Bosnia: one-stop terrorist shop.

"American military intelligence and the CIA have deployed hundreds of officers in Bosnia to track suspected Islamic militants amid concern that the country has become a refuge, recruiting ground and cash conduit for international terrorism," reported the July 26 London Telegraph.

"There is a flow of people heading in from Chechnya and Afghanistan on to Europe and back, then to Iraq," one U.S. official told the British paper. "They are spreading the story that Bosnia is a one-stop shop close to Europe for terrorism needs--guns, money, documents." Bosnia is particularly useful as a nearly limitless source of phony passports: Ahmed Ressam, convicted of attempting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on New Year's Day 2000, carried a Bosnian passport.

Hundreds of Islamic militants have been under scrutiny in Bosnia since 9-11. In early 2002, six Algerian nationals suspected of plotting to attack the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo were seized and deported to Guantanamo Bay. At approximately the same time, the Bosnian office of the Saudi Arabia-based al-Haramain foundation was closed down after being accused of funneling money to al-Qaeda.

Bosnia is a UN-supervised multi-ethnic entity that has been patrolled by NATO troops since 1995. "Peacekeepers" from the European Union will take over that mission later this year. As previously recounted in these pages (see "Behind the Terror Network" in our November 5, 2001 issue), radical Islamic elements--including Iranian-controlled terrorist and espionage networks and radicals allied with Osama bin Laden--were installed in Bosnia with Western help during the Yugoslav civil war. Following the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended that war, Washington provided financial and technical assistance to arm and train the Bosnian military, despite abundant evidence of Iran's growing influence in the Bosnian Muslim government.