Izetbegović, Sulejmani and the constant radicalization of Bosnia and Herzegovina
On 3 January 2020, a United States of America drone strike in Iran killed the notorious Iranian general Qassem Soleimani due to him organizing a number of attacks on the U.S. troops in Iraq, as well as planning terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens. Donald Trump, who, unlike the previous American presidents, did not want to tolerate Islamist terrorism for the sake of local interests in some part of the world, put an end to him.
The question that may be asked is why this should be of any interest to Serbia. It should – due to the fact that Soleimani, who was labeled as a proven terrorist by the entirety of the Western world, was mourned in Sarajevo last week at a special memorial organized on the occasion of his death. The political and security concerns of this event are best explained by examining the ample biography of the late terrorist.
Soleimani was a prominent commander of the Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and at the end of 1997 he also became the commander of the elite Quds Force. The main goal of the Force was to export the Islamic Revolution and encourage the radical Islamic elements around the world. This includes waging a universal war against anyone who stands in the way of the Islamic Revolution, such as the State of Israel or the Serbs in Bosnia in the 1990s, for example. Even before the official formation of the Quds Force, Soleimani practiced his skills in organizing terrorism against the Serbs in Bosnia in 1993 and 1994. By his own admission, he organized the arrival of jihadists in Bosnia, as well as the departure of volunteers to terrorist camps for training and indoctrination.
The key feature of his strategy is Tehran’s covert proxy operations through terrorist groups, military formations and militias in various countries, as well as them linking together. All of them are provided with manpower that conducts intense religious indoctrination and radicalization, military training, as well as state-of-the-art weapons. As a result of this, Hezbollah and Hamas, as terrorist organizations, possess the same amount of missile and other heavy weapons as a smaller state.
These terrorist organizations have organized numerous suicide bombings, missile attacks, as well as the abduction of soldiers and civilians in Israel. The peak of their operations is the creation of the Radical Front, comprising Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The invisible connective tissue of this coalition was Qassem Soleimani and the Revolutionary Guard Corps, with the ultimate goal of creating the “Shiite crescent”, where the values of the Islamic Revolution apply and the Jewish state does not exist.
Unfortunately, Sarajevo is still paying its political debt to Riyadh and Tehran through the Islamization of Bosnia, the destruction of the Dayton Agreement and regional peace, the tolerance of para-jamias and the mourning of terrorists who bloodied their hands with tens of thousands of civilians. Instead of devoting itself to the prosperity of its citizens and building a relationship of cooperation and respect with the Republic of Srpska.