For decades, Islamist foreign fighting has been an Arab and Muslim-majority countries' phenomenon. But the Islamic State (IS) and the Syrian civil war's capacity to attract Western youths revealed how this form of political violence spilt over the traditional Muslim world to expand in Europe -or the West more broadly. Yet, the question of when exactly Islamist violence became specifically a European phenomenon remains puzzlingly less addressed. The post-9/11 Academic scenario contributed to this omission by implicitly assuming that pre-9/11 cases of European Muslim violence were already expressions of al-Qa'ida's terrorist strategy. When estimated, alternative hypotheses on the genesis of Islamist violence in Europe were only vague footnotes in the story of bin Laden's organisations. This al-Qa'ida-centric approach, however, downplayed the experiences of Muslim European citizens who fought in civil wars in the early 1990s, notably in Bosnia, Chechnya, Algeria and Kashmir, without being affiliated with al-Qa'ida.
By taking British Muslim recruits in the Bosnian civil war as a case study, my paper tries to fill this gap by proposing the following hypothesis: in the early 1990s, before al-Qa'ida's ideology and network began recruiting in Europe, an initial wave of European Muslim fighters left to fight in civil war scenarios where Muslim populations were perceived as in danger. These recruits did not originate from al-Qa'ida nor endorsed terrorism. Yet, in the conflict zones, they were exposed to al-Qa’ida’s affiliates who rerouted part of this British Muslim foreign fighting toward terrorism. In turn, this first mobilisation of British Muslims fighters acted as a 'connecting link' between two phases of European violent Islamism: an initial and less explored one consisting of foreign fighting rather than terrorism and a second and much more studied one marked by al-Qa'ida-inspired terrorism.
To support my hypothesis, I am creating an original database of early European recruits' biographies using radical groups' archival sources and documents in Western languages, Arabic and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian. My paper will proceed as follows. First, I will critically evaluate the existing relevant literature, particularly emphasising the post-9/11 epistemological adverse effects over the historical research on European Islamism. Second, I will introduce the section of my database specifically referring to British Muslim foreign fighting in the Bosnian civil war. Third, I will elaborate more my hypothesis by exploring, first, the radicalisation causes of this forgotten generation of British Muslim foreign fighters and, second, the consequences of the encounters with terrorist-prone Islamist groups in the Bosnian battlefield. Finally, I will analyse the benefits and limits of my paper and highlight possible steps for future research.
My research hopes to contribute to the existing knowledge in two ways: first, by highlighting how the the origins of European Muslim’s international violence began via foreign fighting rather than terrorism; second, by insisting on how, contrary to common assumption, al-Qa'ida would be the receiving end rather than the beginning of such a pattern.
