Summary
• Kosovo, a country with no prior history of religious militancy, has become a prime source of
foreign fighters in the Iraqi and Syrian conflict theater relative to population size.
• About three in four Kosovan adults known to have traveled to Syria and Iraq since 2012 were
between seventeen and thirty years old at the time of their departure. By mid-2016, about
37 percent had returned.
• The vast majority of these known foreign fighters have moderate formal education. In com-
parative terms, this rate appears to be superior to the reported national rate. Two-thirds live
in average or above-average economic circumstances.
• Five municipalities—four of which are near Kosovo’s Macedonian border—judging from their
disproportionately high recruitment and mobilization rate, appear particularly vulnerable to
violent extremism. More than one-third of the Kosovan male combatants originate from these
municipalities, which account for only 14 percent of the country’s population.
• Long-term and targeted radicalization, recruitment, and mobilization efforts by foreign-funded
extremist networks have been primarily active in southern Kosovo and northwestern Macedo-
nia for more than fifteen years. These networks have often been headed by local alumnae of
Middle Eastern religious institutions involved in spreading an ultra-conservative form of Islam
infused with a political agenda.
• Despite substantial improvements in the country’s sociopolitical reality and living conditions
since the 1998–1999 Kosovo War, chronic vulnerabilities have contributed to an environment
conducive to radicalization.
• Frustrated expectations, the growing role of political Islam as a core part of identity in some
social circles, and group dynamics appear to be the telling drivers of radicalization, recruit-
ment, and mobilization in Kosovo.
