Kosovo's counterintelligence exposed a BIA operation inside the Muslim community Belgrade presents to the West as an Islamist threat. One Serbian asset spent seven years inside ISIS. The charging papers name the product: a narrative against Kosovo's statehood.
by Drizan Shala | 16 August 2026
A man in Kosovo types a question to his contact. Have you heard about this news? Is it possible I have a problem? The answer comes back in the calm register the trade reserves for its assets: no, what does that have to do with you, see you tomorrow around 8:30. The file preserves the reply in the original: "Jo bre çfarë lidhje ki ti, shihemi nesër rreth orës 8:30."
Both halves of that exchange now sit in an indictment of Kosovo's Special Prosecution, quoted as evidence, which means that while the handler was reassuring his source, a third party was reading along. The third party was Kosovo. The source was Hysri Selimi, a man from Bresalc in the Gjilan municipality, recruited in November 2009, per the indictment, by Serbia's Security Information Agency, the BIA. The officers he answered to sat in that agency's directorate for combating terrorism. And the business they conducted for fifteen years, the terrain this front is fought on, was the religious life of Kosovo's Muslims.
For a decade and a half, Belgrade has presented that religious life to Western governments as a security file: Kosovo as Europe's Islamist incubator, the mosque as the evidence, Serbia as the indispensable partner holding the dossier. What the court files in Prishtina describe is where part of the dossier came from. They describe a foreign service that, rather than observing this community from across a border, worked inside it, on salary.
By his own account to prosecutors, the work began small. In 2009 he was paid 100 euro per item for information assembled from open sources on former UÇK figures. The service equipped him with smartphones, three of them over time, paid him what would grow to 700 euro a month, and promised him a house. Then, on 22 November 2015, according to the indictment filed on 9 September 2025, Selimi flew to Syria through Istanbul airport, on a mission assigned by the BIA, and joined the Islamic State.
His tasking inside the organization was statistical: establish how many Albanians were in its ranks, how they were organized, and where in Syria they operated. He found work in the group's bureau for wounded soldiers, which paid him about 100 dollars a month; his other employer's arrangements have been described above. He was repatriated to Kosovo on 28 May 2022, and that December a court sentenced him, on a guilty plea, to four years and eight months for the participation itself.
Seven years. From the November he flew out of Istanbul to the May he was flown home, Serbia's service had a sponsored man inside the caliphate's apparatus for the better part of a decade, and when he came back, the relationship resumed as though the sentence were an interruption in an employment history. The indictment describes meetings across Serbia, in Vranje, in Niš, in Bujanoc (Bujanovac), with the BIA's director for combating terrorism, given in the prosecution's release as I.B., and a second officer. The taskings they set concerned radicalized persons and the development of what the requirement calls Vehabi currents in Kosovo, their influence, the number and functioning of prayer houses, the imams, the families of those who had gone to Syria. Among the items on his seized phone: images of the weaponry captured at Banjska, photographs of persons he claimed held senior positions at the Specialist Chambers, and video of believers performing Friday prayer at a mosque in Prishtina. At one point, per the indictment, he supplied his handlers the names of those arrested for the killing of police sergeant Muhamet Lika.
Then comes the sentence in the charging papers that reads the whole file for us. Through these actions, the indictment states, Selimi gravely endangered and damaged the constitutional legal order and security of the Republic of Kosovo, while also helping the Serbian BIA to create a narrative harmful to Kosovo's statehood: "duke ndihmuar po ashtu BIA-n serbe të krijojë një narrativë të dëmshme për shtetësinë e Kosovës."
Stop on that clause, because it changes what kind of case this is. Kosovo's prosecutors did not confine themselves to charging a man with passing information to a foreign service, under Article 124, paragraph 3, of the Criminal Code, in conjunction with Article 77. They charged, in the instrument itself, that the espionage serviced a story, and they named the story's target: Kosovo's statehood. The theory Kosovo's prosecutors put before the court, and on whose charge a court convicted at first instance this June, holds that the surveillance of Kosovo's Muslims and the sponsored membership in ISIS were inputs to the tale Belgrade tells about Kosovo abroad. What we might otherwise have to argue by inference, the charging document asserts as the function of the crime.
The record around the conviction requires precision, and gets it. Per the prosecution's dossier reporting, Selimi described his acts and his meetings in detail during his interview at the prosecutor's office and said he had worked for money, not to harm the country. At his initial hearing on 23 September 2025 he pleaded not guilty. On 15 June 2026 the Basic Court in Prishtina convicted him at first instance and sentenced him to six years, a punishment that executes only when the judgment becomes final. It is not yet final, and this account treats it accordingly.
The newest file extends the operation to this month, and it adds the pipeline. Fehim Sali, a teacher from Dragash holding citizenship of both Kosovo and Serbia, was arrested at Merdare on 13 August; a court ordered a month of detention the next day. The Special Prosecution's detention dossier, obtained and reported by KALLXO.com, alleges that he worked for material gain under the orders of a senior BIA official, identified in Telegrafi's reporting as Zelimir Matoviq, and that among his services he identified persons the tasking calls members of "sekti Vehabi", the Vehabi sect, and proposed them to his handler as candidates for contact and recruitment. The dossier alleges a second line of work: contacts with politically and socially influential figures from Kosovo's non majority communities, to whom he offered guidance on political conduct, in the interests of the service paying him. Searches of his home produced 39,500 euro, 500 Serbian dinars and four telephones; the prosecution regards the money as proceeds. At the detention hearing, prosecutor Bekim Kodraliu told reporters, Sali himself declared that he had been recruited by and had maintained continuous contact with BIA officials. He is a suspect, and every allegation against him belongs to a trial that has not happened.
A word on vocabulary, because it travels with the money. "Vehabi sect" is nobody's self-description and no category of Kosovo's institutions; it entered Kosovo's court files as the census language of Belgrade's security apparatus, because those were the requirements being filled. What the tasking calls a sect, the seized footage shows as men at prayer.
Read the two files together, at the level of allegation the prosecution has signed, and the shape is plain. Identification of believers. Proposal. Contact. Recruitment. Payment. Direction. A sponsored membership in a terrorist organization, sustained for seven years. This is a service building and running an asset network inside the milieu it describes to foreign governments as the threat, and the craft has a rule about such networks: assets who are members are levers, a network built for counting can be tasked for steering, and the distance between inventorying a scene and cultivating it is a sentence in a handler's instructions, invisible from outside. What the files prove is the network, the payments, the recruitment pipeline and the sponsored membership, together with the prosecution's stated theory of what it was all for. What they do not contain, and we state it plainly, is a documented instruction to instigate: no file we hold shows the BIA ordering an extremist act or founding a radical structure. Leaving that line unblurred is what makes every other line here unanswerable.
The story the operation serviced has a known market and a known supply problem. We traced the doctrine on 3 August: Belgrade's relabeling of a national dispute as a war of faiths, with its buyers in Washington and its licensor in Moscow. The trouble with the Islamist chapter of that story is that its facts expired. Departures from Kosovo to Syria collapsed to nearly zero in 2016; the courts processed the returnees; parliament had criminalized foreign war participation; the Islamic Community's own imams staffed the rehabilitation program. A story that needs its threat alive, told about a place where the threat died, needs someone paid to keep producing material, and the files show who, and from where. Inside.
Now the other service, because an operation of this design is built precisely so that no one ever reads it, and it has been read twice since May of last year. Selimi's final walk from his apartment to the Dheu i Bardhë crossing was observed, in the indictment's own words, at every minute, without his knowledge. His meetings with BIA officers had been photographed under covert measures. His crossings had been logged: outbound by bus in the guise of a traveler, homeward sometimes on foot across the green border, sometimes driven, always within the day. The man he reported to had been identified for the prosecution by the Kosovo Intelligence Agency, by name and by post, at the top of the counterterrorism directorate. A year later the same patience closed around Sali: more than a year under special investigative measures, per prosecutor Kodraliu, contacts and movements mapped, the arrest timed at a border crossing with the file already built to courtroom standard. Around the two cases stands a wider docket, aggregated by Telegrafi this week: four espionage convictions for work on the BIA's behalf, among them a former OSCE employee and a former Kosovo Police lieutenant, and three further cases in process whose defendants have pleaded not guilty or remain uncharged, a status this record carries as fully as the convictions.
Count what the exposure costs the operation's owner. If the dossier's allegations hold, Sali's recruitment proposals are now Kosovo's map of exactly whom the BIA wanted next inside the community. Four telephones are under examination. The payment channels, the meeting choreography, the crossing routes, a director's initials and the existence of his colleague are in files that defense counsel and judges can read, and journalists after them. A service that loses two assets on one front inside sixteen months has taught its adversary its own tradecraft twice, in the one forum it cannot spin, a courtroom that publishes.
And with that, the file changes owners, and so does the question. For fifteen years, Belgrade instructed the world to ask what Kosovo's mosques harbor. Kosovo now holds the beginnings of an adjudicated answer to a different question, because everything the operation collected and built belongs to its courts, where a charging document already states, in black letter, that the work fed a narrative against Kosovo's statehood. So the question travels back across the border with interest: what was your service doing inside our mosques for fifteen years, what was a sponsored man doing inside the caliphate for seven, and what else was the network for? Belgrade built the question it now has to answer.
Two closing cautions, both cold. The cases we can read are, by definition, the failures; nobody audits the assets still running, and this front does not close. And the congregation in that Friday footage has been worked twice in a single decade, by the recruiters of the Islamic State and then by the service that sponsored its own man's way in, while the community's imams sat in the rehabilitation rooms. The community cooperated with its state. A neighboring state ran an operation inside its faith.
There was no problem, the handler wrote. See you tomorrow around 8:30. The meeting was kept, with more attendance than was invited, and the minutes are a public record now.
Drizan Shala writes on security, institutions, and political violence for Kosovo Dispatch and Tirana Examiner. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Sarajevo.
