FOR Bosnia’s Muslims, images of stick-thin prisoners cowering behind the barbed wire of Serb concentration camps such as Omarska were final proof of their abandonment by the West, confirmation that neither the UN nor Nato would stop ethnic cleansing. The images accelerated the radicalisation of a once tolerant Muslim society. Rejected by the West, the Bosniaks turned east. Into the gap stepped Iran and Saudi Arabia, pushing a hardline Islam quite unsympathetic to Bosnia’s Ottoman traditions. During the war we saw bearded Arab fighters, known as Mujahidin, in the narrow lanes of the Ottoman-era city of Travnik. They were hard men, hostile to Westerners and angry at the presence of Bosniak women soldiers. In nearby Zenica, Bosniak soldiers formed the all-Muslim 7th Mountain Brigade, which fought with the Mujahidin.

Despite the culture clash, the foreign fighters were welcome. “Some of them might be motivated by the possibility of fighting a jihad, but I only wish there were more of them. Their presence shames Europe,” one army commander said.

As the war ground on, the West’s failure to stop Serb atrocities caused a huge psychological shift among the Bosniaks. “If you asked me before the war I would say it’s nice to be European Muslim,” Effendi Nusret Abdibegovic, the Imam of Travnik, told me. “But we don’t feel like we used to in Europe. We accepted help from our Muslim brothers because it’s their duty to help us. Muslims are awakening to their identity.”

The Bosnian war was an opportunity lost. A society that could have forged a new relationship between Islam and the West vanished beneath a rain of Serb artillery shells. The Dayton accords rewarded Serb ethnic cleansing by dividing Bosnia into two quasi-statelets, intensifying the ethnic divide. The West’s failure to capture the Serb war criminals General Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic has only increased Muslim cynicism.

Radical Islam has taken root not just in Bosnia, but across the Balkans. When I asked a young Bosniak soldier about Serb claims that his people wanted an Islamic regime, he replied: “Europe will bring about here the very thing it fears.”

• Milosevic: A biography, by Adam LeBor, is published by Bloomsbury

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