How a Fake Serbian “Top Secret” Document Became Anti-Muslim Propaganda in Kosova

On August 25, Kosova’s Special Prosecution filed an indictment against Fatmir Sheholli, accusing him of espionage on behalf of Serbia’s Security Intelligence Agency, BIA, as well as blackmail. Among the evidence described in the indictment was a photograph found on Sheholli’s phone: a supposedly “top secret” document obtained from Serbian intelligence.

This so called “Top Secret” document describes an alleged Serbian strategy to make Kosova increasingly Islamic by financing mosques in prominent locations, expanding religious schools and encouraging greater religious influence in public life. According to the document, the goal is to make Kosova appear radicalized and culturally alien to the West, eventually turning Euro-Atlantic opinion against the country. It predicts that, after 20 years, parts of Kosova would resemble “Kandahar,” Western governments would reconsider their support, Serbia would re-occupy Kosova and Albanians would then be encouraged to migrate to Turkey.

News of the document spread like wildfire across Kosova’s media and social-media landscape. Klan Kosova highlighted the alleged plan to use funds from Islamic embassies to build mosques throughout Kosova, while KOHA framed it as revealing “Serbia’s aim” to turn Kosova into “Kandahar.” Insajderi described it as a Serbian intelligence strategy, while Top Channel said the plan had been “exposed.” Screenshots and excerpts then spread rapidly across social media, giving the document an appearance of a newly uncovered Serbian intelligence operation.

The problem is that this is not new. The supposedly “Top Secret” document had been circulating publicly since at least August 2018, eight years before the Sheholli indictment brought it back into the headlines. The fact that major outlets, commentators, and influential social-media users presented it as a fresh revelation without checking its easily traceable history reflects a basic failure of verification.

Before the Sheholli case, the last time the document generated significant attention was in June 2024, when former Deputy Minister of Communities and Return Milazim Gashi appeared on Debat Plus and claimed that Serbia was paying imams, financing women to wear head coverings and funding the construction of mosques in Kosova. Grand Mufti Naim Tërnava rejected the accusations and challenged Gashi to provide evidence, even declaring that he would personally demolish any mosque proven to have been financed by Serbia. Two weeks later, Gashi returned to the program with what he presented as proof: the same low-quality, one-page “Top Secret” document that would later be found on Sheholli’s phone. Written in colloquial Serbian Latin script with numerous spelling errors, the page also prominently displays the English words “Top Secret” and “CONFIDENTIAL.”

Gashi wasn’t the first influential Albanian to circulate it. In 2022, former MP Gani Geci shared the same document with his roughly 64,000 Facebook followers, while versions of it had already appeared on social media and Albanian-language news portals.

But where did this document actually come from? The earliest publicly dated source I have been able to locate is an August 2, 2018 Facebook post by Selatin Retkoceri, a Kosova Albanian politician and former Vetëvendosje mayoral candidate in Lipjan. Retkoceri posted the same document, translated its contents for his followers and claimed that it had already been circulating among Kosova Albanians for several months. While there is no evidence that Retkoceri created the document – he explicitly denied being its author – his post is, so far, the earliest traceable public appearance of the exact ‘Top Secret’ document I have been able to locate.

In 2018, three months after Retkoceri had already posted the document publicly, Bota Sot presented it as a Serbian “top secret” file obtained from an unnamed former senior Kosova official. Whether that source was Retkoceri is unclear, but the framing made a document already circulating online appear far more secretive than it actually was.

On August 27, journalist Milaim Zeka added another twist to the document’s strange history. In a Facebook post, Zeka claimed that the document was actually written in 2018 by Qamil Zekolli, an Albanian activist living in Belgium. I was unable to independently verify Zeka’s claim: I could not locate an original 2018 post by Zekolli containing the document, or any other record establishing that he was its author.

I nonetheless looked into Zekolli and found something striking. In 2012, six years before “Top Secret” document surfaced, Zekolli published a lengthy article on Pashtriku advancing almost the same conspiracy. He alleged that Belgrade paid Albanian-speaking imams, that Serbian authorities encouraged the “Islamization” of Albanians, and even that Russians and other Slavs had been trained and sent into Albanian communities as imams. He also claimed, without offering evidence, that Qur’ans used in Albanian territories had been deliberately altered to disorient Albanians culturally and nationally. All this does not prove Zekolli wrote the secret document but it does show that years before the it surfaced, he was already publicly promoting many of its central ideas.

There is still no evidence that the document originated with Serbian intelligence, and its exact authorship remains unclear. What the available trail does show, however, is that the ideas contained in it were already circulating among Albanian figures years before the document was presented as a Serbian intelligence leak. That raises a more important question: what purpose does this narrative serve? The answer becomes clearer when the document is viewed not as an isolated fake, but as part of a broader conspiracy that repeatedly links Albanian Muslim religiosity to Serbia’s interests.

What makes this conspiracy particularly nefarious is also what makes it effective: it instrumentalizes Serbia, knowing the enormous weight that Serbia carries in Albanian historical memory. Rather than arguing openly that Albanians should become less Muslim, the narrative suggests that becoming more Muslim is itself what Serbia wants. Mosques, imams and visible Islamic practice can therefore be opposed in the language of patriotism and resistance to Serbia.

Yet there is currently no evidence that the “Top Secret” document originated with Serbian intelligence. The public trail instead leads through Albanian politicians, commentators and media figures, several of whom have expressed openly hostile views toward Muslim religious visibility. Whether coordinated or not, the effect is the same: Serbia becomes a convenient instrument through which an existing Albanian Islamophobia can be legitimized.

This narrative appears in other forms as well. In 2023, historian Frashër Demaj claimed that Russian imams had once been sent into Kosova’s mosques to convince Muslim Albanians not to educate their children, describing this as part of a “Serbian strategy.” When asked for evidence, Demaj called it “a fact” based on “oral history.” Grand Imam Enes Goga later challenged him to identify even one Russian imam, with a name, date and mosque, who had actually served in Kosova. Russia and Serbia have long been closely allied and occupy interconnected places in Albanian political anxieties; here again, an external Slavic enemy is placed behind Albanian Muslim religious life.

The same conspiracy has also been projected backward onto Vaso Čubrilović, the Serbian nationalist intellectual and politician best known among Albanians for his 1937 memorandum The Expulsion of the Albanians, which advocated their mass removal from Kosova. For years, a quotation of unknown origin has circulated in Albanian circles claiming that Čubrilović believed “the backbone of Albanian nationalism” could be broken through Islamization. Historian Jusuf Buxhovi, for example, claims that Čubrilović wrote, “We can destroy Albanian nationalism if we inject Islam into it,” while genocide researcher Nusret Pllana has repeated a virtually identical version. But the quotation appears nowhere in the memorandum.

Čubrilović actually argued the opposite: Albanians could not be effectively assimilated and therefore had to be expelled through the “brute force of an organized state.” He proposed making their lives unbearable through administrative pressure, police harassment and direct attacks on Muslim Albanian communal life, including mistreating Imams and destroying Muslim cemeteries.

The significance of this distortion is difficult to ignore. Čubrilović and his memorandum are deeply familiar reference points in Albanian discussions of Serbo-Yugoslav oppression, which makes attaching an invented quotation to him especially powerful. By reversing his actual position, influential figures can transform a Serbian nationalist who wanted Muslim Albanians removed and their religious life attacked into supposed proof that Serbia wants Albanians to become more Muslim. Whether these individuals are consciously coordinating or simply repeating one another, they reinforce the same broader Islamophobic narrative as the “Top Secret” document: that visible Albanian Muslim religiosity is precisely the fulfillment of Serbia’s plan to re-occupy Kosova.

Retkoceri’s own Facebook history may help explain why he was so willing to promote a document like this. His other posts reveal a consistent pattern of anti-Muslim rhetoric and suspicion toward visible Islamic practice in Kosova. In one lengthy post, he described mosque construction as contributing to the “indoctrination,” “brainwashing” and radicalization of young people, called amplified calls to prayer from minarets “terrifying,” demanded that the public broadcast of the adhan be stopped, and warned that Kosova risked becoming “Kosovistan” if religion continued to be placed above the nation. In another post, he shared rhetoric describing common Muslim expressions such as Allah, selam, hallall and elhamdulilah as “Turkish-Arab barbarisms” and evidence that Albanians were sliding toward “archaism and the Middle Ages.” The Islamophobia is clear.

The historical record makes this conspiracy not only ironic, but almost absurd. Serbian and Yugoslav rule did not generally treat Muslim Albanian religious life as something to cultivate, but repeatedly as something to suppress or erase. After Serbia occupied Kosova during the Balkan Wars, an Austro-Hungarian vice-consul reported in 1914 that only two of Prizren’s 32 mosques were still permitted to function for worship; the other 30 had been turned into stables, haylofts, barracks and warehouses, while muezzins were intimidated from making the call to prayer.

Albanian scholarship on the interwar period cites an estimate of 320 mosques destroyed and 85 mektebs and their libraries desecrated across Albanian-inhabited lands between 1912 and 1941.

The 1998-99 war was therefore not the first attack on Kosova’s Islamic heritage, but the most devastating recent example. Postwar research found that 218 of Kosova’s 560 mosques were destroyed or seriously damaged by Serbian forces and paramilitaries. It is documented that anti-Islamic graffiti and Qur’ans had been deliberately torn apart, desecrated and burned, while Serbian police torched the Central Historical Archives of the Islamic Community of Kosova in Prishtina shortly before their withdrawal. The International Crisis Group additionally recorded the destruction of the homes of 302 imams and the killing of 30 of them.

Against this record, the claim that Serbia’s strategy is to make Albanians more Muslim becomes especially difficult to sustain. The historical pattern points in the opposite direction: Muslim Albanian religious life was repeatedly treated as an obstacle to Serbian hegemony and something to be weakened, controlled, or destroyed.

Omer Spahić, a Bosnian scholar, highlights in his groundbreaking book Serbian Islamophobia that Serbian nationalism is inherently antiMuslim – or, as Spahić himself states, “To be a Serbian nationalist means to be a Serbian Islamophobe.” He further argues that Serbia stands as one of the epicenters of global Islamophobia, influencing and even inspiring the Islamophobic paradigms of France, the United States, and England. With this in mind, it is almost bizarre to suggest that greater Muslim religiosity among Albanians somehow serves Serbian interests. If Spahić is right that anti-Muslim hostility is deeply ingrained in Serbian nationalism, then Albanian figures who portray mosques, imams and Muslims in general as suspicious because “Serbia wants it” are not really resisting that worldview. They are reproducing it in Albanian form. Serbia becomes the excuse, but the target remains the same: Muslim Albanians. The difference is that, in this case, the rhetoric is not coming from Serbian nationalists, but from Islamophobic Albanians themselves.

(c) 2026 Shan Karemani. All rights belong to the author. This is the English version of the piece RREJ, SE DIÇKA DO TË MBETET published in this magazine earlier today. Title has been chosen by the editor. Cover image is AI-generated.