Bosnia ‘Failing to Share Terror Threat Intelligence’

Six days a week Ibrahim Delic lives in the small village of Bocinja in central Bosnia and takes care of his sheep.

On Mondays, however, he travels to Sarajevo to stand trial on charges of having fought in Syria.

Delic is one of about 200 Bosnian Muslims, all members of the Salafi community, who have travelled to Syria and Iraq since 2012. Most are believed to have fought with jihadi groups, including Islamic State, ISIS, and Al Qaeda-affiliate Al Nusra.

According to Bosnia’s State Investigation and Protection Agency, SIPA, at least 30 have been killed in the conflicts and 50 have now returned home, Delic among them.

Once a destination for foreign fighters during the 1990s, Bosnia has become a significant country of origin for jihadi fighters, particularly given its relatively small population of around 3.8 million.

“Until mid-2013, we had no idea people were going or planning to go, we just found out all of a sudden about 100 had left,” says Goran Kovacevic, a professor at Sarajevo University’s criminal sciences faculty.

As the scale of the problem became apparent, Bosnia adopted law reforms in June 2014, creating a number of new offences including “enlisting in a foreign military, paramilitary or para-police unit”.

The new laws have been applied retroactively, which is why Delic and others who are accused of fighting in Syria and Iraq since 2012 are now on trial. Many are angry they are being tried for offences that did not exist at the time they left for the Middle East.

“No one forbade those travels in 2013. I went to oppose Bashar al-Assad. America was against him and so I think it was fine,” Delic told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN.

He denies fighting in Syria and says he went solely “to help the Syrian people” and “see where all the Bosnians were going and… bring them into one group”.

Delic insists he poses no risk to security and that he returned home disillusioned by the “anarchy” he witnessed in Syria. The authorities, however, disagree.

Returnee fighters ‘biggest security threat’

The Bosnian security and police agencies consider all returnees from Syria and Iraq as potentially dangerous.

In February, Bosnian Security Minister Dragan Mektic confirmed suspected returnee fighters from Syria and Iraq are under surveillance because they pose “the biggest threat to security”.

He also said 67 arrest warrants, including two Interpol red notices, have been issued for Bosnians believed to be fighting in Syria and Iraq.

Amer Veiz, the head of SIPA’s counter-terrorism unit, notes some returnees from warzones are not only skilled in using explosives and weapons but are “additionally radicalised”.

“We have operational knowledge that some are still involved in the recruitment of people to go and fight [with ISIS in Syria and Iraq],” he says.

Uros Pena, deputy director of Bosnia’s Directorate for the Coordination of Police Bodies, is of the same opinion.

“These persons are obviously a security threat. They were ready to take up arms and kill, so they are a threat. It is impossible that they are not completely changed after being there,” he says.

While Pena regards returnee fighters as a significant threat, he is critical of plans to create specialist prosecutors for religion-based terrorism trials.

Instead, he believes the police services need to adopt a more community and prevention based approach to policing, including working with young people in schools and also tackling mental health issues.

Pena also notes a reliance on estimated numbers for returnees and those at risk of radicalisation means Bosnia’s policing bodies “only deal with consequences”.

“We don’t even know how big this problem of terrorism and radicalisation is…Until we get to the bottom of how big this problem is and create an entire strategy to deal with this – and that means going back to basics, to community policing, being among the people, which we don’t do anymore – we will have this problem,” he told BIRN.

Agencies ‘don’t share information’

Even when there is credible intelligence of a threat, BIRN has learned information is not always shared between the country’s 15 police services.

“Sharing information is a big problem. Each agency holds on to the best information. They all have obligations to share information, but this is not done. They are jealous. We do not have clear definitions of jurisdiction, so we always have problems”, says Pena.

Policing in a state as highly divided as Bosnia is complex. The country’s two entities, the Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Bosnian Serb-dominated Republika Srpska, come under some state-level governance but have their own government, parliament and police bodies.

As a result, there are separate police agencies in each entity, in the ‘ethnically-neutral’ Brcko district and in each of the federation’s 10 cantons, as well as state-level bodies, including SIPA and the border police.

The director of the Bosnian Serb Interior Ministry, Dragan Lukac, also told BIRN that the “existing agencies are not communicating fast enough” in terrorism investigations.

“Experience shows us that the biggest problem is poor coordination and sharing operational intelligence between police agencies. The terrorist-related attacks in Zvornik and Sarajevo showed us that we need to work better together,” he says.

In the past year there have been two incidents which the Bosnian prosecution classified as terrorist attacks.

In one, Nedin Ibric, a member of the Salafi community, gunned down a police officer in the Republika Srpska town of Zvornik. Ibric was later killed. In another, a man killed two Bosnian army officials in Sarajevo before taking his own life.

Security Minister Mektic said the state-level intelligence agency had received information a few days before the Zvornik shooting that “an incident was possible”. The Bosnian Serb ministry then complained this information had not be shared with them.

The authorities are currently implementing a 2015 anti-terrorism strategy that will see the creation of a single database, available to all police units, for all operational information regarding radicalisation and terrorism.

Security services ‘hijacked by politicians’

Experts believe intelligence sharing between Bosnia’s numerous police forces is further complicated by the influence of politicians, many of whom stand accused of exploiting the country’s inter-ethnic tensions for political gain.

Professor Kovacevic goes as far as saying Bosnia’s political parties have “hijacked the security system”.

“We have a constitutional set up based on ethnic background and we have security systems operating on the same principle. We have Serbs operating in Republika Srpska’s interests only and we have Bosniaks overriding entity levels. They don’t trust each other at all…

Essentially, very few are operating based on the law,” he says.

Vlado Azinovic, a terrorism expert and professor at Sarajevo University’s political sciences faculty, underlines security service chiefs are political appointees.

“This is why communication and coordination between them is a problem,” he says.

Others believe undue political influence has led to incidents being too quickly categorised as terrorist acts.

“When we have incidents, classification [as a terrorist act] is given by politicians. Politics was never more involved in police structures. The same is true for prosecutions and the courts. It is especially visible when we talk about the election of persons in charge, and this is why results are bad,” says Pena.

The Bosnian prosecutor’s office told BIRN there are 40 active terrorism investigations, about half of which are related to returnees from Syria and Iraq.

Jihadists ‘radicalised in unofficial mosques’

According to prosecutors, most Bosnian jihadi fighters were radicalised by extremists preaching online or in ‘unofficial’ mosques that operate outside the control of the country’s official Islamic affairs institution, the Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, IZ.

The IZ is now in the process of closing down these ‘unofficial’ mosques, known locally as paradzemati or ‘para-mosques’. It says 64 paradzemati are currently operating across the country, mostly in rural and mountainous areas.

“It’s a widespread phenomenon. Basically every Bosnian town has its own paradzemat,” Ismet Veladzic, a member of the Reisul-ulema, the cabinet of the higher authority of the IZ, told BIRN.

“The issue is being urgently addressed by the Islamic Community and especially by the individual imams operating at community level,” he says.

The issue is highly controversial and many paradzemati leaders fiercely reject being labelled as extremist.

Prayers at the paradzemat in the central Bosnian village of Osve are led by 28-year-old Selvedin Dzanic. Osve is a closed Salafi community that has been regularly linked to extremists, including ISIS supporters, in the regional and international press.

Delic, the shepherd accused of fighting with jihadists in Syria, is also known to have delivered sermons in Osve.

A SIPA staffer confirmed several residents are under surveillance and the village is of “security interest in regard to violent extremism and radicalism”.

Dzanic insists, however, his village has been unjustly targeted because of negative media coverage.

“We only want to live an Islamic life…a life of prayer,” he says.

Prevention and rehabilitation

Experts remain concerned that aside from attempting to close down paradzemati and prosecute returnee fighters, little is being done to tackle the root causes of radicalisation.

Apart from the Super Citizens programme – a coalition of NGOs brought together by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe to tackle all kinds of hate crime in Bosnia – the state has only recently began to implement the strategy to tackle violent extremism drafted in 2015.

Professor Kovacevic says the state must combat poverty, corruption, organised crime and poor levels of education before the issue can be effectively addressed.

Around 800,000 Bosnians, almost one quarter of the population, are unemployed and represent, says Kovacevic, a “great mass for radicalisation”.

“We have very poor formal or informal mechanisms of education and population control… we need to help the people, to educate them, to help them find jobs [and] work with young people.”

Others believe that as long as Bosnia remains sharply divided along ethnic lines tackling one kind of radicalisation, in this case Islamic extremism, will be hard to do.

Banja Luka-based sociologist Ivan Sijakovic says Bosnian society as a whole suffers “extreme radicalisation in all fields”.

“The problem is we have extreme radical behaviour in parliaments – politicians coming out with radical statements. We also, as a society, do not work on creating a system of values for young people, especially those marginalised in rural areas,” he says.

Aside from the lack of multi-agency prevention programmes, experts are also concerned that simply criminalising returnee fighters could prove counter-productive, particularly as some are thought to have been radicalised in prisons in the first place.

Professor Azinovic notes many left Syria because they were appalled by what they witnessed.

“They thought they were going to fight with the best of the best, but they saw paedophiles, rape, robberies, [and] drug addicts,” he says.

In a 2015 report on Bosnian fighters in Syria he co-authored with Bosnian theologian and columnist Muhamed Jusic, Azinovic suggests establishing lines of communication with fighters, their families and, in particular, family members who opposed their departure to Syria and Iraq.

“This would build support networks for their successful reintegration into society (if desired) and would vitally inform the development of tools to assess the readiness of returnees for such reintegration,” the report reads.

Meanwhile, Professor Kovacevic fears Bosnia faces future violence unless the issue of radicalisation, particularly of young people, is addressed.

“We have seen in the early 90s that a war broke out because of politics. Terrorism today is being used by politicians to drive a wedge between the different ethnic groups in the country. I only hope that we will not continue down this road, because we have seen what it can do,” he warns.