The Protests in Macedonia are Only the Beginning.
By Edward P. Joseph
May 10, 2015
ike most terrorists, he was young. He had been born in the days just before bitter hatred engulfed his country; not long after his birth, his father had been seized by authorities and killed, along with scores of other Sunni Muslims. Two weeks ago, the 24-year-old son marched into a police station reportedly shouting the jihadist war cry “Allahu Akbar!” and then opened fire, killing one officer and wounding two others, before he was killed in a firefight with police.
Over the weekend, 350 miles to the south, eight more policemen were killed along with 14 suspected terrorists in a raging gunbattle near an international border created in the aftermath of World War I that radicals no longer recognize.
Another day in Syria or Iraq? No, this happened in Europe, an easy day’s drive from Vienna. The first attack, in Zvornik, a town in Bosnia’s Serb entity, was a shocking reminder of the potential influence of radical Islam in the region, especially in the wake of the rise of the Islamic State (also called ISIS). Only a small number of Bosnians have been radicalized, and even fewer have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq. But in the still-fractured Balkans, it doesn’t take many radicals to destabilize a country.