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OPINION

Updated September 9, 2013, 8:21 p.m. ET

I nact i on on Syri a St rengt hens AlQ aeda

For decades, the terror group has used military conflicts to push a tale of Western responsibility for Muslim suffering.
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By HANNAH STUART

Those who argue that the West's response to 9/11 only aided al Qaeda's recruitment efforts forget the powerful narrative that was already in place as a result of the Bosnian war of the early 1990s: that the West is complicit in Muslim suffering and that only groups such as al Qaeda can protect Muslim communities. Nowhere is this notion more dominant right now than in Syria, where al Qaeda is busy winning hearts and minds while the West continues to debate its role in the conflict. The Bosnian war set the template. After a Western-led arms embargo in 1991 left Bosnian Muslims almost helpless to defend themselves, foreign jihadistsor mujahideenfrom the Middle East and beyond traveled to Bosnia to fight on their behalf. They were reportedly financed by al Qaeda through a variety of front charities. While mujahideen did not play as decisive a role in the Bosnian conflict as al Qaeda-linked groups are apparently playing in Syria, Bosnia nonetheless became central to al Qaeda's propaganda message of a Western war against Islam. Osama bin Laden's 1996 declaration of war against Americans, for example, referenced the massacres of Muslims in Bosnia. The West, he wrote, "not only didn't respond to these atrocities, but also with a clear conspiracy between the USA and its' [sic] allies . . . the dispossessed people were even prevented from obtaining arms to defend themselves." All throughout the 1990s and after, radical clerics in Europe have recruited young men on the strength of the Bosnian story. Abu Hamza al-Masri, the hook-handed former imam of the Finsbury Park mosque in London, spent the early part of the '90s fighting in Bosnia before returning to Britain with his tale of righteous jihad. He now faces charges in New York for his alleged support to terrorism everywhere from Oregon to Afghanistan.

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Hannah Stuart: Inaction on Syria Strengthens Al Qaeda - WSJ.com#articleTabs%3Dcom...

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A Sudanese Muslim student who joined Bosnian forces in Sarajevo holds his Kalashnikov on a bus returning from the front, August 1992.

The message wasand continues to bea powerful one. Another veteran of

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the Bosnian "holy war" is Omar Sheikh, the British-born former London School of Economics student and convicted murderer of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Abdulla Ahmed Ali, the British -born ringleader of a 2006 plot to blow up multiple trans-Atlantic aircraft, claimed that he had been deeply affected by images of Muslim suffering in Bosnia. He was 12 years old when the war broke out in 1992. Today, in the Syrian conflict, the graphic videos of last month's chemical weapons attack in Damascus are shocking the world. Images of children struggling to gather their last breaths may corral public support for Western military intervention. But they will also be remembered for decades, in al Qaeda's narrative, as still more evidence of Western complicity in global Muslim suffering. From the very beginning of the conflict, Syrians have been asking for Western assistance. To date, the West has done little to support them. Al Qaeda, however, has reacted. And it won't matter that their fighters shot dead a 14-year-old Syrian boy accused of blasphemy, or that they committed any number of other atrocities against the people they claim to protect. After two and half years of fighting and more than 100,000 people killed, the story will be that al Qaeda's fighters risked their lives for their Syrian brothers while world leaders watched the country burn. Ms. Stuart is a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based think tank.
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