Recruiters Prey on Bosnia’s Forgotten Youth

“I knew little about faith,” starts a 31-year-old Sarajevo, recalling his introduction to the twilight world of radical Islam. “In high school, we did everything but study – concerts, pot and alcohol,” he recalled.

“After high school I took a break from college and got a job as a waiter because I could no longer live on one or two dollars from my parents. There I met a girl who took me into the world of Islam.”

He told BIRN how, following the lead of the girl, he got married “before the brothers in a mosque”, joined the Salafi movement and soon became, in his own words, “very radical.

“I started fasting every other day, because I thought I needed to catch up,” he said.

“I wanted to worship for the years when I hadn’t … all sorts of things happened…I grew a beard, went to the Fahd Mosque. A lot of brothers were there. I met them and then you joined some of their activities. I went to Brijesce, to the dzemat [para-mosque] of theirs for lectures. Most of them from there went to the Islamic State,” he recollected.

He stayed in the world of radical Islam for about four years after which he started focusing on college and he got divorced.

The exact number of Salafi followers in Bosnia and Herzegovina is not known, but estimates put it at several thousand.

According to Bosnia’s security agencies, over 200 of them have left to fight in Syria and Iraq over the last few years. The average age of those who went to the battlefields is about 27, and about 80 minors are among them.

Lack of prospects leads to ISIS:

Analyst Osman Softic says that many young people in Bosnia feel hopeless which is why some depart for the Islamic State.

“Young people feel they do not stand a chance. Some are not as educated as they should be, and in certain places they do not have adequate resources,” he said.

“Sometimes there are personal reasons as well, family occurrences and typically a feeling of humiliation. They try to find salvation and the meaning of life, a sense of belonging,” Softic explained.

Unemployment among the young in Bosnia is the highest in the region, amounting to 57 per cent, according to an economic report for South East Europe by the World Bank.

According to the Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International, Bosnia is facing a “total collapse of the system”. The organisation notes a higher level of corruption there than in other countries in the region.

The young man who agreed to speak for BIRN says that he did not get close to radical Islam because of drugs or poverty – though he knows many who did – but purely “out of love.”

“I fell in love with a girl who introduced me to it. It was a product of ignorance because I did not have any foundations and then this came along… they have good arguments for some things, unrelated to jihad… Now I’m divorced. I have stayed in Islam and I practice everything, but I simply left all those communities,” he said.

He is grateful that his family stood beside him at all times. He said that some parents of his friends quickly gave up on them and that “this was not fair of them.

“My parents did not cut me off,” he said. “They listened to whatever I had to say. It was great how they accepted me, given how angry I was,” shrugging in response to the question about where this anger came from.

After some thought, he slowly answered that the anger, “was how I got my kicks. The more angry someone was, the more he suffered, the more radical and better he was.”

In the absence of a systemic response to the radicalization processes in Bosnia, it is often left to families or non-government organizations to oppose it.

As part of its investigation, BIRN contacted a married couple who live outside a village with a large Salafi community in north-eastern Bosnia.

According to them, their son was radicalized to such an extent that he was preparing to go to war in Syria before they got help.

His mother asked not to use the names of her family or of her village, as her son still has many acquaintances in the Salafi community.

She remembers how her 19-year-old son could not find a job last year after finishing high school, and, a bit embarrassed, adds that he had “a few drug problems.

“One night he came back and said he wanted a motorcycle. We had a fight. His father said he couldn’t have one… First a job, then a motorcycle. Then he left home,” she said.

“Those people from the village got him hooked on bikes. We wanted him to get a job and to ride a motorcycle with papers. He answered that the police couldn’t touch him and he did not need papers,” she added.

“He started to go on about bikes and grew a beard and that was the beginning, but after a while, this was no longer cute, he started to talk about battlefields and the Islamic State and then we realized we had to do something,” the boy’s father added.

In tears, the mother said her panic rose, worrying that her son would go to war in Syria. “This was my biggest fear, that he would go off to war and not come back because no one came back,” she said.

She decided to fight. She persuaded her son to come home and she turned to the police, who, although the boy had not committed a crime, agreed to talk to him every day to dissuade him from going to off to the battlefields.

“We have two more children. It was a shock for all of us… He looked like he had gone crazy from those books of theirs,” she said.

“Luckily, we continued to talk to him. He told us he was going to ride those motorcycles. He told us how they took him near Zvornik and taught him to handle weapons,” the mother recollected.

The boy’s parents ensured that, in addition to visits by the police, religious scholars, who could speak against radicalism, came to their home.

They explained that their son had been systemically radicalized. The radicals had wooed him through motorcycles, had given him weapons and shown him films about Islamic State.

In response, his parents decided to organize a support system within the home through talks with the police, family and friends.

“I found him a job and asked elderly people to talk to him. We talked constantly with him. I told him all the time, find me one book of God, which says you can kill someone, this does not exist!” the father said.

After a period, the parents say that their son stopped talking about leaving for foreign battlefields. He found a girl and turned his life around.

“I brought him back 100 per cent, just by talking… This is all because of the unemployment; if some companies were to open up, it would be easier,” the mother said.

Asked what kind of message she would send to other families going through a similar situation, she said: “Just talk, talk, talk, never let go, never push away.

“We made an entire system around him – police, family, our friends who came to visit… We made a system because the state has no system,” she concluded.

Young girl pushed to quit school:

Unlike the family in Brcko, who found an ally in the police and friends, a family in Zenica, facing a similar situation with their daughter, turned to the NGO Medica.

Lejla Heremic, a social pedagogue and family counselor in Medica, told BIRN that she worked with the 15-year-old girl who was going through a crisis of identity under the influence of certain people and who wanted to leave school.

“Her radical thoughts were reflected primarily in her self-perception that she was chosen by God to change things in her life and family – that her job was to learn as much as she could from religious books because you could learn much more from them and she did not need school,” she recalled.

“She thought she should not continue school; would not have any use of it and that, come judgment day, she needed to dedicate herself to testifying against her family, which is very sinful,” Heremic said.

In the beginning, Heremic recollected, working with this girl was hard. There was a lot of resistance and everything that was suggested met tantrums.

“In conversation, she often directed her anger towards those who had separated her from her former company, perceiving them as her enemies,” she said.

“Her aggression was reflected in threats to do something to them when she saw them – curses, insults and similar. It was a challenge to establish trust and communication with the girl,” Heremic added.

However, with Medica’s comprehensive approach – which included therapeutic and educational work, medical services and education about health protection – there was progress, after which she stopped exhibiting anger towards the people who were trying to help.

Heremic says the problem of radicalized young people needs to be talked about in Bosnia – and parents need to be educated in ways to recognize the changes in their children.

“It is necessary to work on preventive activities, give young people a choice and the possibility to be included in different activities and such activities should be made available to them.

“Society really too few opportunities to young people from families of a lower social status,” she said.

It is especially important, according to her, that government institutions like the police, social services and prosecution recognize the problem and work on punishing those who promote this mindset and who encourage others in radical thinking, especially if they are abusing minors.

Bosnia has neglected promotion of values:

Sociologist Ivan Sijakovic says one problem is that systemic work with young people, as well as their guidance towards positive, useful and moral work and behaviour, has disappeared in Bosnia.

“Young people have been forgotten and left to the streets, loneliness, poverty and to arbitrary behavior,” he said.

“There are no forms of control and restraint of deviant behavior. Everything is tolerated and justified – no selection, no pointing to positive values, no emphasizing good examples.

“As a society we are doing nothing to create a desirable system of values and behavioral patterns, which would include all young people aged 10 to 25,” Sijakovic thinks.

Sijakovic added that this is why young people are susceptible to the influence of extreme religious groups, some of which encourage the young to go off to foreign battlefields.

While he was in the Salafi movement, the 31-year-old Sarajevo local says he saw weapons that some members carried “for protection.”

“Most of those who carried weapons ended up in Syria… I knew some of them who make contact from there, like Bajra Ikanovic. I attended Nusret Imamovic’s lectures as well. He was boss in [the hardline village of] Maoca. He is now part of a terrorist group in the Islamic State,” he said.

Asked whether he thinks he would ever have gone to Syria to fight, had he stayed part of the community, he answers after a pause, “Who knows…”

“I hope that if I’d left it would have been out of curiosity. But the things being done there, this is forbidden by God. I cannot even imagine myself doing that, even when I was at my angriest,” he concluded.