Tuesday, September 02, 2008

CORRECTION: Bosnia, Kvadrat, Mujahideen

I have been detained for months, trying to begin to write up, and I am in the process of submitting some work both on my theoretical framework and on the drugs and antiquities trade. While working through it, I was reminded of the question of the source for the claim about (apparent Bosnian Wahhabi terrorist group) Kvadrat, which requires correction.

I had relayed that:
Turkey even formed a pivot between conflict zones, as
members of the Bosnia-based terrorist group Kvadrat have been facilitated in traveling through Turkey to get into Chechnya, where they have been engaged in terrorist and insurgent operations, and then repatriated through Turkish-controlled Northern Cyprus, where they are clearly supported by the Turkish Cypriot and Ankara authorities.
It had been playing at the back of my mind, until I vaguely remembered, then Googled and rediscovered, Oliver Kamm's note on the 'less well known and far more controversial body called, confusingly, the International Strategic Studies Association', which is not 'the well known International Institute for Strategic Studies'.

Now, I find a similar claim about Kvadrat on a Serb nationalist website, and I distrust it even more.

Thankfully, it doesn't materially change anything I've said, because it was a detail, an illustration, and the BBC's, CNN's, the Guardian's and the Boston Globe's documentation of the flow of Mujahideen between Turkey and Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya is certain.

As I said before:
Turkish security forces only targeted Turkish Hizbullah when they feared that it would target them, imprisoning or killing its leaders, but failing to prevent its activists (who then numbered and still now number about 20,000) leaving to fight outside Turkey, including in Bosnia and Afghanistan. Yet, they did not merely "fail to prevent" Islamic extremists going elsewhere to fight.

Turkish ex-military and 'maybe' serving secret service staff trained Mujahideen to go to Chechnya at a (Grey Wolves splinter group) Nizamı Alem (Universal Order) camp in Turkey and '[a]rms purchased by Iran and Turkey [and].... Mojahedin fighters were also flown in [to Bosnia by the US, Turkey and Iran]'; moreover, '"... some of these people who went to fight Russians or Serbs were indoctrinated against infidels" and returned to Turkey as cell leaders for Al Qaeda'.

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