THE COMING BALKAN CALIPHATE
In September 2001, George W. Bush admonished the world, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." But how will the world know where to stand when America itself is with the terrorists?
Such is the America that operates in the Balkans, and such is the question underlying Christopher Deliso's new book, "The Coming Balkan Caliphate", which tells the most terrifying story never told in the War on Terror. An American journalist based in Macedonia, Deliso has been investigating radical Islamic trends in the region for the better part of a decade. He's the director of the independent Balkan news website and a field analyst on Macedonian politics for the Economics Intelligence Unit, London.
His book examines the repercussions of the free world's alliance with radicals in Kosovo and Bosnia, one of which surfaced just this month with the attempted bombing of the U.S. embassy in Austria. The vivid picture Deliso paints, one that is corroborated by daily reports that have been streaming out of the region since the Clinton administration rallied NATO countries to the side of "moderate" Muslims against Yugoslavia, is more disturbing than anything that even the most vigilant Jihad-watchers can imagine.
On the first page of the first chapter, Deliso dispels the unanimous, carefully crafted and guarded script that the Bosnian Muslims were innocent, hapless victims of genocidal Serbian aggression:
It would not be until the watershed events of September 11, 2001, that the role of Bosnia as an incubator and catalyst for international terrorism would become impossible to ignore. This embarrassing truth had long been suppressed by the many Western diplomats, journalists, and public relations hacks who had built large fortunes and careers on protecting this myth of their own making…Preliminary to any historical debate, therefore it must be acknowledged that high-powered Washington lobbyists and much of the Western media purposefully distorted, omitted, and concealed key facts on the ground.
Indeed, Caliphate affirms what the 9/11 Commission itself found: that "the Bosnian jihad had essentially created a global empire for terror." It served as a finishing school for terrorists bent on killing Americans and Europeans, but who cut their teeth on the Serbs. The indictment for the 2004 Madrid bombing mentions Bosnia 300 times, and a planned rocket attack on major world leaders at the 2005 funeral of Pope John Paul II, which was summarily unreported, was hatched in a backwater Bosnian villageand thwarted by a tip to the Italians and Croatians from Bosnia's Serb Republic.
Further, "a number of key figures associated with the 9/11 plot," writes Deliso, "were veterans of the Bosnian jihad…Bosnia had become one of al Qaeda's most important European assets..." As well, Deliso mentions that the 7/7 bombings in Britain netted the arrest of several Balkan Muslims and British Muslims radicalized by the Balkan jihads. But Caliphate also reminds us of a less known Balkan connection:
Although almost forgotten by now, in the immediate aftermath of the [9/11] attacks, tight-lipped U.S. government sources disclosed an explosive fact: that there was a definite connection between the 9/11 plotters and Albania-based Islamic terrorists. Further, these officials attested that KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] members had indeed been trained at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan…
Deliso's main focus is Kosovo, which saw the Clinton administration repeat its deadly Bosnian mistake rather than admit it. Regarding Kosovo and the surrounding areas that, like clockwork after our intervention, curiously fell victim to near carbon-copy conflicts of Kosovo (Macedonia, Montenegro and southern Serbia), Deliso again makes quick work of the principal objection one encounters when pointing to how NATO directly Islamicized the Balkans:
Albanians, whether from Albania, Kosovo, or Macedonia, have scoffed at the idea of a major religious fundamentalist incursion in their midst. So have their Western yes-men. The West heavily backed the Kosovo Liberation Army during the NATO bombing, despite the presence of mujahedin in its ranks, and for Western publics to suspect that this cause has been muddled up with an Islamist one would amount to a public relations disaster for both Clinton-era political veterans and for the Albanians themselves. Indeed, it would call into question the entire rationale for Western intervention in Kosovo.
The Islamist cause that Deliso refers to is the prevalence of Saudi Arabia, UAE and others who have been active in the Balkans since even before Western interventions there but for whom the interventions were a major boonand downright coup. Wahhabi groups and "charities" entice Albanians in Kosovo and Macedonia with hundreds of dollars per month for every family member who adopts the strictest form of fundamentalist Islam. To that end, the Balkan landscape has been changing, not only with the new, Saudi-style mosques now dotting the formerly Christian lands, always taller than the nearest (and usually vandalized) church, but also with the increasing prevalence of Wahhabi dress and worship.
No apologist for the Serbs, Deliso engages in the standard scolding of the Serbian lobby for its alleged exaggeration of Albanian-connected terror, though he doesn't go on to debunk any specific exaggeration. Rather, his book demonstrates a terror-laden Balkan reality beyond what even the wildest exaggeration could conceive. Among the revelations in the book is that terror-connected, Saudi-based charities were pulling at least some of the strings behind the big Kosovo pogrom of March 2004, in which 35 churches were dynamited, hundreds of Serbian homes burned, 1,000 people injured and 19 killed.
Insider revelations about this episode, however, include that "19" was just the "agreed" number, with the actual death toll at more than 30 (indeed, initial, pre-damage-control reports had the number at 31). Two other unreported facts are that the rioters killed six NATO peacekeepers and slashed the throats of Serbian farmers' pigs. Most embarrassing for UNMIK (UN Mission in Kosovo) authorities, reports Deliso, is that the U.S.and UN-supported Kosovo Prime Minister Agim Ceku's officers "actively aided the mobs."
As Deliso explains, the UN (in concert with the U.S.) "has allowed former KLA leaders and the mafia to control society…Today, this chaotic situation has moved from the unfortunate to the scandalous, with the CIA, MI6, BND [German intelligence], and others eager to build 'special relationships' with Islamic extremists bent on killing Christians, attacking Western targets, and creating a fundamentalist caliphate…Indeed, longtime UNMIK employees in Kosovo who have watched the process disintegrate over the years express disbelief at how the Western media and politicians can get away with calling the intervention a success."
Deliso details the bizarre arrangement by which we've allied ourselves with "nominally Muslim" Albanian mafiosos to feed us information about the Islamists they do heroin and weapons business with, while Albanians, some at the highest levels of Kosovo's U.S.-supported officialdom, moonlight as terrorists themselves. "
Read it all.
Labels: al-Qaeda, Albania, Balkans, caliphate, Christopher Deliso, CIA, KLA, Kosovo, NATO, Serbia, Serbs, Yugoslavia
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