-out, and viewed Western NATO troops as enemies of Islam, any number of ugly incidents occurred when the two sides met, even as a Canadian suicide bomber attacked a Croatian police station in revenge for the abduction of al-Qasimy. In December, a nineteen-year-old British suicide bomber was killed when a car bomb he was readying for use against Croat forces prematurely exploded. A spiral of violence ensued, especially after Croat troops ambushed and assassinated sheikh Anwar Shaaban, the key figure in the entire Bosnian jihad. As Christmas was celebrated for the first time in four years in Bosnia, the mujaheddin shot up Croat soldiers returning from mass.

What happened in Bosnia is important