"No wonder so many in the west are embarrassed to talk about them"

Quite:

Imagine if a European country was found to be harbouring 500 former jihadists from North Africa and the Middle East, some of whom still have links with terrorist organisations. Imagine if that European country had been put under pressure to expel the jihadists for more than a decade, but had continually resisted, instead allowing them to become naturalised citizens. Imagine if the country's officials finally decided, at the end of last year, to deport its hundreds of one-time Mujahideen, and started by kicking out a high-profile Algerian who allegedly posed a threat to European security.

In our age of fevered obsession with Islamic terrorism, such a story would be huge, right? If London is referred to by some as "Londonistan", simply because it has a handful of radical clerics who spout nonsense about kafirs and slags, then the revelation that a European state had within its borders hundreds of fully-trained former fighters from the ranks of the Arab-African Mujahideen would surely cause an epidemic of handwringing in European newspapers and on the nightly news.

You'd be surprised. All of the above is happening right now, in Bosnia, and it has generated barely an inch of ink in the British press or anywhere else.

There are hundreds of has-been holy warriors in Bosnia. An estimated 3,000 Mujahideen from Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East, many of them veterans of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, journeyed to Bosnia during the civil war of 1992 to 1995. They fought alongside the Bosnian Muslims against the Bosnian Serbs, and occasionally against the Croats. It is estimated that more than 500 remain, having married local women or having been granted citizenship status during or after the war.

In the late 1990s, and with renewed vigour after 9/11, Washington put pressure on the Bosnian authorities to expel the jihadists. Bosnia always dithered. Now it has set up a citizenship revision commission, which has recommended that around 500 Bosnian citizens from Islamic countries have their citizenship revoked and be deported back to their country of origin.

Most of these men will have travelled to Bosnia to make war against the Serbs in the early 1990s; according to Bosnian officials some still have "connections with Islamic militant groups that are still active, though ostensibly not in Bosnia." One of them, Atau Mimun, an Algerian said to have trained holy warriors in Bosnia during the civil war, was reportedly "a danger to [Bosnia's] national security." He was the first former Mujahideen to be deported by the Citizenship Revision Commission, in mid-December last year. It is expected that more will be thrown out this month.

It is highly debatable whether these men should be deported. Yes, they may have fought with the notorious El-Mujahid unit of the Bosnian government army, which committed some heinous crimes, including the decapitation of Serb soldiers and civilians. Yet they were allowed into Bosnia by the Bosnian authorities, frequently with the complicity of Washington, and in the 12 years since the civil war ended they will have started families in Bosnia. Washington and its Bosnian allies cannot just employ Arabs and Africans as attack dogs in a war and then deport them when it's all over.

Yet the question remains: why isn't any of this being debated in western commentary circles positively obsessed with jihadism? Commentators have an insatiable, almost Johnny Colonialist lust for writing about the myriad Mujahideen and Islamist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan; they frequently investigate the loose networks of holy warrior wannabes in Britain. Yet they're far more reluctant to talk about the radical Islamists in Bosnia. Many in the west seem deeply embarrassed by Bosnia's holy warriors, which is understandable, when you consider that these one-time Mujahideen are their former spiritual allies with whom they share a great deal in common.

Violent jihadists in Afghanistan and Pakistan can be discussed as ultra-weird foreigners who pose a mortal threat to the western way of life; they allow western commentators to indulge in the fantasy that they're engaged in an historic battle to defend our enlightened culture against alien outsiders. Yet Bosnia's Mujahideen cannot so easily be depicted as "the other", to use a knackered old academic phrase. On the contrary, Bosnia's holy warriors are intimately and historically bound together with western officials and liberal commentators.

Both sides backed precisely the same force in Bosnia's civil war. The Clinton administration supported, armed and trained the Bosnian government army, and western liberal commentators uncritically championed the Bosnian government; the Arab Mujahideen fought alongside Bosnian government forces. Western interventionists hailed the late Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic as the hero of the civil war; the Mujahideen were employed by Izetbegovic, and according to terrorism expert Evan Kohlmann were directly answerable to him. Western thinkers became gripped by feverish anti-Serb prejudices, depicting the Serbs as thugs, gangsters and the new Nazis; likewise the Mujahideen, who looked upon the Serbs as "dogs". Where western liberals demonised the Serbs, Eastern extremists decapitated them.

The Bosnian Mujahideen were no bizarre foreign force - they were the armed wing of western liberal hysteria about "evil Serbs". The former holy warriors being lined up for deportation from Bosnia are the one-time fanatic leftovers from the west's transformation of a dirty civil war into an epoch-defining battle between "good" (Washington, western journalists, Bosnian Muslims and the Mujahideen) and "evil" (the Serbs). How embarrassing, then, that some of these Mujahideen, who learned their violent methods and developed their black-and-white worldview on the battlefields of Bosnia, went on to help organise the African Embassy bombings, 9/11 and the Madrid train attacks.

Such acts of terror can be seen as blowback for the super-moralisation of international affairs that reached its peak during the Bosnian civil war. The Bosnian Mujahideen were energised by the near-global demonisation of the Serbs in the mid-1990s; they were less foreign fanatics than they were cosmopolitan cut-throats. No wonder so many in the west are embarrassed to talk about them.