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republic, Iran quickly gained control of the government in Sarajevo. The mujahadeen, up to 7,000 of them, were allowed to stay and many of them married local Muslim women. Iran moved in with financial aid to the Muslim government that amounted to tens of millions of dollars annually.By the mid-1990s, Iranian agents established a base in Albania, which has not had a central government in nearly a decade. Iranian Revolutionary Guards provided weapons, money, and training to Kosovo rebels. Iranian and Saudi representatives launched charities and banks.
From Albania, Iranian agents moved to Kosovo. In Prizren, Iranian envoys formed a society funded by the Iranian Culture Center in Belgrade and sent groups of Kosovars to Iran to study militant Islam.
By 1998, Iran was smuggling in weapons and fighters, the sources said. Commando units entered Kosovo last May to help the KLA. These units were comprised of Albanians, Bosnians, Egyptians, Macedonians and Saudis.
By August, the Saudis were ordered to leave the units and Riyadh, strapped financially, reduced financial support to the KLA.
"It's clear that this is an issue on the Islamic agenda," says Boaz Ganor, director of the International Policy Institute of Counterterrorism, based in Herzliya, Israel. "This phenomenon is marked by waves. First, the mujahadeen were in Afghanistan. Then the war ended and they had nothing to do. The Kosovo arena for them is both ideological and a source of employment."
The weapons and money have been smuggled from both Albania and Bosnia. In December, Croatian authorities said they seized close to $1 million of weapons brought from Bosnia that were headed for Kosovo. The route for smuggling, regional diplomats say, has been the Adriatic Sea.
Other weapons were smuggled in cargo shipments classified as humanitarian aid. One such shipment was uncovered by Croatian police in the port of Split in September. Several tons of weapons and ammunition were stored in crates marked "humanitarian aid."
Yugoslav authorities say the weapons include rifles, mortars, and communications systems made in the United States and Israel.
Today, says the Federation of American
Scientists, a prominent group of researchers which often
consults U.S. administrations, the KLA contains 1,000
mercenaries from Albania, Saudi Arabia,
Afghanistan, Bosnia, Croatia and Yemen. KLA training camps are in
four Albanian cities under the influence of former
Albanian President Sali Berisha.
Yugoslav officials say the KLA's goal is to sever Kosovo from Yugoslavia and merge it with Albania. But Western strategists go further. They say an Islamic Kosovo could serve as a bridge for an Iranian sphere of influence that would soon join Albania, in the east, to Bosnia, in the west. They say Macedonia, which also contains a significant Muslim population, would soon succumb to Iranian control.
The argument is echoed by KLA representatives themselves in their arguments for Muslim support. At the Islamabad conference, a KLA envoy, according to a report by the London-based monthly Filistin al-Muslimah, "explained the geographical and strategic importance of Kosovo in the connection between the Islamic centers of Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia."
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gether in the Yasenovatz destruction camp. From within Muslim Bosnia, with inciteful encouragement by the Mufti of Jerusalem, a Jew-killing SS Division arose. The Serbs kept dozens of German divisions occupied in battle, and caused them great losses. Serbia was the only country in Europe that threw off the German conquest on its own, paying a terrible price along the way: 1,700,000 dead--11% of its total population. The partisan army numbered a quarter of a million, including many Jews, and it saved thousands of Jews. How could Clinton possibly think that a people who went through all this would surrender to an air attack of the type of which Saddam Hussein made a mockery?The hostile media hide from the public the fact that "ethnic purifications" have taken place all over Yugoslavia. The Croatians expelled 200,000 Serbs from the Krajna district. From Kosovo itself, the Moslems-- beginning the moment they received autonomy there in 1974--pushed out a half-million Serbs, while 400,000 Albanians spilled over the border, turning the Serbs into a 10% minority in their own homeland.
What are the Serbs fighting about? Milosevic agreed to restore autonomy to the Moslems. He merely refused the NATO demand to bring in 30,000 foreign troops to his country. What self-respecting country would have accepted such a dictate? Clinton had great difficulty explaining why he attacked a sovereign country simply because of an internal dispute within its own borders. The situation there is not at all the same as Iraq's attempt to wipe out a foreign country. If the present attack is justified, why didn't NATO intervene in China
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Outpost - 4 - April 1999