AUSTRIA ISLAMIST GROUPS FROM BALKANS REPORTEDLY ACTIVE IN VIENNA
BBC Monitoring International Reports - January 18, 2008, Friday

Text of report by Austrian newspaper Der Standard on 18 January

Unattributed report: "Doing Missionary Work With Videos"

Vienna - "These fighters are we - the Muslims - with whom you, Susanne, now have a problem," stated the threat video against FPOe [Freedom Party of Austria] politician Susanne Winter, which was originally posted by a German user. At the end it said "Made by Bilal and Jasko." The video disappeared again and was posted a second time on YouTube by an Austrian user, before it was removed once and for all.

One theory is that the video was produced by Islamists from the Balkans. The producers of the video probably live or lived in Austria or Germany. After the war in Bosnia an Islamist community of Bosnians and people from the Sandzak had gathered in Vienna. Meeting places of the so-called Wahhabis are the Sahaba prayer room in Vienna's seventh district and the Tehwid mosque in the 12th district. The Viennese Islamists have been watched critically in Bosnia by the official Islamic Community (IZ) for quite some time, because they have considerable influence on Wahhabis in the Balkans, whom they control from Vienna.

On the one hand, there is the group around Muhammad Porca, who is engaged in a power struggle with the IZ. However, the really unpredictable one is the group around Nedzad Balkan a.k.a. Ebu Muhammed, who is working in the Sahaba prayer room. The Sahaba prayer room was mentioned publicly most recently, when it became known that the suspected producer of the threat video against the Austrian Government frequently went to the Sahaba prayer room. The group around Balkan (Kelimetul Haqq - in German "The True Word") belongs to the "Al-Takfir wal-Hijra" movement. The Takfiris accept the shari'ah without any exceptions. And they consider it legitimate to hurt believers of other religions, whom they call "Kafir." The group, which has a "branch office" in the Montenegrin part of Sandzak, is putting, among other things, aggressive sermons into the Internet. Kelimetul Haqq "prohibits" working in state organizations and notes critically that polygamy is banned in Bosnia. The conflict with the Wahhabis in Bosnia is a political issue. While some people on the Serbian side and some media exaggerate the number and influence of the Wahhabis, many moderate Muslims are indeed worried that there are mosques that are no longer under the control of the IZ.

Source: Der Standard, Vienna, in German 18 Jan 08
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