Fighting the ‘good’ fight

Millions, perhaps even billions of words have been written about al-Qaida over the past three years. We know of the group’s origins as an Office of Services in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when Osama bin Laden used CIA cash to recruit and train foreign fighters for that last gasp of the Cold War, the jihad against the Soviets. We even know, thanks to the editor of the British-Arab magazine Al-Quds, what Osama likes to have for his dinner (salty cheese and a few fried eggs, since you ask). Yet this, as far as I can tell, is the first book to cover the Islamist venture into the Balkans in the mid-1990s, the period between the Afghan war and 9/11 when Mujahedin forces kept themselves busy by declaring holy war against the Serbs.

The Bosnian outing has been discussed in brief elsewhere — over a couple of pages in Loretta Napoleoni’s Modern Jihad, and in a chapter in Cees Wiebes’ excellent Intelligence and the War in Bosnia.