Europe's New Jihadi Army Ready for Action

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New Jihadist Army Forming in Balkans

>From DEBKA-Net-Weekly's Intelligence Report

24 June: The next radical Islamic terror attack in America could

well originate in a corner of the Balkans, where a new jihad force

is taking shape quietly and unhindered. In its last issue, published

on Friday, June 21, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources reported

that close to 20,000 fighters, battled-hardened veterans and eager

young recruits, are already under arms, with more joining up all the

time.

An Islamist bloc of nations (whose formation has been reported in

the past by DEBKAfile) - made up of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, al

Qaeda and Hizballah, with active Palestinian support - is behind the

new Muslim Balkan army. Saudi, Iranian and Iraqi intelligence

services and al Qaeda operations officers in Macedonia, Kosovo,

Bosnia and Albania are tasked with recruitment, training and

organization. The units are armed with modern weaponry, including

missiles and artillery, while handpicked young Muslim recruits have

been sent to sign up at private flying schools, especially in the

Czech Republic and Bulgaria, as the nucleus of an air force.

Having learned the lessons of the war in Afghanistan, planners and

commanders keep their heads well down, their training bases and

facilities well hidden.

Recruitment is brisk among the ethnic Albanian Muslim populations of

Kosovo, Macedonia and Bosnia, as well as Albania proper. Hundreds of

mosques are sprouting in these countries, funded from deep Saudi

pockets. The mosques open cultural societies to attract boys aged 15

to 16 and enroll them at medressaswhich, like their Pakistani

prototypes, integrate military training in their curricula. The

result is an expanding recruiting pool for terrorists, the same as

Pakistan's medressas, before the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Because Balkan Muslim families tend to be large, the percentage of

teenagers in the general population is among the highest in the

world, close to half, providing a potential recruiting reservoir of

three quarters of a million youngsters.

Each mosque has its Saudi imam, who takes orders from Saudi

intelligence. The military instructors are Iranian and Iraqi

officers, as well as al Qaeda commanders who fought the Americans in

Afghanistan. They mark out the best and brightest students for long-

term careers. At the age of 17, these youths are promoted to a

secret quasi-military organization and given three training sessions

a week in urban warfare, weapons systems, the manufacture of

explosive devices, bombs and mines, ways of demolishing tanks and

aircraft, as well as night combat. After two months, they receive a

fixed salary of roughly $500 to $700 a month, an irresistible draw

in a society where employment is scarce. A month later, they are

given uniforms and personal weapons, which they take home and hide.

Drilled into them is the consciousness that their wages depend on

perfect obedience to their instructors and religious mentors.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards (Pazdaran) have set up a logistical

command center in the Iranian embassy in Skopje to coordinate the

swelling movements of Iranian, Iraqi and Saudi instructors,

organizers, couriers and bagmen in and out of the Balkans, usually

from the Middle East. Most of the Saudis are al Qaeda operatives who

fought in Afghanistan.

Until recently, they all traveled to the Balkans by indirect routes,

careful not to draw attention to themselves, especially from agents

of the US intelligence services attached to US Special Force

contingents based in Kosovo and Bosnia. When they saw that no US

intelligence service appeared interested in their activities, the

travelers began to throw caution to the winds, freely using Skopje's

international airport for their comings and goings.

Our sources have failed to turn up any hand obstructing the

emergence of the Balkan Muslim terrorist force, although

fundamentalist governments of the Middle East and al Qaeda have

fathered it for the aim of injecting young blood into the Islamic

terror movement and invigorate the movement dedicated to violent

assault against the West, primarily the United States.

The government of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, headed

by its president Boris Trajkovski, is painfully aware of the threat.

But, 11 months after concluding a ceasefire with Albanian

insurgents, its army (see picture) can scarcely stand up alone to

the youthful terrorist force, led by professional Saudi, Iranian and

Iraqi military instructors as well as al-Qaeda terror experts.

As a provisional containment measure, the Macedonian government has

secretly closed the country's borders to the passage of goods to and

from Kosovo, Bosnia and Albania, hoping to block the flow of weapons

and ammunition supplies to the Muslim army. But it is probably too

late to have much effect. Nevertheless, Macedonian forces are

believed to be preparing to go into the regions taken over by the

Jihadist force for the urgent but hopeless task of flushing the out.

If this action goes ahead, it will most likely trigger an upsurge of

violence on the tiny Balkan republic's borders.