In 2011, when protests broke out in Syria, the Barack Obama administration exploited the unrest to launch a dirty war against President Bashar al-Assad. The result of that policy became clear earlier this month when Iraq War veteran Mohammad Abu al-Julani (he fought for Al-Qaeda in Iraq) seized power in Damascus. At the same time, the US is supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, likely driving more men into the arms of jihadist groups.
Washington’s dirty war in Syria draws important parallels with President Bill Clinton’s policy during the Bosnia War. Then, the US aided the movement of jihadists arms and weapons to support Muslims in Bosnia while bombing and starving hundreds of thousands to death in Iraq.
In Scott Horton’s latest book, Provoked, he explains Clinton’s policy of arming Islamic groups in the 1990s and how that backfired on America with the September 11 attacks. The following excerpt is from the text.
~ Kyle Anzalone
We Owed Them One
In his study of the intelligence agencies’ involvement in the war, Dutch government investigator Cees Wiebes wrote that since America had waged Iraq War I in the Arab world, even though this was supposedly in defense of Saudi Arabia, the U.S. then owed a favor to the Saudis and their kept mujahideen mercenaries. “After the Gulf War it was payback time for the United States: there was an expectation in the Arab world (especially Saudi Arabia) that Washington would support the Bosnian Muslims.”
Amb. Bissett also wrote that one explanation for American intervention on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims was that “the United States wished to demonstrate to the Muslim world that it could support Muslim causes. After the Gulf War, it is suggested, the U.S.A. was anxious to find a Muslim position with which it could ally itself.”
Though Iraq War I had allegedly been fought to protect the Saudi monarchy, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda had been enraged at the king’s rejection of their offer to liberate Kuwait from Iraq in favor of his allowing the Americans to station their mostly white, Christian combat forces on holy Arabian soil to do so. So as “payback,” the U.S. would back their Arab allies from the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s in another war, this time in Europe.
President Clinton wrote that “standing up for the Bosnians had another benefit to the United States: it would demonstrate to Muslims the world over that the United States cared about them, respected Islam, and would support them if they rejected terror and embraced the possibilities of peace and reconciliation.”
This goes to show Clinton’s vastly displaced priorities and hypocrisy. If he wanted to score points with his predecessors’ International Islamic Brigades, he could have stopped constantly bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia, supporting Arab dictatorships and the Israeli occupations of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Lebanon, and the rest of al Qaeda’s list of grievances against the United States about policies which were questionable at best in the first place. Instead, he would just support the terrorists on another battlefield and apparently hope they would forget about their other complaints. And what was this about rejecting terror? The administration was counting on the bin Ladenites to get the job done.
Famous Veterans
Yossef Bodansky, a former investigator for the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, reported that bin Laden himself visited Bosnia three times between 1994 and 1996. According to Agence France-Presse and the Wall Street Journal, the Bosnian government had even given the terrorist leader a passport. Renate Flottau, Balkan correspondent for the German newspaper Der Spiegel, met bin Laden in Izetbegović’s office in Sarajevo in 1993. He showed her his passport from Bosnia-Herzegovina, issued by the embassy in Vienna, and told her he was bringing in fighters from outside of the country. Eve-Ann Prentice of the London Times saw him there too.
Other veterans of the jihadists’ war in Bosnia included the men who trained Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian national arrested at the Canadian border in 1999 after planning to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve; eventual September 11 ringleader Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Flight 77 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar; as well as Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who recruited Flight 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and his friend Ramzi bin al Shib into the plot. The same was true for Saud al-Otaibi and Abdel Karim al Meyati, the organizers of the Madrid train bombings of March 2004 and Abdul Azizi al-Murqrin, the later-founder of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who was responsible for at least two attacks in the George W. Bush era, and whose group carried out multiple successful and attempted attacks against the West in Barack Obama years.
After the London train bombings of July 7, 2005, British MP Michael Meacher explained that it was blowback from U.S.-UK intervention in the Balkans, saying the policy was still so twisted that an American federal prosecutor credibly accused MI6 of protecting the man who may have been behind the attack. “[T]he U.S. wanted to raise another jihadi corps, again using proxies, to help Bosnian Muslims fight to weaken the Serb government’s hold on Yugoslavia. Those they turned to included Pakistanis in Britain,” Meacher said. Further, he cited a recent Indian report that Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, at the request of the Clinton administration, sent a contingent of 200 men from the Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA) terrorist group, which had been trained by their Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), to fight in Bosnia “with the full knowledge and complicity of the British and American intelligence agencies.” Meacher complained, “For nearly a decade the U.S. helped Islamist insurgents linked to Chechnya, Iran and Saudi Arabia destabilize the former Yugoslavia.” He said that after the war, thousands of fighters moved on to Kosovo, then Austria, Germany and Switzerland.
And then it turned out Omar Saeed Sheikh, the al Qaeda member alleged to have wired $100,000 to lead hijacker Mohamed Atta before the September 11 attack and was convicted of murdering Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002 (he was later released), was also a veteran of the war in the former Yugoslavia.
Ungrateful Terrorists
If the Clinton administration really thought they were going to buy some goodwill with the jihadists by intervening on their behalf in Bosnia, they were wrong. The terrorists remained unimpressed by Washington’s efforts on their behalf. Al Qaeda leadership in Bosnia denounced the NATO bombing campaign and Dayton negotiations. They expected their sacrifices of the previous months to lead to a whole new Muslim offensive and total victory. They declared the U.S., Britain and France enemies and vowed to destroy us. As Osama bin Laden, by then back in exile in Afghanistan, said in his first declaration of war against the United States in 1996, addressing President Clinton, “[T]he sons of the land of the two holiest sites had come out to fight against the Russians in Afghanistan, the Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and today they are fighting in Chechnya. Allah granted them victory and He came to their aid. They have been made victorious over your allies, the Russians.” He added, “I tell the Islamic youth of the world who fought in Afghanistan and Bosnia-Herzegovina with their money, lives, tongues and pens that the battle has not yet ended.”
Washington got the message. The Dayton Accords mandated that all foreign fighters would have to leave Bosnia. Special Envoy Holbrooke pressured Izetbegović to round up the Arab-Afghans and get rid of them before NATO troops arrived. Some did leave. Many were given asylum in Europe, where they continued to carry out terrorist attacks, or moved on to Chechnya or Afghanistan. Izetbegović gave the rest Bosnian papers and passports. Only after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon was Izetbegović, disgraced by his association with the mujahideen, forced from power.
