Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [33]
That request marked the start of a program that would soon spiral out of control, embroiling U.S. military veterans in a jihadist circle with links to al Qaeda and to a stunningly ambitious homegrown plot to kill thousands of innocent victims in New York City.
THE WAR IN BOSNIA
Bosnia-Herzegovina had a long and storied relationship with Islam, going back to its conquest by the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century. The official religion of the empire was Sunni Islam, which was broadly adopted, but Bosnian Jews and Christians were permitted to maintain their practices, resulting in a cosmopolitan mix of religions that worked successfully for centuries.
After the fall of the Ottomans, religion and ethnicity became hot issues. A Bosnian Serb, motivated by ethnic nationalism, fired the shot that started World War I. As part of Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia during World War II, Croatian Catholics and Bosnian Muslims took part in the extermination of Jews and Romany populations.
After World War II, Yugoslavia was united in large part by force of will—a cult of personality built around Communist strongman Josip Broz Tito, who suppressed religious expression and raised a generation of secular Slavs for whom the word “Muslim” was mainly an ethnic identifier.
The Muslims of Yugoslavia became perhaps the world’s most secular. They drank—a lot. They smoked—a lot. They gambled, ate pork, neglected prayers, and charged interest at their banks. Men’s faces were clean shaven, and women’s clothes were low cut.
For more than three decades, Tito’s iron grip held Yugoslavia together. His death in 1980 was the start of a long and agonizing collapse. In 1991 Croatia and Slovenia peeled away from Yugoslavia, while Serbia and Montenegro maintained most of the infrastructure of the former state under a new flag.
All of these machinations left Bosnia with a mixed population that rapidly and violently separated along “ethnic” lines, even though members of the three main groups—Croats, Serbs, and Muslims—had intermarried, spoke the same language, and looked alike.
There were a few who had kept the Islamic flame alive despite severe state repression. After Tito’s fall, longtime Islamic activist Alija Izetbegovic took over the presidency of Bosnia on behalf of the Muslim-controlled Party of Democratic Action (SDA in the Bosnian language) after the country’s first multiparty election in 1990.
Izetbegovic hadn’t won the election. The actual winner was a charismatic businessman named Fikret Abdic whose appeal cut across ethnic lines. Abdic declined to take the presidency as the result of political machinations that have never been disclosed. Izetbegovic—perceived by many Western leaders as a moderate and secular Muslim—later commissioned a fatwa against Abdic, declaring him an infidel and offering the rewards of martyrdom to anyone who was killed fighting his supporters.13
Izetbegovic’s personal beliefs are unclear—he was a cipher to his closest associates, as well as to international intelligence agencies—but his actions soon demonstrated that he had no problem wrapping himself in Islam if it provided some benefit.
The new president and his cabinet were unusually well connected in the Muslim world, keeping up strong ties in both Saudi Arabia and Iran despite the sectarian antagonism between the two countries. As civic chaos gave way to a three-way civil war among Bosnia’s Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, these international connections came into play.
The Iranians chipped in with direct shipments of arms and elite intelligence operatives to assist the Muslims. The Saudis provided copious funds from the kingdom’s coffers but also used their religious leverage to internationalize the conflict.
As part of the latter effort, Izetbegovic was obliged to accept an influx of mujahideen fighters. Between 1,000 and 2,000 foreign fighters took part during the course of the conflict, and they led about 3,000 Bosnians who opted to fight