SECURITY CONSULTING INVESTIGATIONS, LLC INTEL BRIEFING FOUO
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***********DATELINE: BOSNIA SARAJEVO 23 Dec 2015*********
‘Eleven people were arrested. They are suspected of terrorism, financing and preparing a terrorist act as well as inciting candidates to go to the battlefields abroad,’ police say
Bosnian police on Tuesday launched an anti-terror raid in the capital Sarajevo and arrested 11 people suspected of having links to the ISIL group, officials said.
“Eleven people were arrested. They are suspected of terrorism, financing and preparing a terrorist act as well as inciting candidates to go to the battlefields abroad,” a police spokesman told AFP.
According to state-run FTV television, one of the leaders of Bosnia’s movement, Muric Kemal, was among those arrested.
“The objective of this major operation was to track down some 15 people who… are close to radical groups and structures of the ISIL, as well as people who are on the battlefields in Syria or Iraq,” national prosecutors in charge of terrorism said in a statement.
Searches were conducted at two places of prayer as well as at several homes used by the suspects, it said.
“Physical evidence of the links with the ISIL group structures were seized.”
The operation was conducted in several Sarajevo districts, including in Rajlovac, where two members of Bosnia’s armed forces were killed in November in a suspected terror attack by a man who then blew himself up.
Out of some 200 Bosnian nationals who joined extremist groups in Syria and Iraq in 2012 and 2013, at least 26 have died while about 50 have returned to the Balkan country, according to the authorities.
Last year Bosnia adopted a new law providing for jail sentences of up to 20 years for extremists and their recruiters, since when the number leaving for the Middle East appears to have dropped off.
A radical Bosnian Islamic leader was sentenced by a local court in November to seven years in prison for inciting terrorism. Husein Bosnic was found guilty of encouraging his followers to fight alongside extremists in Syria and Iraq.
Around 40 percent of Bosnia’s population of 3.8 million people are Muslim, who overwhelmingly follow a moderate form of Islam. The rest of the population are mainly Orthodox and Catholic Christians.
*********DATELINE BOSNIA KOZLUK 9 DEC 2015*****************
World Bulletin / News Desk
Bosnian forensic experts have started exhuming the human remains from a recently uncovered mass grave believed to contain victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the war crime prosecutor’s office said Wednesday.
“So far remains of at least 15 victims have been recovered,” the prosecutor said in a statement.
The mass grave was uncovered at Kozluk, a village some 70 kilometres (40 miles) north of Srebrenica.
Some 8,000 Muslims were executed by Bosnian Serb forces as they captured this eastern Bosnian town in July 1995, at the end of the 1992-1995 inter-ethnic war in Bosnia which claimed 100,000 lives.
“Some 1,000 Muslim men and adolescents from the Srebrenica region were executed at this place. No one survived this execution,” the prosecutor said, adding that some 200 victims remained unaccounted for.
Twenty years after the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II, the remains of some 6,600 of the Srebrenica victims have been found, identified and buried, most of whom in a memorial centre located near the town.
But such exhumations have become rare events in recent years as the authorities claim to have no information on where the rest of the victims are buried.
The last large-scale exhumation around Srebrenica took place in 2010, when the remains of some 50 victims were found.
The site of the newly uncovered mass grave was unveiled by a Bosnian Serb, witness of the atrocities, Munira Subasic, president of an association of Srebrenica victims’ families, told AFP.
“This man came to talk to me in a small restaurant in Kozluk. He told me ‘I should tell you something. There is a mass grave nearby. I can’t sleep of guilty conscience’,” Subasic said.
Three other mass graves, holding the remains of with 340 victims were uncovered in the region of Kozluk in 1999 by investigators of The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY), according to Lejla Cengic, a spokeswoman of Bosnia’s Institute for missing persons.
Hundreds of other victims of this massacre have been found in mass graves in other places.
The Srebrenica massacre has been acknowledged as genocide by two international courts.
**************DATELINE: BOSNIA Sarajevo 19 Nov 2015 ********
At least two Bosnian soldiers were killed and three civilians injured in an attack by a gunman in Sarajevo.
World Bulletin / News Desk
Two Bosnian soldiers were killed late Wednesday when a gunman opened fire near a barracks in Sarajevo, police said.
The man, who was armed with an automatic rifle, later killed himself as police surrounded his home on the city’s outskirts.
Enes Omeragic opened fire on a betting shop near the base in the Rajlovac neighborhood before firing on a bus, wounding the driver and two passengers, a Sarajevo police spokesman said.
The motive for the attack is unknown but Bosnia announced the security level at military bases would be raised throughout the country.
ANALYSIS:
The boiling pot that has been shaking, sometimes violently, rattling on the stove-top that is the security situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a nation of 3.829 million people divided along ethnic, religious and geographical lines. Even though the average life expectancy is well over 70, the health of the citizens is ravaged through chronic pollution, smoking that continues unabated, poverty and the inability to obtain adequate health-care. The unsafe streets, the saturation of the government and business by organized crime exacerbates the helplessness that many of the nations most impoverished feel. An unemployment rate in some cities tops 90 percent. The unemployment rate nationwide (according to 2013 figures) stands at 44.3%. That number is optimistic, gathering into the calculations subsidized government jobs that are temporary at best, corrupt at the worst; and the entrance into the military by some of those unable to find work. Bosnia holds the world’s highest unemployment rate for young persons at 57.5%.
Since the war in the 1990’s Since the war ended in 1995 about 150,000 young people have left Bosnia with an estimated 10,000 more leaving every year.
It is no wonder when on top of the unemployment, if it is possible to find work; the salaries that one will earn on average are reported to be 1327 BAM a month or in US dollars, $741.25. According to the experts, the cost of living in Bosnia is 52.53% lower than the U.S. The poverty level in the U.S. for a family of four is drawn at $23,850 a year. Taking 52.53% of that, the poverty line in Bosnia for a family of four would be $12,528.41. The average income for an employed person in Bosnia comes to $8,895.00 per year. That is a disparity of $3,633. If only 50 percent of the entire population can get work, how likely is any family of four to have TWO people with jobs?
Is there any wonder why ISIS, al Qaeda, organized crime syndicates and hosts of other nefarious types would find fallow ground for new recruits among the young people of Bosnia? It is a matter of survival.
The headlines of the last six-weeks will not dissipate but rather will grow more frequent, more frantic and more fatal. Watch for the continuing schism between the Serbs and the Muslims. Expect that the current government setup will begin to crumble even more rapidly than it already is and that the void created by looming anarchy will be filled by someone, from somewhere and most likely they will not have the best interests of the U.S. or the western world at heart.
The following sources were used in the preparation of this report:
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/141008/bosnia-youth-unemployment-rate
CIA World Factbook demographic statistics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina
http://www.worldbulletin.net/haber/166497/gunman-kills-two-bosnian-soldiers-in-sarajevo
http://www.worldbulletin.net/haber/167205/new-srebrenica-mass-grave-uncovered
http://www.worldbulletin.net/news/167675/bosnia-arrests-11-in-anti-terror-raid
http://www.salaryexplorer.com/salary-survey.php?&loctype=1&loc=27
http://themoneyconverter.com/USD/BAM.aspx
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=Bosnia+And+Herzegovina
*All figures are computed using data, if not specifically dated, from 2010 to 2015.
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