“Every Friday, just yards from a statue of Bill Clinton with arm aloft in a cheery wave, hundreds of young bearded men make a show of kneeling to pray on the sidewalk outside an improvised mosque in a former furniture store.”
“The mosque is one of scores built here with Saudi government money and blamed for spreading Wahhabism – the conservative ideology dominant in Saudi Arabia – in the 17 years since a US-led intervention wrested tiny Kosovo from Serbian oppression.”
“Since then – much of that time under the watch of U.S. officials – Saudi money and influence have transformed this once-tolerant Muslim society at the hem of Europe into a font of Islamic extremism and a pipeline for jihadis. Kosovo now finds itself, like the rest of Europe, fending off the threat of radical Islam. Over the last two years, police have identified 314 Kosovars – including two suicide bombers, 44 women and 28 children – who have gone abroad to join Islamic State, the highest number per capita in Europe.”
“They were radicalised and recruited, Kosovo investigators say, by a corps of extremist clerics and secretive associations funded by Saudi Arabia and other conservative Arab gulf states using an obscure, labyrinthine network of donations from charities, private individuals and government ministries.”
“Kosovo now has over 800 mosques, 240 of them built since the war and blamed for helping indoctrinate a new generation in Wahhabism. They are part of what moderate imams and officials here describe as a deliberate, long-term strategy by Saudi Arabia to reshape Islam in its image, not only in Kosovo but around the world.”
“From the outset, the newly arriving clerics sought to overtake the Islamic Community of Kosovo, an organisation that for generations has been the custodian of the tolerant form of Islam that was practised in the region, townspeople and officials say.”
“From their bases, the Saudi-trained imams propagated Wahhabism’s fundamentalist tenets: the supremacy of Sharia law as well as ideas of violent jihad and takfirism, which authorises the killing of Muslims considered heretics for not following its interpretation of Islam.”
“In some cases, centuries-old buildings were bulldozed, including a historic library in Gjakova and several 400-year-old mosques, as well as shrines, graveyards and Dervish monasteries, all considered idolatrous in Wahhabi teaching.”
“The influence of the radical clerics reached its apex with the war in Syria, as they extolled the virtues of jihad and used speeches and radio and television talks shows to urge young people to go there.”
In 2014, after two young Kosovars blew themselves up in suicide bombings in Iraq and Turkey, “the authorities opened a broad investigation and found that the Saudi charity Al Waqf al Islami had been supporting associations set up by [radical preachers] in almost every regional town. Al Waqf al Islami was established in the Balkans in 1989. Most of its financing came from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain, Kosovo investigators said in recent interviews. Unexplained gaps in its ledgers deepened suspicions that the group was surreptitiously funding clerics who were radicalising young people, they said.”
“By the summer of 2014, the Kosovo police had shut down Al Waqf al Islami, along with 12 other Islamic charities, and arrested 40 people.”
“Why the Kosovar authorities – and US and UN overseers – did not act sooner to forestall the spread of extremism is a question being intensely debated. As early as 2004, the prime minister at the time, Bajram Rexhepi, tried to introduce a law to ban extremist sects. But, he said in a recent interview at his home in northern Kosovo, European officials told him that it would violate freedom of religion.”
““It was not in their interest, they did not want to irritate some Islamic countries,” Rexhepi said. “They simply did not do anything.””
“In recent years, Saudi Arabia appears to have reduced its aid to Kosovo. Kosovo Central Bank figures show grants from Saudi Arabia averaging €100,000 a year for the past five years. It is now money from Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – which each average approximately €1 million a year – that propagates the same hardline version of Islam. The payments come from foundations or individuals, or sometimes from the Ministry of Zakat (Almsgiving) from the various governments, Kosovo’s investigators say.”
“Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organisations were still raising millions from “deep-pocket donors and charitable organisations” based in the gulf, the Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, David S Cohen, said in a speech in 2014 at the Center for a New American Security.”
“While Saudi Arabia has made progress in stamping out funding for al-Qaeda, sympathetic donors in the kingdom were still funding other terrorist groups, he said.”
“Today, the Islamic Community of Kosovo has been so influenced by the largesse of Arab donors that it has seeded prominent positions with radical clerics, its critics say. Ahmet Sadriu, a spokesman for Islamic Community of Kosovo, said the group held to Kosovo’s traditionally tolerant version of Islam. But calls are growing to overhaul an organisation now seen as having been corrupted by outside forces and money.”
Read more: How Kosovo Was Turned Into Fertile Ground for ISIS (archived)
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