Bosnia Investigates Radical Threats
By Anes Alic, Damir Kaletovic for ISN
Bosnia’s State Investigation and Protection Agency’s (SIPA) and Federal Police (FUP) have opened separate investigations into the activities of several Bosnians and radical Islamic websites suspected of advocating the killing of foreign troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and attempting to recruit Bosnians to fight against US-led coalition forces in both hotspots.
The investigations, launched in late February shortly after the Federal Television (FTV) political talk show “60 Minutes” aired video footage featuring four clips of the executions of US soldiers in Iraq. The video, titled “Juba, the Baghdad Sniper, was distributed among the followers of radical Islam in several cities in central and northern Bosnia.
Bosnian security views the video footage, originally attributed to the Islamic Army in Iraq (IAI), and its distribution as a renewed attempt to recruit Islamic fighters for the wars in the Iraq and Afghanistan. The video glorifies the fight against the western alliance in Iraq and is aimed at attracting Islamic radicals, mostly former fighters from the El-Mujahid Unit in Bosnia, to volunteer for a "holy war" against the US and their allies in Iraq.
The now officially defunct El-Mujahid unit, headquartered in the central Bosnian town of Zenica, was under the jurisdiction (in theory) of the Bosnian army during the war, though it operated autonomously and was comprised of foreign fighters from Islamic countries. After the Bosnian war, many of its members left Bosnia for Chechnya and Afghanistan.
The video footage, which contains subtitles in Bosnian, documents the actions of Iraqi snipers, including the infamous “Juba,” as they eliminate US troops patrolling Baghdad or manning checkpoints.
The footage also shows fighters training during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia, as well as in Chechnya, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The DVD is being distributed among radical Muslims of the Wahhabi movement in Zenica and Bugojno, where the movement is strongest. According to a Federal Police source involved in the investigation who spoke to ISN Security Watch on condition of anonymity, the materials are being shown only to Wahhabi members who have expressed a clear desire to be sent to Afghanistan or Iraq.
“The meetings where those materials are being distributed have so far been held in central and western Bosnia in private homes, and our informants report that aside from [attempting to] recruit [Bosnians] for the Middle East, they are discussing the plotting of attack on US targets here in Bosnia,” the source said.
The source also said that many of those attending the meetings are former members of the El-Mujahid unit, known to police structures for their militant and violent histories. Many of them are radical Bosnian Muslims from the diasporas in Germany and Austria.
Federal anti-terror officers have noted an increase in the arrival of radical Muslims in the past six months, the source added. Security agencies believe that the purpose of their visits is to establish a network of people tasked with recruiting future fighters in Bosnia.
It remains unclear exactly how many Bosnians have been recruited so far to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, the source said. Bosnian and western intelligence agencies believe that most of the foreign fighters who fought against Serbs and Croats during Bosnian war left the country after the war and joined Islamic militant groups elsewhere.
ISN Security Watch sources from SIPA and the Federal Police do not rule out the option that some of the Bosnian Islamists who returned from the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan brought the controversial DVD with them in order to recruit more fighters.
“We assume that the main goal of the DVD material distribution is the recruitment of new fighters, and even though it is hard to fight against and control this kind of propaganda, we know that it is coming to Bosnia from the Middle East through secure channels. The very same circle of people used similar tactics during the war in Chechnya, and dozens of men from central Bosnia went there to fight against Russian troops. I don’t see a reason why they wouldn’t use the same propaganda for Iraq and Afghanistan,” the Federal Police source said.
Wahhabi.com
Parallel with the FUP investigation, SIPA has launched a separate investigation, which however appears to be linked to the recruitment probe, of local internet sites which have been republishing their own propaganda.
The initial results of the SIPA investigation show that the possible recruitment of Bosnian men for Middle East war zones is being directed from Western Europe. Earlier, ISN Security Watch intelligence and police sources claimed that Vienna was the financial and ideological center for radical Bosnian Muslims.
"The agency is taking measures and actions according to its authority, with an aim to identifying individuals linked to the cases of recruiting people from BiH for the war in Iraq and to distributing of the video material showing the liquidation of the US soldiers,” SIPA said in a press release.
A source from SIPA closely involved in the investigation told ISN Security Watch on condition of anonymity that four Bosnian men with links to militant Islamic groups were currently under investigation in connection with the video distribution and the creation of a network of fighters in Bosnia to be sent abroad.
In 1999, the four men, who names cannot be disclosed due to the ongoing investigation, were tried and convicted along with four others for planting landmines around the property of Bosnian Croat refugee returnees in Bugojno and setting off explosives in front of the house of a local Croat politician. One of the men, referred to only by his initials, MJ, was said to be the group’s leader and the organizer of the attacks, was a member of the El-Mujahid unit during the Bosnian war.
SIPA’s investigation is focusing on the internet site external pagePutvjernika(“Pilgrims Journey”), which also broadcast the sniper video as well as other materials from al-Qaida linked internet sites calling for the execution of foreign troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and glorifying suicide bombers.
With some 300 visits per day, Putvjernika includes a photo gallery called the "external pageSmile of Shahid" showing the faces of dead jihad warriors, the charts of the favorite suicide bombers and columns written by Bosnian radical Muslims or foreign radical clerics calling for jihad against all nonbelievers, including moderate Muslims in Bosnia.
The site also has a news section with detailed updates of the events in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Palestinian Territories with precise external pagecharts showing constantly updated foreign troop losses there.
ISN Security Watch’s source from SIPA says that the website is run from Austria, and that for some time, due its content, had been closed by Austrian authorities but was recently relaunched.
In an interactive forum, the website invites readers to ask questions. One reader asked: ”Is it a sin if a man put the explosive on himself and blow himself up among the group of unbelievers?”
The answer: “This type of fight we don’t see as forbidden, but also we don’t believe it should be used as classic weapon, but only in extraordinary occasions and situations. Allah knows the best.”
The administrator who answered that question was Nusret Imamovic, a figure known to Bosnian security services as a violent man with a criminal record and one of the leaders of the Bosnian Wahhabi community.
Imamovic, a naturalized Austrian citizen living between Vienna and the northern Bosnian village of Gornja Maoca, near the city of Brcko, founded and lead a small Wahhabi community which was closed to outsiders. Children in the community do not attend public schools, but are instead given lectures held by Imamovic in accordance with a Jordanian school program.
Imamovic became better known to the Bosnian public when he and six other Wahhabis, three of them naturalized Austrian citizens, assaulted Bosnian Serb Mihajlo Kisic in Brcko in 2006. After a short trial, the seven were given symbolic sentences and released on parole and some of them returned to Vienna. Among the seven was another Wahhabi cleric, Effendi Nedzad Balkan (also known as Ebu Muhammed), a Vienna-born Serbian Muslim, the leader of Vienna’s Sahaba Mosque and the alleged financier of Wahhabis in the Sandzak region of Serbia.
Furthermore, Imamovic is a close associate of Muhamed Porca, the imam of the Al-Tawhid Mosque in Vienna. Bosnian security services believe that Porca, a former Bosnian imam, is a key financial and ideological supporter of radical forces in Bosnia. Some Bosnian Islamic community officials also accuse Porca of organizing and financing visits to Bosnia for radical Muslims from Germany and Austria.
State security threats
According to classified information gathered by the security and intelligence services on all levels, there are at least 40 persons in Bosnia labeled as potential state security threats. The Federal Police source said that those men, most of them living in central and western Bosnia with some frequently visiting Western European cities, were under constant surveillance.
Some of these alleged security threats were the subject of intelligence correspondence from late January between US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Bosnian intelligence and police services, after the US said it was investigating two Bosnian citizens believed to be connected to militant groups planning to attack US targets, primarily in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“One of the people covered in the investigation announced plans to move with his family to Gornja Maoca, a Muslim community run on sharia law and led by Nusret Imamovic, the head of the Active Islamic Youth (AIO). Among Islamic extremists, this community is viewed as an example of a successful Islamic state. Our investigation confirmed contact between Imamovic and the person we are interested in,” read a communiqué from the FBI translated into Bosnian, a copy of which was obtained by ISN Security Watch.
The Federal Police source told ISN Security Watch that two suspects were already known to the police and were the subject of several other investigations. He said that the FBI was interested in the suspects' contacts in Bosnia in light of the fact that one of the two has been visiting the US regularly and is married to an US citizen.