by Aimen Dean
I was excited to handle a weapon and they were in plentiful supply thanks to gunrunners from Hungary and Croatia. A good quality AK-47 would cost some $250. Within days I was able to take apart and reassemble an AK-47 blindfolded. We did target practice with rifles, machine guns and then heavy calibre weapons, including the 20mm Yugo gun. My ability with maths and map reading soon made me competent in firing mortars.
I knew most of my brothers were worried about me and I tried to reassure them with regular letters that I was engaged in humanitarian work and was in no danger. I ignored their pleas to return home; home had become something of an abstract notion since my mother’s death. And for the first few months I wasn’t in any danger. We were either training or snowed in; there was little fighting in the Balkan winter.
There was, however, plenty of schooling. A Saudi cleric called Sheikh Abu Ayoub al-Shamrani spent hours expounding in lectures on the virtues of jihad. We were here to protect Muslims’ lives and lands. Shamrani also talked about jihad to remove obstacles to the spread of true Islam around the world.
‘There are powerful forces conspiring to stop the message of God from reaching people’s hearts and they need to be confronted by force,’ he said.
I recognized the words. He was paraphrasing the manifesto of Sayyid Qutb.15
In past centuries, offensive jihad had been the prerogative of the Supreme Leader of the Muslim community, the Caliph. However, Qutb had argued that in the absence of a Caliph today a Vanguard of mujahideen could lead jihad. The reason, Shamrani explained, was that this jihad was in essence a battle to defend our religion, creating the same obligation for Muslims to act with or without a Caliph’s blessing as in ‘defensive’ jihad.
He turned to a passage by Qutb: ‘If we insist on calling Jihad a defensive movement then we must change the meaning of the word “defence” and mean by it “the defence of man” against all those elements which limit his freedom. These elements take the form of beliefs and concepts, as well as of political systems, based on economic, racial or class distinctions.’16
He paused to survey his congregation.
‘Ever since the European powers abolished the Caliphate,* the Muslim nation was left without a figurehead. Brave Muslim scholars like Sayyid Qutb realised there was this third kind of jihad which, although practised during the time of the Prophet, subsequently went unrecognized. We refer to it as jihad al-Tamkeen [empowerment]. It is a jihad to restore Muslim sovereignty. Look around you. Is it not we who are the Vanguard?’
His words made me uncomfortable. Qutb had depicted secular rulers in the Arab world as part of a global plot to marginalize and dilute Islam.18 While many of the Egyptian jihadis in Bosnia hoped one day to overthrow Hosni Mubarak, I could not countenance shedding blood back home. I approached the Sheikh when his lecture was over.
‘One thing worries me,’ I said. ‘Against whom should we wage this new form of jihad? Are you suggesting we fight our own governments and armies?’
‘I’m not saying that,’ said the Saudi cleric, much to my relief. ‘But one day our governments may take sides with the West in the face of the jihad to restore the Caliphate If that happens, fighting our own governments would not be a matter of choice, but of the survival of our faith.’ He fixed me with a serious gaze. ‘You may be sceptical that such a day might come, but some of us will survive Bosnia and fight in new battles, so mark my words.’
Some of my comrades were already takfiris: to them secular Arab leaders were apostates who needed to be excommunicated. I had not reached that point – not by a long way – but the perspective was clearly gaining ground.*
For now our hands were full enough fighting the Serbs, but some of what he had said stayed with me. There was something about being in Bosnia that made Qutb’s writing take on new meaning.
In the spring of 1995, after the snows melted we decamped to a new base a dozen kilometres south of Zavidovići which was nearer the front lines. In the shadow of a mountain ridge near a village called Kamenica, the Mujahideen Brigade set up camp in a clearing alongside a fast-flowing stream. The jihadis called it Masada (the Lion’s Den) after Osama bin Laden’s famous forward-operating base in Jaji, Afghanistan, close to Soviet positions in the 1980s. At any one time 500 Bosnian and foreign mujahideen were stationed there. In an irony typical of Bosnia, our white all-weather tents had been ‘borrowed’ from United Nations supplies. Such was its contempt for the UN, the Brigade had painted out the logos.
I had the sense that a big engagement was imminent. We were being trained on mortars and grenade launchers, and one night a feast was laid on. Slaughtered lambs were thrown in pits and covered in charcoal. Then we were told to gather around the campfire. Pointing to a large map, our commanders announced we would be joining a Bosnian army offensive to drive back Serb forces north-east of Zenica and open the road to Tuzla. There was real optimism among the mujahideen. With Muslim and Croat factions no longer at loggerheads, the tide of war was turning against the Serbs.
The offensive had the backing of Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović, whose commanders saw the jihadis as shock troops ready to run towards the bullets. I hoped our tactics would be somewhat more sophisticated but like my comrades eagerly anticipated the opportunity to worship God through jihad.
On the first day, skirmishes quickly escalated into exchanges of mortar fire. My fear was tempered by real exhilaration, adrenalin pumping as I ran from trench to trench carrying orders. I could see the flashes of enemy mortars firing at us some 400 metres away and quickly learned to gauge the distance of an incoming impact.
We lost two men that day; it was a rapid education in battlefield survival. But all my fears and doubts evaporated as I fired the opening salvo of my jihad. The privations no longer mattered. The lack of sleep and wearing full combat gear even when we did sleep, being soaked through by torrential rain, the diet of cold tuna: all were sacrifices to be embraced.
My love of maps made me a natural choice to be part of the reconnaissance unit, probing enemy positions. But my short-sightedness meant I couldn’t go close to enemy lines – which was perhaps just as well, because some reconnaissance teams would get within ten metres of enemy positions on what seemed like suicide missions.
I found my calling operating mortars. Day after day we would fire 82mm or 120mm shells towards Serb positions which our spotters had located behind forested hills a mile or two away. That most of the mortars we used were Yugoslav or Russian added a sense of poetic justice. One after another, we loaded the heavy shells into the firing tubes before crouching with our palms clasped to our ears. The sound was unforgettable – a deafening detonation more felt than heard as the mortar roared towards the unseen enemy. After each muffled impact in the distance, I felt a sense of satisfaction at the possibility that a few more among the butchers and rapists of our fellow Muslims had been liquidated.
To this day, I have no idea how many of the enemy I may have killed through mortar fire. But our indirect fire – at times intense – must have taken a toll on the Bosnian Serbs.*
Through the summer of 1995, the Bosnian Serbs resorted to ever more atrocious massacres as their military position weakened. The nadir was reached in July when they murdered more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys after overrunning what was risibly described as the safe enclave of Srebrenica. It was one of the worst crimes against humanity of the twentieth century. Shocked into a response, NATO finally carried out air strikes on Serb positions around Sarajevo, which we viewed as far too little far too late.
We wanted revenge; there was a visceral impatience at the Masada camp. In August we were told that we would soon advance on Serb positions in the Ozren Mountains. I was given a crash course in battlefield first aid. We were short on medics and the fighting was expected to be intense. Far from being disappointed, I welcomed the assignment. I would be in the middle of the action rather than behind the front lines. After midnight on 10 September we set off, moving stealthily towards the Serb bunkers dug into a steep wood
ed hill. We were just one element of an offensive to liberate the strategic village of Vozuc´a.*
Our battalion advanced up the hill just after dawn. An intense barrage of fire from the Serbs in their bunkers above created a killing zone. Within minutes, dozens of our fighters were cut down. Again and again I crawled up the hill to tend to the injured and dying, dragging their mangled bodies away. I must have made thirty trips. Those whose lives could be saved were loaded onto a Bosnian military helicopter. But too often a comrade who was alive and whimpering at the top of the hill was silent and inert before we reached the bottom.
At one point a Yemeni fighter beckoned to me for help. He was writhing on the ground in agony, having been shot several times in the lower abdomen. Parts of his intestines were hanging out. I very nearly vomited.
‘Quieten down or you’ll draw Serb fire towards us,’ I whispered to him.
I injected him with a shot of morphine, but he carried on screaming.
‘Are you a drug user?’ I asked him. In my paramedic training I had been told that this could reduce the effect of the morphine.
‘No, brother. But I chew qat,’ he gasped, referring to the narcotic popular in Yemen.
I administered two more shots of morphine. That stopped the screaming. I reached through the blood with my hands and pushed his intestines back into his stomach and tied my scarf tight around the wound. As bullets and mortars exploded around us, we managed to get him onto a stretcher.
Eventually our forces broke through Serb lines. As I looked for fighters who might be wounded but still alive, I heard someone wailing for help in Arabic from inside one of the abandoned Serb bunkers. As I went to investigate, I felt something catch and wrap around my legs.
‘Stop! Stop!’ yelled the fighters behind me.
My legs were entangled in wire. I had dragged up no fewer than four landmines. Things seemed to move in slow motion: I saw the Arab fighters throwing themselves to the ground, bracing for the explosion.
I stood motionless, expecting to be cut down by a sniper’s bullet at any second but knowing that one step in any direction would bring the certainty of death.
One of the fighters crawled towards me very slowly. I held my breath. He began to pick away at the wires curling around my legs. His fingers moved carefully but with extraordinary calmness. As he disentangled me, he spoke softly.
‘God be praised. For one of these not to explode I would call you lucky. Two would be extremely fortunate; three a miracle. And four, well, God must be watching over you,’ he said.
‘Maybe God doesn’t want me,’ I told him.
As I clambered back down the hill, I was jolted from shock to disappointment. After a year in Bosnia, I was still very much alive. I had been sure this would be my bridge to paradise, a place the Prophet had described as beyond imagination. Of the five medics assigned that day, only two of us had survived. My brothers in arms were now in paradise but I had been left behind. I could not hold back the tears. I felt like a loser among winners. I made a silent prayer asking God to reunite me with my friends soon and vowed to embrace jihad as never before. Maybe God would then find me worthy.
There was too much work that afternoon saving the lives of others to allow me to dwell on mine. A British Pakistani fighter named Babar Ahmad* was stumbling through the woods holding his bloodied skull. He had been hit with shrapnel. He leaned against me and we staggered down the hill.
The battle was over; my day was not. I had to attend a makeshift hospital and morgue in an underground car park in Zavidovići to help identify the fallen and collect their wills, final letters and personal effects. It was a grotesque scene. I slipped on sticky streaks of blood that lay fresh on the floor. In the morgue there were rows of corpses on the floor covered with blankets. I saw the bloodied bodies of forty-four of our fighters, many of them friends. The student from Riyadh with whom I had travelled to Bosnia was among them. So were Hazam and Marwan, the young Palestinians from Milan, who had also been working as paramedics that day. The wounds of many of the dead were horrific, but I was struck by the serene expressions on their faces. Truly they were in paradise.
When I got to the last corpse, I thought I had begun hallucinating. A soft whimpering came from under the blanket. It was the Yemeni whose intestines had been blown out. The doctors had declared him dead; they had been spectacularly wrong. He had regained consciousness and was still clinging to life. I arranged for his rapid evacuation to hospital. He would recover and fight on several other jihadi battlegrounds, including against US troops in Iraq. In a 2005 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, he recounted how a Bahraini medic had saved his life twice in one day in Bosnia.21
I met Khalid al-Hajj that night. He had been fighting on a different section of the front with Anwar Shaaban and told me excitedly how the people of Maglaj had cheered the arriving mujahideen after they broke the Serb siege of the town. Across a broad front line, 2,000 Bosnian soldiers and our 500-strong Arab contingent had decisively pushed back a force of some 4,000 Serbs.
‘How was the day for you?’ he asked.
‘Tomorrow’ was all I could muster. I was too exhausted to talk.
It was in Bosnia that I first saw – just days after my seventeenth birthday – how quickly war and religious hatred can demean mankind. The collapse in Serb lines had resulted in our battalion taking some 250 Serb prisoners. Most were Chetniks, members of Serb militia who had terrorized Bosnian Muslims through a systematic campaign of rape and killings.
Many were brought to the Masada camp in the week that followed the battle and held in abandoned buildings. There were disagreements in the junior ranks about what to do with them. For one faction, inflicting torture was just retribution, especially after Srebrenica. The suffering of prisoners was to be relished. Others said that summary execution with a bullet to the back of the head was enough, citing the Prophet’s dictum that if you kill you should be merciful about it. Yet another group said prisoners should be handed to the Bosnians as we were on their territory.
I believed we should use the Serbs as bargaining chips to win the release of prisoners, but not out of any sympathy for them. In the preceding months I had seen too many mass graves outside Muslim villages, some holding the skeletons of infants, to countenance any mercy towards the Chetniks. To me at that time they looked sub-human, grotesque and filthy. I was haunted by their wild, staring eyes.
When I suggested to Khalid that we could bargain our prisoners in exchange for Muslim civilians, he cut me off with a disbelieving stare.
‘We need to dispatch them all to hell,’ he said. Many of the Bosnian fighters, whose families had suffered so acutely at the hands of the Serbs, felt the same. Word spread that Shaaban had made a decision.*
‘There will be a killing party soon,’ one of our commanders said in a menacing tone.*
I was asked to participate in what happened next but could not bring myself to do so. As the first prisoners were brought in front of us in a clearing alongside the camp and crudely beheaded, I approached a young Saudi fighter from the town of Taif that I had befriended.
‘Abu Dujana,’ I said, ‘do you think if the Prophet was here he would agree with this form of execution?’ I asked him.
‘He beheaded people in Medina,’ he said.
‘But Islamic law dictated executions should be done with a swift strike to the back of the neck. Call it a merciful dispatch. Not like this. We are becoming like them.’
He shrugged and turned away amid the primal screams of the victims.
Some of the condemned men were wearing jeans and casual clothing rather than military uniforms. One of our commanders said they were Chetnik spies and collaborators. But looking back now, it is possible some were civilians.
Khalid wanted to see them all tortured and beheaded. And that’s what happened. During the course of several days, our brigade put to death more than one hundred prisoners.** They were paraded, told to admit to crimes and executed in batches, while several of our fighters
recorded the scene with camcorders.23 There was nothing surgical about the executions: axes, knives and even chainsaws were used. Some prisoners were crudely beheaded, their heads kicked across the dust. Many looked terrified as they were forced to witness the killings. Others were defiant to the last, saying they would rape Muslim women again if given the chance. One was foolish enough to claim he was a magician and could not be killed. His head was placed on a concrete block, and another block was dropped on it.
Several dozen had been executed by the time it was Khalid’s turn. His eyes had a glazed, demented expression that I found deeply disturbing. He dragged a prisoner onto the bloodied earth, forced him to the ground and, crouching over him, began sawing at his neck with a serrated hunting knife.
Khalid had always viewed the world in a binary way. If he was going to fight the enemies of Islam, he was not going to be inhibited about it. In his view the Prophet had prescribed such forms of execution; there was no debate. After decapitating the man, Khalid kicked away his head in contempt. I turned around and left.
For hours I sat unsettled in my tent as the muffled screams resounded across the valley. Even if they couldn’t be traded and our leaders believed they had to be executed, I was sickened by the spectacle I had just witnessed. It was perhaps the first step of jihad’s descent into altogether darker territory.
The massacre of Serb fighters after the Battle of Vozuća was later featured in trials at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, where Bosnian commanders asserted they had no control over the Mujahideen Brigade.* Of the 250 Serbs taken prisoner by the brigade, I am aware of only twenty being spared.** Weeks later, I felt my views vindicated when we exchanged them for some 200 civilians.