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Many writers have traced the formation of al-Qaeda to the war in Afghanistan in the 80s and 90s, linked with American backing of the the mujahedin. What’s less commonly considered is how those forces matured in Bosnia in the 90s, again with help from the Americans.

In ‘Intelligence and the War in Bosnia’ (published 2002) Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam University complied a report called ‘Intelligence and the War in Bosnia’ in which he details actual alliances between the Pentagon and radical Islamic groups from the Middle East.

America allowed the movement of Islamic fighters into the region but once that genie was out of that bottle it wasn’t going back in. Subsequent events don’t require detailing, but the importance of these watershed years can’t be overstated.

Read what Brendan O’Neill has to say about this over here.

Historically, it’s generally considered that American intervention in the Balkans during the troubles of the 90s was a good thing, that prevented more bloodshed than actually happened.

The counter-argument is quite different and quite convincing, and a further indictment of Western interventionism.

The violence didn’t stop. The innocent continued to die. America’s legacy, with regards the former Yugoslavia reaches far beyond those lands and in a modern globalised world, to this day touches us all.

Read Jonathan Marshall’s account of actual events over here.

Former CIA agent Robert Baer, an operative in the Balkans, has written books on CIA activity abroad. His ‘confessions’ regards events in the former Yugoslavia provide further evidence of White House meddlings that went catastrophically wrong… or right, depending on your interests…

Hunting down ‘terror groups’ that didn’t exist in order to sow seeds of chaos by spreading panic amongst Bosnian politicians seemed to be standard practice. This was in the 1990’s and it’s pertinent to reflect on what successive U.S. administrations have cooked up in the name of peace…

Read more from Robert Baer over here.