This book is a pathbreaking piece of research into two underexplored aspects of contemporary terrorism. Author Evan F. Kohlmann outlines the trajectories of Arab-Afghan veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad and subsequent civil war in Afghanistan during the 1980s and early 1990s. He also looks to the origins and patterns of mujahedin activity during the 1992-1995 wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The result is a deeply disturbing illumination of late twentieth century Islamic militancy. Both troubled states attracted fighters from across the Greater Middle East and North Africa, and although many of the leading jihadists in wartime Bosnia made their reputations in the earlier Afghan conflict, Kohlmann portrays both states as roughly parallel forges of extremist sentiment. Al-Quaida's Jihad in Europe traces terrorist trajectories from the Peshawar-based Mujahedin Services Office, across the mountains of central and southwestern Bosnia, to London's infamous Finsbury Mosque and the metropoles of Western Europe and North America.
The weight of the book is on the Arab-Afghan migration to Bosnia-Herzegovina. As organized combatants, the contribution of mujahedin units to the Bosnian Muslim war effort was clear: their fearlessness under fire, and their consequent impact on military goals, was undisputed. Their lack of discipline and total disregard for the laws of war, on the other hand, were a liability to the government of Alija Izetbegovic. As religious colonizers, their promotion of conservative Islam also conflicted with the laissez-faire attitudes of Bosnian Muslims. Kohlmann addresses this ambiguity quite adroitly, exploring official reluctance to deal with the post-war settlement of foreign fighters who shed blood in defence of their admittedly obscure Bosnian Muslim brethren. Between 1995 and 2001, these contentious remnants of war became regional outposts for transnational terrorist networks. Numerous post-war terrorist incidents have been traced back to the Afghan-Bosnians, but intervention forces in the Western Balkans ensured that the security spotlight never wavered far. The Al Quaida attacks of 11 September 2001 precipitated a sudden shift in foreign policy attention to Bosnia, and in its own government's approach to domestic counter-terrorism. The country quickly became a second front in the war on terror, at a time when patience with the Balkan quagmire had worn thin.
Equal parts travelogue, journalistic exposé, think tank inquiry, and independent research, Kohlmann's work is part of a newly emerging strand of scholarship that explores some of the hidden micro-histories of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Such authors as Cees Wiebes, Marko Attila Hoare, and Charles R. Schraeder have touched on this uncomfortable aspect of the conflict. Kohlmann addresses the issue in unprecedented detail, exploiting a wide variety of available sources to piece together a largely neglected segment of contemporary Bosnian history. Extensive North American and European media coverage, declassified intelligence documents, and legal case files form the backbone of the study, but interviews with radical clerics, and excerpts from jihadist internet and video propaganda, provide critical insights into terrorist preferences, motives, and interests. Kohlmann offers no overarching theoretical arguments. The book, instead, is descriptive and empirically rich: the author's main accomplishment is to document the many terrorist incidents the Afghan-Bosnians perpetrated in wartime Bosnia, and post-war cases of terrorist activity rooted in their far-reaching network.
This book is also useful for the light it sheds on two related issues that have taken on striking policy relevance since the global war on terror began: the nature of terrorist sanctuaries, and counter-terrorist approaches to stamping them out. NATO's intervention in Bosnia after 1996, interestingly, is given the feel of an early denial-of-sanctuary operation, of the sort more commonly associated with post-9/11 Bush Administration counter-terrorist doctrine. For the professional mujahedin of Afghanistan and Bosnia, constantly in search of violent outlets for their religious convictions, sanctuary has clearly not been the same thing as safety. Many of them were committed jihadists before they ever fought the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Serbs and Croats in the Balkans. They remain a mobile diaspora whose members have been unable to return to their countries of origin, and the sanctuaries they sought out have been a mix of combat zones, staging areas, logistical bases, planning centers, transit points, and ideological enclaves. This reader, for one, anxiously awaits further scholarship on sanctuary in terrorist thought and practice. The one major failing of Kohlmann's study is the poor quality of its editing: the text is full of the sort of typographical errors that should have been picked up in a thorough copyedit. A work of this importance deserves better treatment by its publishers, and one hopes that a second printing will see a more polished product.
Michael A. Innes
book review in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, March 2005
