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Teenage Girl Said Drugged and Abducted to Become a Mujahideen Bride
‘What true Muslim would kidnap a child?’
By Kurt Schork
"I got off the bus and a woman from my neighbourhood insisted I come to her home for coffee. When I drank the coffee my head felt like it would explode and a haze formed before my eyes and I passed out," the 15-year-old girl told Reuterss.
"I woke up at midnight in a completely dark room with the door locked and a steel mesh over the windows. I had a terrible headache. I had been drugged. I had a sense of what was happening around me but I couldn't move, I had no will power."
Eldina's abductor, a woman, lives near the Mesinovic family in Tetovo, a hilly suburb of Zenica full of blue-collar families. She is one of half a dozen people whom Eldina's father, Fahrudin, identified as Middle Eastern mujahideen. He speculated that the woman had been paid to serve as a matchmaker for one of them.
"We're told Eldina was intended as a second wife for one of the mujahideen. This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened in our area, but it may be the first time that it has been spoken about publicly," Fahrudin Mesinovic said. "People are pressured to keep quiet. There have been other beatings and women have been spat upon for wearing short skirts or tight jeans. You can't even have a beer in your garden for fear a mujahideen might grab it from your hand and smash it."
No thanks to local police, Eldina was rescued by her family the day after she was abducted. The matchmaker asked the local imam (Muslim priest) in Tetovo to arrange a quick marriage for a girl who had been "obtained" and the imam tipped off the family.
When Eldina was retrieved by her parents from the matchmaker's house nearly 24 hours after being abducted she was still heavily sedated and covered from head to foot in a black chador of the sort women in strict Muslim societies wear. Enraged at the girl's escape, four mujahideen came to her home where they beat her father and uncle and shot up the house.
The kidnapping occurred on June 21, just five days before the United States announced that all "foreign forces" had left Bosnia as required under the Dayton peace agreement which ended 43 months of war here in December. Bosnian television and newspaper reporters have tried to cover Eldina's story but only one sanitised version has appeared publicly due to pressure from government authorities.
"I fought for four years in the Bosnian Army but I told the police after this incident that I now regret every day I spent in uniform in the trenches," said Fahrudin Mesinovic. "These mujahideen have money and power and protection from the authorities. We haven't let our daughter go to school or even leave the house to go into the garden all week. My wife and I are staying home from work. We're prisoners in our own home."
Bosnia's pre-war Muslim population was steadfastly secular, especially in cities. But four years of fighting, a huge migration of rural folk to urban centres and the influx of thousands of foreign mujahideen have given Muslim fundamentalism a toe-hold across the country.
"Whatever they did for us in the war these (mujahideen) are now trying to impose their values and their customs on us unfairly," Eldina's mother, Kasena, complained. "We're a Muslim family, more Muslim than they are...They're mafioso. They live among us but they keep to themselves. What true Muslim would kidnap a child?" |
ZENICA, Bosnia, June 29 (Reuters) - Slender, fair-skinned Eldina Mesinovic was abducted on her way home from school, drugged and held captive as a bride for a foreign mujahideen (Islamic holy warrior) who fought in Bosnia.
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