Balkans

Abstract: Over 1,000 adult male foreign fighters, women, and minors from the Western Balkans spent time in Syria and Iraq and around 500 from the region are still there, including children born in theater. After seven years of fighting and at least 260 combat deaths, the last active jihadi unit from the Western Balkans in Syria and Iraq is a modest ethnic Albanian combat unit fighting with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham in Idlib. The rest of those remaining in Syria and Iraq, mostly minors, are held in Kurdish-controlled IDP camps. Some 460 others have gradually returned home, making the Western Balkans the region with the highest concentration of returning foreign terrorist fighters in Europe and creating a long-term security challenge compounded by inadequate resources and the threat posed by homegrown jihadi militants.

Last April, a Bosnian court sentenced Munib Ahmetspahic to three years in prison after a guilt admission agreement with the prosecutor. From 2013 to 2018, Ahmetspahic fought in Syria with Jabhat al Nusra and returned to Bosnia with a serious leg amputation. He was detained at the airport in Sarajevo in November 2018. However, Ahmetspahic […]

Countries along the Balkan route are stepping up border controls in an attempt to stem irregular migration. An increasing number of migrants have been taking this route since this summer — what accounts for this phenomenon? Several hypotheses exist.

Bulgaria has detained 70 people suspected of having entered the country as migrants using irregular means. Some had to be rushed to hospital having suffered exhaustion, according to regional police forces.

The police operation took place at a parking lot on a highway near the southern Bulgarian city of Sliven early on Sunday, which is located about 100 kilometers north of the country’s border with Turkey.

It is just after midnight when they arrive at the registration centre in Dimitrovgrad on Serbia’s eastern border with Bulgaria.

The 17 Afghan men are all exhausted after a seven-hour walk over the mountain that forms the border between Bulgaria and Serbia. Their faces, hands, and arms are covered in scratches and their eyes are bloodshot from fatigue.

Restrictions on media freedom, unpunished violations by officials and alleged violence by police continued to be problems in south-east European countries in 2020, said a new US State Department report.

The US State Department’s 2020 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, which was published on Tuesday, warned that countries in the Balkans and south-east Europe have continuing problems with media freedom, censorship and violence against journalists, while officials are not being sanctioned for rights violations.

Ahead of the war crimes trial of ex-President Hashim Thaci and three other former guerrilla leaders, there is widespread distrust of the Hague-based Kosovo Specialist Chambers, which many Kosovo Albanians see as biased.