Bulgaria: Vigilantes prowl Europe's border with a target: Muslim migrants

[TomSea]

Vigilantes prowl Europe's border with a target: Muslim migrants

Vladimir Rusev, left, surveys members of his volunteer force at a training session near the Turkish border in February. (Shashank Bengali / Los Angeles Times)
By Shashank Bengali Contact Reporter

They gathered in a snowy forest dressed in their menacing best: combat fatigues and military-style boots, their faces obscured by ski masks.

One group jogged off into a thicket of beech trees while another watched an instructor demonstrate, with a 6-inch hunting knife, the proper technique for stabbing an assailant in the chest and throat.

The training session in the rolling woods near the Turkish border was not a military exercise, and the participants were not soldiers or police. They were members of a far-right vigilante group with a simple goal: stopping Muslim migrants from entering Europe.

The desperate flight north by Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis and others has sparked a backlash here along the European Union’s southeastern border, where the Bulgarian vigilantes see themselves as a front-line force against the threat of Islamist radicals infiltrating the West.

Continued: http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-europe-vigilantes-20170313-story.html

[mountaineer]

The desperate flight north by Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis and others has sparked a backlash here along the European Union’s southeastern border, where the Bulgarian vigilantes see themselves as a front-line force against the threat of Islamist radicals infiltrating the West.

There is scant evidence that extremists are posing as refugees or migrants to penetrate this border, which is guarded by a partial fence, Bulgarian police and a small European contingent. But that has not dampened the zeal of the volunteer brigade ...

Because, as we all know, wanting to protect your family from criminals is xenophobic, ultra right-wing and - worst of all!! - nationalistic!

the vigilantes have tapped into a deep vein of xenophobia across the continent. Their English website calls on Europe-born citizens to “help close and defend the southern border … from the hordes of radical fake Islam adherents, terrorists and [Islamic State] fighters pouring in and headed for Europe.” ...   In a Europe on edge over the link between migration and terrorism, a nationalist fervor is spreading. The November 2015 Paris attacks were carried out by militants who traveled through Greece posing as refugees, while the man suspected of driving a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin last December was a rejected asylum seeker from Tunisia.

So it would appear, sadly, this writer had to acknowledge that terrorists actually do pose as refugees.