Kosovo: The young country has become “fertile ground for ISIS”
City of Prizren in the south of Kosovo.
According to a study published by the New York Times on May 21, 2016, Kosovo is becoming a real “font of extremism”. American journalist Carlotta Gall shows financial support from Saudi Arabia has enabled Wahhabism to enter the country and aided fighters to travel to the Middle East.
According to the Times, 200 Kosovars were granted scholarships after the war with Serbia to study Islam on the Arabic peninsula. Many of them returned radicalized. Hundreds of mosques were built with money from Riyadh, via Moslem charitable organizations or private persons. Carlotta Gall explains that in these new mosques, imams “promote a very rigorist view of Islam and develop radical rhetoric in support of jihad.” The few religious leaders who oppose extremism are attacked and threatened with death.
During the last two years, 314 Kosovars left to join ISIS, including two suicide bombers, 44 women and 28 children. This makes Kosovo, independent since 2008, the European country with the greatest number of recruits to Daesh per capita. “It is a stunning turnabout for a land of 1.8 million people that not long ago was among the most pro-American Muslim societies in the world. (…) But where the Americans saw a chance to create a new democracy, the Saudis saw a new land to spread Wahhabism,” concludes the New York Times.
(Sources: kipa-apic.ch – New York Times – DICI no. 337, 17/06/16)
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