Mainstream accounts of the Kosovo War are silent about the role of al Qaeda in training and financing the UCK/KLA, yet this fact has been recognised by experts and to my knowledge never contested by them.

For example, James Bissett, former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, said ‘Many members of the Kosovo Liberation Army were sent for training in terrorist camps in Afghanistan … Milosevic is right. There is no question of their [al Qaeda’s] participation in conflicts in the Balkans. It is very well documented.’

In March 2002, Michael Steiner, the United Nations administrator in Kosovo, warned of ‘importing the Afghan danger to Europe’ because several cells trained and financed by al Qaeda remained in the region.

As late as 1997, the UCK/KLA had been recognised by the United States as a terrorist group supported in part by the heroin traffic.

The closeness of the UCK/KLA to al Qaeda was acknowledged again in the western press, after Afghan-connected KLA guerrillas proceeded in 2001 to conduct guerrilla warfare in Macedonia.

Press accounts included an Interpol report containing the allegation that one of bin Laden´s senior lieutenants was the commander of an élite UCK/KLA unit operating in Kosovo in 1999. This was probably Mohammed al-Zawahiri.

The American right wing, which opposed Clinton’s actions in Kosovo, has transmitted reports ‘that the KLA’s head of élite forces, Muhammed al-Zawahiri, was the brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the military commander for bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.’ Meanwhile Marcia Kurop in the Wall Street Journal has written that ‘The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps, weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading networks throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia.’

According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, 'Bin Laden’s Arab “Afghans” also have assumed a dominant role in training the Kosovo Liberation Army … [By mid-March 1999 the UCK included] many elements controlled and/or sponsored by the US, German, British, and Croatian intelligence services.