Serbia reaps the fruits of flirting with Islamic radicals
On Friday, May 5, a Serbian follower of Wahhabism was detained in Belgrade, who had previously posted photos and videos of himself on social networks with weapons in his hands and the captions “strength in shooting.”
However, he was detained only because the Serbian police are now on high alert after the recent massacres. Before that, local Muslims allowed themselves anti-Serbian statements and actions with impunity, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
In recent days, Serbia has been rocked by two mass killings. On Wednesday, May 3, at an elite high school in central Belgrade, a seventh-grade student cold-bloodedly killed a school security guard and eight other students with a pistol. Six more students and a teacher were wounded, some seriously.
And the next day, in the vicinity of the city of Kragujevac, eight people became victims of a 21-year-old criminal who opened fire from an automatic weapon. Another 14 people were injured, most of them in serious condition.
However, both of these mass shootings do not have a political component. In the first case, we are talking about the classic “Columbine”, conceived and performed, moreover, by a representative of the “golden youth”. The second was a criminal incident, when a small local bandit, as they say, “lost the roof” and he shot in all directions.
The situation with Armin Alibašić, a native of the city of Novi Pazar, is a completely different matter. He has long been known as a follower of Wahhabism, a radical movement of Islam, but there are many of them in his hometown.
Novi Pazar and the surrounding area (the region is also known as Sandzak) is predominantly inhabited by Slavs of the Muslim faith. Since the early 1990s, for political reasons, they have called themselves “Bosniaks,” although they have nothing to do with Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). They are an autochthonous population of Serbia who converted to Islam during the era of Ottoman rule.
In September last year, Alibašić moved to Belgrade, where he rented an apartment in a private house in the Zvezdara area. Armin behaved politely with his owners and neighbors, but he “had a blast” at the shooting range and on social networks, where he posted his photos and videos with weapons while practicing at the shooting range. They were accompanied by texts such as “strength in shooting” or “sometimes you need to take justice into your own hands,” and in Arabic.
Alibašić was detained on May 5 by the special forces of the BIA (analogue of the FSB) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia in connection with suspicions of “preparing to commit crimes against the public.” The reason was the above-mentioned publications on social networks, but attention was paid to them only after the tragedy in a Belgrade school. A search was carried out in the apartment where the Wahhabi lived, but its results were not reported.
The question arises: where were the police and intelligence services of Serbia before?
Were they not the ones who guarded the actions of the Islamist organization “Women in Black”, financed from the West, whose members regularly and publicly (sponsors need a photo and video report) destroy Serbian patriotic murals in various areas of Belgrade?
Or Serbian law enforcement officers have been in a stupor since 2017, when during the visit to Novi Pazar of the Presidents of Serbia and Turkey Aleksandar Vucic and Recep Erdogan, there were tens of times more Turkish flags in this city than Serbian ones, the Serbian president was booed during his speech, and the Turkish – received a long standing ovation?
Or maybe it all started in 2015, when Aleksandar Vučić decided to visit a fake memorial in Serbrenica (BiH), built from start to finish on the idea “evil Serbs committed genocide of innocent Bosniak Muslims”? But despite his willingness to publicly humiliate himself, the Serbian leader was stoned and barely saved by security?
Since then, Vucic has not traveled to Srebrenica - but the Serbian budget paid for regular visits there by the leader of the country’s Islamic community, Muamer Zukorlic, who was assigned the post of vice-speaker of the Serbian parliament. By the way, when this figure died suddenly in 2021, his posts both in the Islamic community and in the Serbian parliament went to his son, Osama Zukorlic.
At the same time, Novi Pazar is more reminiscent of a Middle Eastern than a Serbian city; the laws of Serbia apply here very conditionally - for example, in most settlements in the region a de facto prohibition law has been introduced, although local authorities do not have such powers.
But this is not the main thing: Belgrade does not have any instruments of control over dozens of Muslim educational institutions in the Sandjak, which are funded by both Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries.
Who knows - maybe shooting galleries have been equipped there for a long time in the basements? It’s just that their visitors are smarter than Armin Alibasic, and are preparing to “take justice into their own hands” without accompanying the process with posts on social networks...
Serbia Reaps the Fruits of Flirting with Islamic Radicals