| schema:articleBody
| - North Macedonia, a small landlocked country in southeast Europe, is under the spotlight after news emerged that a 20-year-old suspected Islamic State group sympathiser accused of killing four people in Vienna had roots in the Balkan country. While details about the suspect and his connection to North Macedonia are still unclear, here are facts about the ethnically diverse state, which like its Western European peers has battled to contain violent extremism on the fringes of its minority Muslim community. North Macedonia was formerly part of Yugoslavia and is home mainly to Slavic Orthodox Christians, who make up more than two thirds of the two million population and dominate political and economic life. But the country also hosts a large ethnic Albanian community, many of whom are Muslim and live in north and western border regions that flank Kosovo and Albania, two predominantly Albanian neighbours. Unlike its neighbours, North Macedonia avoided the ethnic bloodshed that unravelled Yugoslavia in the 1990s. But it was pushed to the brink of war when ethnic Albanian rebels launched an insurgency in 2001. Up to 200 people were killed during seven months of fighting. The violence was halted by the internationally-brokered Ohrid agreement, which provided greater rights for the Albanian minority. Relations have remained broadly peaceful ever since, though integration is limited and Albanians still face social and economic discrimination. Like many countries in Europe, North Macedonia was a source country for foreign fighters who joined the Islamic State group and other jihadist causes in the Middle East starting in 2012. A total of 150 citizens including fighters and their wives left the Balkan country for Syria, around half of whom have returned, according to police figures. While neighbours like Kosovo exported a higher number of fighters per capita, North Macedonia had the highest rate in the Western Balkans relative to the size of its Muslim population, according to a 2018 British Council report. Most hailed from Albanian neighbourhoods in the capital Skopje, other predominantly Albanian communities and from the large Albanian-origin diaspora in Western Europe. Muslim Albanians across the Balkans typically practice a moderate form of Islam, where alcohol consumption is common place and religious dress is minimal. But there has been religious revival and radicalisation in recent decades, with the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia creating a vacuum for other belief systems. In Muslim communities, a radical Salafist movement has spread among some believers, often through "parallel" mosques that organise services inside private homes, according to a 2017 report by the Atlantic Initiative, a Sarajevo-based think tank. In addition to a separate religious path, these groups have filled other social gaps left by a weak government by providing education, healthcare and other humanitarian services, the report found. Jihadist recruitment has typically taken place at a grassroots and individual level, with youth the main target. While the outflow of jihadists abroad stopped almost entirely in 2016, North Macedonia has since had to face the threat of homeland attacks among returnees and other IS sympathisers. In recent years, police have thwarted several terror plots. Most recently in September, police arrested three men in their twenties accused of stockpiling weapons for a "terrorist" cell linked to IS. In February 2019, authorities also said they had prevented "terrorist act" by IS supporters, without elaborating. ssm/adp
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)