[R-G] U.S. supported al-Qaeda cells during Balkan Wars

[Macdonald Stainsby]

National Post. 15 March 2002. U.S. supported al-Qaeda cells during
Balkan Wars.

Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network has been active in the
Balkans for years, most recently helping Kosovo rebels battle for
independence from Serbia with the financial and military backing of the
United States and NATO.

The claim that al-Qaeda played a role in the Balkan wars of the 1990s
came from an alleged FBI document former Yugoslav leader Slobodan
Milosevic presented in his defence before the Hague tribunal last week.

Although Hague prosecutors have challenged the veracity of the document,
which Mr. Milosevic identified as a Congressional statement from the FBI
dated last December, Balkan experts say the presence of al-Qaeda
militants in Kosovo and Bosnia is well documented.

Today, al-Qaeda members are helping the National Liberation Army, a
rebel group in Macedonia, fight the Skopje government in a bid for
independence, military analysts say.

Last week, Michael Steiner, the United Nations administrator in Kosovo,
warned of "importing the Afghan danger to Europe" because several cells
trained and financed by al-Qaeda remain in the region.

"Many members of the Kosovo Liberation Army were sent for training in
terrorist camps in Afghanistan," said James Bissett, former Canadian
ambassador to Yugoslavia and an expert on the Balkans.

"Milosevic is right. There is no question of their participation in
conflicts in the Balkans. It is very well documented."

The arrival in the Balkans of the so-called Afghan Arabs, who are from
various Middle Eastern states and linked to al-Qaeda, began in 1992 soon
after the war in Bosnia.

According to Lenard Cohen, professor of political science at Simon
Fraser University, mujahedeen fighters who travelled to Afghanistan to
resist the Soviet occupation in the 1980s later "migrated to Bosnia
hoping to assist their Islamic brethren in a struggle against Serbian
[and for a time] Croatian forces."

The Bosnian Muslims welcomed their assistance.

After the Bosnian war, "hundreds of Bosnian passports were provided to
the mujahedeen by the Muslim-controlled government in Sarajevo," said
Prof. Cohen in a recent article titled Bin Laden and the war in the
Balkans. Many al-Qaeda members decided to stay in the region after
marrying local Muslim women, he said.

They also set up secret terrorist training camps in Bosnia -- activities
financed by the sale of opium produced in Afghanistan and secretly
shipped through Turkey and Kosovo into central Europe.

In the years immediately before the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999,
the al-Qaeda militants moved into Kosovo, the southern province of
Serbia, to help ethnic Albanian extremists of the KLA mount their
terrorist campaign against Serb targets in the region.

The mujahedeen "were financed by Saudi and United Arab Emirates money,"
said one Western military official, asking anonymity. "They were
mercenaries who were not running the show in Kosovo, but were used by
the KLA to do their dirty work."

The United States, which had originally trained the Afghan Arabs during
the war in Afghanistan, supported them in Bosnia and then in Kosovo.

When NATO forces launched their military campaign against Yugoslavia
three years ago to unseat Mr. Milosevic, they entered the Kosovo
conflict on the side of the KLA, which had already received
"substantial" military and financial support from bin Laden's network,
analysts say.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes on the United States, NATO
began to worry about the presence in the Balkans of the Islamist
terrorist cells it had supported throughout the 1990s.

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Macdonald Stainsby
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