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The most prominent leaders of the Bosnian mujahideen were Egyptians associated with Omar Abdel Rahman’s Islamic Group and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.15 Bosnian president Izetbegovic was allied with these leaders, even consenting to be videotaped during a grip-and-grin meeting with fighters closely tied to Osama bin Laden and Omar Abdel Rahman.16

Bin Laden sent several al Qaeda members to Bosnia in an effort to exploit the conflict. The mastermind of September 11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, also traveled to Bosnia looking for recruits he could turn from military jihad to terrorism, and two of the 9/11 hijackers fought in Bosnia. However, the majority of the mujahideen were not overtly connected to al Qaeda (see chapter 5).17

THE VIEW FROM AMERICA

The Saudi government had invested tremendous resources into shaping the opinions and the organizations of American Muslims. Its most overt tool for this purpose was the New York office of the Muslim World League.

As the war in Bosnia heated up, the English-language MWL Journal placed the conflict front and center, with dozens of articles and cover stories focusing on the Muslims’ disadvantages in terms of arms and training, compared to the Serbs and the Croats.

The journal also chronicled the impotent rage of the Islamic Conference states over a UN arms embargo that covered the conflict zone. The embargo was widely perceived by Muslims and non-Muslims alike to provide a devastating advantage to Bosnian Serbs by preventing Muslims from defending themselves.

The Muslim States and communities have been patient. For months on, they have been watching with their hands on their hearts Bosnian Muslims being mercilessly butchered and their children and women being ruthlessly evicted from their homes and farms as Serbia occupies more land and gains more ground.18

Others were steering the narrative in American policy circles. Abdurrahman Alamoudi was a player who had over the years worked for several mainstream U.S. Muslim organizations before founding the American Muslim Council in 1990. He was also wired into the Muslim underground. According to an informant, he carried regular payments of $5,000 from Osama bin Laden to Omar Abdel Rahman in New York to cover the cost of Rahman’s rent and expensive international phone bills.19

Articulate and media-savvy, Alamoudi was a regular presence on television and in newspapers, always ready to provide a quote or a sound bite when journalists needed someone to represent the voice of mainstream American Islam. Alamoudi was an advocate of U.S. intervention in Bosnia, staging protests and rallies for the cameras and writing op-eds for both Muslim and mainstream publications:

Candidate Clinton called for increased U.S. involvement in the Balkans designed to halt Serb aggression and violations of human rights. President Clinton, however, has dithered and drifted, abdicating his responsibilities as leader of the free world and ignoring the considerable powers of his office.20

These lobbying efforts were helped by a combination of pragmatism and idealism on the part of the mainstream media. Pragmatically, it was extremely unsafe to report firsthand on the unfolding war, so journalists frequently relied on official pronouncements from Bosnian Muslim officials as to what exactly was going on. Idealism was an even more powerful force—CNN’s Christiane Amanpour flatly stated that attempts to report on the conflict from a neutral perspective would have made reporters “complicit in genocide.”21

Few other reporters would go that far in public, but most Western coverage clearly favored the Muslim side in the war. And in many important respects, the narrative was correct—the Muslims were, by and large, the victims of Serbian aggression, and they endured horrifying war crimes in Bosnia. Nevertheless, most reporting tended to neglect important complexities, such as atrocities and war crimes committed by Bosnian Muslim factions, including the mujahideen, about whom little was known.

On the policy side,