Extremist clerics and secretive associations funded by Saudis and others have transformed a once-tolerant Muslim society into a font of extremism.
PRISTINA,
Kosovo — 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 an American-led intervention wrested tiny Kosovo from Serbian oppression.
Since
then — much of that time under the watch of American 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
jihadists.
Kosovo
now finds itself, like the rest of Europe, fending off the threat of
radical Islam. Over the last two years, the police have identified 314
Kosovars — including two suicide bombers, 44 women and 28 children — who
have gone abroad to join the Islamic State, the highest number per
capita in Europe.
They
were radicalized 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.
“They
promoted political Islam,” said Fatos Makolli, the director of Kosovo’s
counterterrorism police. “They spent a lot of money to promote it
through different programs mainly with young, vulnerable people, and
they brought in a lot of Wahhabi and Salafi literature. They brought
these people closer to radical political Islam, which resulted in their
radicalization.”
After
two years of investigations, the police have charged 67 people,
arrested 14 imams and shut down 19 Muslim organizations for acting
against the Constitution, inciting hatred and recruiting for terrorism.
The most recent sentences, which included a 10-year prison term, were
handed down on Friday.
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.
Americans were welcomed as liberators after leading months of NATO
bombing in 1999 that spawned an independent Kosovo.
Photo
American bombing of Serbian positions in Kosovo in 1999 during the air campaign by NATO.Credit
Jerome Delay/Associated Press
After
the war, United Nations officials administered the territory and
American forces helped keep the peace. The Saudis arrived, too, bringing
millions of euros in aid to a poor and war-ravaged land.
But where the Americans saw a chance to create a new democracy, the Saudis saw a new land to spread Wahhabism.
“There is no evidence that any organization gave money directly to people to go to Syria,” Mr. Makolli said. “The issue is they supported thinkers who promote violence and jihad in the name of protecting Islam.”
A portrait of Bill Clinton on a back street in Pristina near Bill Clinton Boulevard.Credit
Andrew Testa for The New York Times
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.
Saudi
diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in 2015 reveal a system of
funding for mosques, Islamic centers and Saudi-trained clerics that
spans Asia, Africa and Europe. In New Delhi alone, 140 Muslim preachers
are listed as on the Saudi Consulate’s payroll.
All
around Kosovo, families are grappling with the aftermath of years of
proselytizing by Saudi-trained preachers. Some daughters refuse to shake
hands with or talk to male relatives. Some sons have gone off to jihad.
Religious vigilantes have threatened — or committed — violence against
academics, journalists and politicians.
The
Balkans, Europe’s historical fault line, have yet to heal from the
ethnic wars of the 1990s. But they are now infected with a new
intolerance, moderate imams and officials in the region warn.
How
Kosovo and the very nature of its society was fundamentally recast is a
story of a decades-long global ambition by Saudi Arabia to spread its
hard-line version of Islam — heavily funded and systematically applied,
including with threats and intimidation by followers.
Photo
Idriz Bilalli, an imam in Podujevo, has sought to curb extremists and has received death threats.Credit
Andrew Testa for The New York Times
The Missionaries Arrive
After the war ended in 1999, Idriz Bilalli, the imam of the central mosque in Podujevo, welcomed any help he could get.
Podujevo,
home to about 90,000 people in northeast Kosovo, was a reasonably
prosperous town with high schools and small businesses in an area hugged
by farmland and forests. It was known for its strong Muslim tradition
even in a land where people long wore their religion lightly.
After
decades of Communist rule when Kosovo was part of Yugoslavia, men and
women mingle freely, schools are coeducational, and girls rarely wear
the veil. Still, Serbian paramilitary forces burned down 218 mosques as
part of their war against Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, who are 95 percent
Muslim. Mr. Bilalli needed help to rebuild.
When
two imams in their 30s, Fadil Musliu and Fadil Sogojeva, who were
studying for master’s degrees in Saudi Arabia, showed up after the war
with money to organize summer religion courses, Mr. Bilalli agreed to
help.
The
imams were just two of some 200 Kosovars who took advantage of
scholarships after the war to study Islam in Saudi Arabia. Many, like
them, returned with missionary zeal.
Soon,
under Mr. Musliu’s tutelage, pupils started adopting a rigid manner of
prayer, foreign to the moderate Islamic traditions of this part of
Europe. Mr. Bilalli recognized the influence, and he grew concerned.
“This is Wahhabism coming into our society,” Mr. Bilalli, 52, said in a recent interview.
Mr.
Bilalli trained at the University of Medina in Saudi Arabia in the late
1980s, and as a student he had been warned by a Kosovar professor to
guard against the cultural differences of Wahhabism. He understood there
was a campaign of proselytizing, pushed by the Saudis.
“The
first thing the Wahhabis do is to take members of our congregation, who
understand Islam in the traditional Kosovo way that we had for
generations, and try to draw them away from this understanding,” he
said. “Once they get them away from the traditional congregation, then
they start bombarding them with radical thoughts and ideas.”
“The
main goal of their activity is to create conflict between people,” he
said. “This first creates division, and then hatred, and then it can
come to what happened in Arab countries, where war starts because of
these conflicting ideas.”
From
the outset, the newly arriving clerics sought to overtake the Islamic
Community of Kosovo, an organization that for generations has been the
custodian of the tolerant form of Islam that was practiced in the
region, townspeople and officials say.
Muslims
in Kosovo, which was a part of the Ottoman Empire for 500 years, follow
the Hanafi school of Islam, traditionally a liberal version that is
accepting of other religions.
But
all around the country, a new breed of radical preachers was setting up
in neighborhood mosques, often newly built with Saudi money.
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.
From their bases, the Saudi-trained imams propagated Wahhabism’s tenets: the supremacy of Sharia law
as well as ideas of violent jihad and takfirism, which authorizes the
killing of Muslims considered heretics for not following its
interpretation of Islam.
The
Saudi-sponsored charities often paid salaries and overhead costs, and
financed courses in religion, as well as English and computer classes,
moderate imams and investigators explained.
But
the charitable assistance often had conditions attached. Families were
given monthly stipends on the condition that they attended sermons in
the mosque and that women and girls wore the veil, human rights
activists said.
“People
were so needy, there was no one who did not join,” recalled Ajnishahe
Halimi, a politician who campaigned to have a radical Albanian imam
expelled after families complained of abuse.
Gjilan, a town of about 90,000 where a moderate imam was kidnapped and beaten by extremists.Credit
Andrew Testa for The New York Times
Threats Intensify
Within
a few years of the war’s end, the older generation of traditional
clerics began to encounter aggression from young Wahhabis.
Paradoxically,
some of the most serious tensions built in Gjilan, an eastern Kosovo
town of about 90,000, where up to 7,000 American troops were stationed
as part of Kosovo’s United Nations-run peacekeeping force at Camp
Bondsteel.
“They
came in the name of aid,” one moderate imam in Gjilan, Enver Rexhepi,
said of the Arab charities. “But they came with a background of
different intentions, and that’s where the Islamic religion started
splitting here.”
One
day in 2004, he recalled, he was threatened by one of the most
aggressive young Wahhabis, Zekirja Qazimi, a former madrasa student then
in his early 20s.
Inside
his mosque, Mr. Rexhepi had long displayed an Albanian flag. Emblazoned
with a double-headed eagle, it was a popular symbol of Kosovo’s
liberation struggle.
But
strict Muslim fundamentalists consider the depiction of any living
being as idolatrous. Mr. Qazimi tore the flag down. Mr. Rexhepi put it
back.
“It will not go long like this,” Mr. Qazimi told him angrily, Mr. Rexhepi recounted.
Within
days, Mr. Rexhepi was abducted and savagely beaten by masked men in
woods above Gjilan. He later accused Mr. Qazimi of having been behind
the attack, but police investigations went nowhere.
Ten
years later, in 2014, after two young Kosovars blew themselves up in
suicide bombings in Iraq and Turkey, investigators began an extensive
investigation into the sources of radicalism. Mr. Qazimi was arrested
hiding in the same woods. On Friday, a court sentenced him to 10 years
in prison after he faced charges of inciting hatred and recruiting for a
terrorist organization.
Before
Mr. Qazimi was arrested, his influence was profound, under what
investigators now say was the sway of Egyptian-based extremists and the
patronage of Saudi and other gulf Arab sponsors.
By
the mid-2000s, Saudi money and Saudi-trained clerics were already
exerting influence over the Islamic Community of Kosovo. The leadership
quietly condoned the drift toward conservatism, critics of the
organization say.
Mr.
Qazimi was appointed first to a village mosque, and then to El-Kuddus
mosque on the edge of Gjilan. Few could counter him, not even Mustafa
Bajrami, his former teacher, who was elected head of the Islamic
Community of Gjilan in 2012.
Mr.
Bajrami comes from a prominent religious family — his father was the
first chief mufti of Yugoslavia during the Communist period. He holds a
doctorate in Islamic studies. Yet he remembers pupils began rebelling
against him whenever he spoke against Wahhabism.
He
soon realized that the students were being taught beliefs that differed
from the traditional moderate curriculum by several radical imams in
lectures after hours. He banned the use of mosques after official prayer
times.
Hostility
only grew. He would notice a dismissive gesture in the congregation
during his sermons, or someone would curse his wife, or mutter
“apostate” or “infidel” as he passed.
In
the village, Mr. Qazimi’s influence eventually became so disruptive
that residents demanded his removal after he forbade girls and boys to
shake hands. But in Gjilan he continued to draw dozens of young people
to his after-hours classes.
“They
were moving 100 percent according to lessons they were taking from
Zekirja Qazimi,” Mr. Bajrami said in an interview. “One hundred percent,
in an ideological way.”
Evening prayer at the mosque of the radical imam Fadil Musliu on the outskirts of Pristina, the capital.Credit
Andrew Testa for The New York Times
Extremism Spreads
Over time, the Saudi-trained imams expanded their work.
By
2004, Mr. Musliu, one of the master’s degree students from Podujevo who
studied in Saudi Arabia, had graduated and was imam of a mosque in the
capital, Pristina.
In
Podujevo, he set up a local charitable organization called
Devotshmeria, or Devotion, which taught religion classes and offered
social programs for women, orphans and the poor. It was funded by Al
Waqf al Islami, a Saudi organization that was one of the 19 eventually
closed by investigators.
Mr. Musliu put a cousin, Jetmir Rrahmani, in charge.
“Then
I knew something was starting that would not bring any good,” said Mr.
Bilalli, the moderate cleric who had started out teaching with him. In
2004, they had a core of 20 Wahhabis.
“That was only the beginning,” Mr. Bilalli said. “They started multiplying.”
Mr.
Bilalli began a vigorous campaign against the spread of unauthorized
mosques and Wahhabi teaching. In 2008, he was elected head of the
Islamic Community of Podujevo and instituted religion classes for women,
in an effort to undercut Devotshmeria.
As
he sought to curb the extremists, Mr. Bilalli received death threats,
including a note left in the mosque’s alms box. An anonymous telephone
caller vowed to make him and his family disappear, he said.
“Anyone who opposes them, they see as an enemy,” Mr. Bilalli said.
He
appealed to the leadership of the Islamic Community of Kosovo. But by
then it was heavily influenced by Arab gulf sponsors, he said, and he
received little support.
When
Mr. Bilalli formed a union of fellow moderates, the Islamic Community
of Kosovo removed him from his post. His successor, Bekim Jashari,
equally concerned by the Saudi influence, nevertheless kept up the
fight.
“I
spent 10 years in Arab countries and specialized in sectarianism within
Islam,” Mr. Jashari said. “It’s very important to stop Arab
sectarianism from being introduced to Kosovo.”
Mr.
Jashari had a couple of brief successes. He blocked the Saudi-trained
imam Mr. Sogojeva from opening a new mosque, and stopped a payment of
20,000 euros, about $22,400, intended for it from the Saudi charity Al
Waqf al Islami.
He
also began a website, Speak Now, to counter Wahhabi teaching. But he
remains so concerned about Wahhabi preachers that he never lets his
19-year-old son attend prayers on his own.
The
radical imams Mr. Musliu and Mr. Sogojeva still preach in Pristina,
where for prayers they draw crowds of young men who glare at foreign
reporters.
Mr.
Sogojeva dresses in a traditional robe and banded cleric’s hat, but his
newly built mosque is an incongruous modern multistory building. He
admonished his congregation with a rapid-fire list of dos and don’ts in a
recent Friday sermon.
Neither imam seems to lack funds.
In
an interview, Mr. Musliu insisted that he was financed by local
donations, but confirmed that he had received Saudi funding for his
early religion courses.
The
instruction, he said, is not out of line with Kosovo’s traditions. The
increase in religiosity among young people was natural after Kosovo
gained its freedom, he said.
“Those
who are not believers and do not read enough, they feel a bit shocked,”
he said. “But we coordinated with other imams, and everything was in
line with Islam.”
The entrance to the grounds
of the Serbian Orthodox monastery in Decani in western Kosovo. In
January, four armed Islamists passed through the checkpoint and were
arrested at the monastery gates. Credit
Andrew Testa for The New York Times
A Tilt Toward Terrorism
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.
Mr. Qazimi, who was given the 10-year prison sentence, even organized a summer camp for his young followers.
“It is obligated for every Muslim to participate in jihad,” he told them in one videotaped talk. “The Prophet Muhammad says that if someone has a chance to take part in jihad and doesn’t, he will die with great sins.”
“The blood of infidels is the best drink for us Muslims,” he said in another recording.
Among
his recruits, investigators say, were three former civilian employees
of American contracting companies at Camp Bondsteel, where American
troops are stationed. They included Lavdrim Muhaxheri, an Islamic State
leader who was filmed executing a man in Syria with a rocket-propelled
grenade.
After
the suicide bombings, the authorities opened a broad investigation and
found that the Saudi charity Al Waqf al Islami had been supporting
associations set up by preachers like Mr. Qazimi 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 radicalizing young people, they said.
Investigators
from Kosovo’s Financial Intelligence Unit found that Al Waqf al Islami,
which had an office in central Pristina and a staff of 12, ran through
€10 million from 2000 through 2012. Yet they found little paperwork to
explain much of the spending.
More
than €1 million went to mosque building. But one and a half times that
amount was disbursed in unspecified cash withdrawals, which may have
also gone to enriching its staff, the investigators said.
Only 7 percent of the budget was shown to have gone to caring for orphans, the charity’s stated mission.
By
the summer of 2014, the Kosovo police shut down Al Waqf al Islami,
along with 12 other Islamic charities, and arrested 40 people.
The
charity’s head offices, in Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands, have since
changed their name to Al Waqf, apparently separating themselves from
the Balkans operation.
Asked
about the accusations in a telephone interview, Nasr el Damanhoury, the
director of Al Waqf in the Netherlands, said he had no direct knowledge
of his group’s operations in Kosovo or the Balkans.
The
charity has ceased all work outside the Netherlands since he took over
in 2013, he said. His predecessor had returned to Morocco and could not
be reached, and Saudi board members would not comment, he said.
“Our
organization has never supported extremism,” Mr. Damanhoury said. “I
have known it since 1989. I joined them three years ago. They have
always been a mild group.”
Photo
Kosovars celebrating the independence of Kosovo from Serbia in 2008.Credit
Bela Szandelszky/Associated Press
Unheeded Warnings
Why
the Kosovar authorities — and American and United Nations 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,” Mr. Rexhepi said. “They simply did not do anything.”
Not everyone was unaware of the dangers, however.
At
a meeting in 2003, Richard C. Holbrooke, once the United States special
envoy to the Balkans, warned Kosovar leaders not to work with the Saudi
Joint Relief Committee for Kosovo, an umbrella organization of Saudi
charities whose name still appears on many of the mosques built since
the war, along with that of the former Saudi interior minister, Prince
Naif bin Abdul-Aziz.
A
year later, it was among several Saudi organizations that were shut
down in Kosovo when it came under suspicion as a front for Al Qaeda. Another was Al-Haramain, which in 2004 was designated by the United States Treasury Department as having links to terrorism.
Yet
even as some organizations were shut down, others kept working. Staff
and equipment from Al-Haramain shifted to Al Waqf al Islami, moderate
imams familiar with their activities said.
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
hard-line 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.
But
payments are often diverted through a second country to obscure their
origin and destination, they said. One transfer of nearly €500,000 from a
Saudi individual was frozen in 2014 since it was intended for a Kosovo
teenager, according to the investigators and a State Department report.
Al
Qaeda and other terrorist organizations were still raising millions
from “deep-pocket donors and charitable organizations” based in the
gulf, the Treasury under secretary 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 largess
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 organization now seen as having been corrupted by
outside forces and money.
Kosovo’s interior minister, Skender Hyseni, said he had recently reprimanded some of the senior religious officials.
“I
told them they were doing a great disservice to their country,” he said
in an interview. “Kosovo is by definition, by Constitution, a secular
society. There has always been historically an unspoken interreligious
tolerance among Albanians here, and we want to make sure that we keep it
that way.”
Albert Berisha, sentenced to prison for going to Syria to fight, says he did not join the Islamic State.Credit
Andrew Testa for The New York Times
Families Divided
For some in Kosovo, it may already be too late.
Families have been torn apart. Some of Kosovo’s best and brightest have been caught up in the lure of jihad.
One
of Kosovo’s top political science graduates, Albert Berisha, said he
left in 2013 to help the Syrian people in the uprising against the
government of President Bashar al-Assad. He abandoned his attempt after
only two weeks — and he says he never joined the Islamic State — but has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison, pending appeal.
Ismet
Sakiqi, an official in the prime minister’s office and a veteran of the
liberation struggle, was shaken to find his 22-year-old son, Visar, a
law student, arrested on his way through Turkey to Syria with his
fiancée. He now visits his son in the same Kosovo prison where he was
detained under Serbian rule.
And
in the hamlet of Busavate, in the wooded hills of eastern Kosovo, a
widower, Shemsi Maliqi, struggles to explain how his family has been
divided. One of his sons, Alejhim, 27, has taken his family to join the
Islamic State in Syria.
It
remains unclear how Alejhim became radicalized. He followed his
grandfather, training as an imam in Gjilan, and served in the village
mosque for six years. Then, two years ago, he asked his father to help
him travel to Egypt to study.
Mr.
Maliqi still clings to the hope that his son is studying in Egypt
rather than fighting in Syria. But Kosovo’s counterterrorism police
recently put out an international arrest warrant for Alejhim.
“Better
that he comes back dead than alive,” Mr. Maliqi, a poor farmer, said.
“I sent him to school, not to war. I sold my cow for him.”
Alejhim
had married a woman from the nearby village of Vrbice who was so
conservative that she was veiled up to her eyes and refused to shake
hands with her brother-in-law.
The
wife’s mother angrily refused to be interviewed. Her daughter did what
was expected and followed her husband to Syria, she said.
Secretly,
Alejhim drew three others — his sister; his best friend, who married
his sister; and his wife’s sister — to follow him to Syria, too. The
others have since returned, but remain radical and estranged from the
family.
Alejhim’s uncle, Fehmi Maliqi, like the rest of the family, is dismayed. “It’s a catastrophe,” he said.
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