Word: bosnia
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...investigators now think that the "Afghan" nature of the group is subtly changing. The war against the Soviets ended in 1991. Increasingly, al-Qaeda's captains in the field are too young ever to have fought in Afghanistan, though some may have joined Islamic brigades in Chechnya-or in Bosnia, as Abu Zubaydah did. Many of the new fighters were born and raised not in the Arab lands but in the Muslim communities of Europe, around which they travel with ease. And there is a growing sense that a number of them are "Takfiris," followers of an extremist Islamic ideology...
...addition to the ruthless nature of al-Qaeda's soldiers, investigators now also appreciate just how extensive are its tentacles. In mid-October, for example, nato forces in Bosnia foiled a plot to attack U.S. and British targets there. Bensayah Belkacem, an Algerian thought to be at the center of a Bosnia-based terror group, had the number of Abu Zubaydah on a chit of paper in his apartment. On Oct. 28, Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist group in the Philippines that authorities believe has been supported in the past by al-Qaeda, bombed a food market, killing six people...
...Laden stretches his definition of American aggression further. He blames the U.S. for the killing of Bosnian Muslims by Christian Serbs because of a U.N. arms embargo against Bosnia until 1994. He even counts in this category the 1992-94 mission by U.S. troops to mostly Muslim Somalia as part of a U.N. effort to assist a famine-starved population caught between battling warlords. In bin Laden's book, the troop landing was simply a show of force by the U.S. "to scare the Muslim world, saying that it is able to do whatever it desires." He asked...
...events of Sept. 11 were spectacular in their suddenness, their enormity and their surprise. But everyday the world is plagued by more mundane battles, fought not with high technology but with hands and fists and stones. Genocide in Rwanda. Civil strife in the Congo. Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. These events were just as much an affront to justice as were the events of Sept. 11. And thus, by the rhetoric of an attack on American values anywhere being an attack on security everywhere, they should have warranted a meaningful U.S. response...
...Laden has clearly divided the world up into a number of operational theaters for purposes of jihad - Afghanistan and central Asia; Europe and the United States; the Middle East and East Africa; the Balkans (where he first established a presence by sending volunteers to fight the Serbs in Bosnia) and Southeast Asia. In order to counter and defeat him, the U.S. may well have to mirror his actions...