Charitable and non-profit support involves legitimate organizations providing funds or aid that extremist groups misuse. These groups may exploit donations, grants or events under the cover of humanitarian work to gain resources and legitimacy.
During the peak of the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, in Serbia, an Islamic youth association called Furkan was established in 2009 in Novi Pazar, a city in south-western Serbia with a Muslim-majority population, to promote tolerance and ensure equal rights among citizens. By 2013, however, Furkan had become a centre for organizing and supporting the departure of individuals from Serbia and elsewhere in the Western Balkans to join combat units of the Islamic State in Syria.8 The association was also used to collect funds for terrorist activities from supporters in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Austria, Germany and Luxembourg. The court judgment found that funds were used to purchase to a van to transport volunteers to Syria and to buy a bus ticket from Istanbul to Kilis, on Türkiye’s southern border.9 From there, fighters were illegally transported to Azaz in north-eastern Syria, where they attended a camp for basic military training.10
8Higher Court in Belgrade, Serbia, Judgment no. 222 K88/2014, 4 April 2018; Senka Vlatkovic Odavic, Serbia’s attempt at
deradicalization, Insajder, 22 March 2017, https://www.insajder.net/english/focus/serbias-attempt-at-de-radicalization; Marija Ristic, Sasa
Dragojlo and Zoran Maksimovic, Jihadists ‘Target Young, Marginalised Serbian Muslims’, Balkan Insight, 28 March 2016,
https://balkaninsight.com/2016/03/28/jihadists-target-young-marginalisedserbian-muslims-03-27-2016/; Moma Ilić, Ovo je glavni štab
džihadista u Sandžaku, Blic, 9 October 2014, https://www.blic.rs/vesti/hronika/ekskluzivno-ovo-je-glavni-stab-dzihadista-usandzaku/
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9Higher Court in Belgrade, Serbia, Judgment no. 222 K88/2014, 4 April 2018.
10Higher Court in Belgrade, Serbia, Judgment no. 222 K88/2014, 4 April 2018; Nikola Kovačević, Comparative analysis of the verdicts against Serbian citizens who fought on the Syrian and Ukrainian battlefields, in The rise of the right: The case of Serbia, Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, pp 129-167, 2022, https://www.helsinki.org.rs/doc/The%20Rise%20of%20The%20Right.pdf;
Nikola Paunović, New EU criminal law approach to terrorist offences, in EU and comparative law issues and challenges series – Issue 2,
2018, pp 530-552, https://hrcak.srce.hr/ojs/index.php/eclic/article/view/7125/4616.