The ghosts of Srebrenica are never far away.
They continue to hover over and touch Bosnia and Herzegovina more than 30 years after the madness of July 1995, the summer when Bosnian Serb paramilitaries turned the streets and meadows and forests of Srebrenica into killing fields.
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“The soil here,” a survivor once told the BBC, “is soaked in blood.”
The same blood that pumped through Bosnian midfielder Esmir Bajraktarević as he stood behind the penalty spot March 31 at Zenica’s Stadion Bilino Polje, the ghosts of Srebrenica filling up the night as much as the flares that lit up the sky in a smoky orange glow.
Bosnia and Italy’s playoff match for a final spot in the World Cup had come down to this moment at the end of a sudden-death penalty kick shootout. If Bajraktarević, the 21-year-old from Appleton, Wisconsin, could slip his penalty kick past Italy’s Gianluigi Donnarumma, one of the best goalkeepers in the world, Bosnia and Herzegovina would return to the World Cup for the first time since 2014.
“Here it is. I can win it,” he told himself, knowing full well that for Bosnia there was so much more than a World Cup spot on the line.
Bajraktarevic is the son of Bosnian Muslim parents, refugees who fled the Srebrenica massacre in which more than 8,300 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were slaughtered in July 1995, Europe’s first legally recognized genocide since World War II. Among the massacre’s victims were the grandfather, uncles and ghosts of Srebrenica that Bajraktarevic would never know.
“Srebrenica is a part of me,” Bajraktarevic said. “I carry it in my blood.”
Soccer has been called the “Simple Game.” Yet for all of the game’s simplistic beauty, the World Cup is also a reflection of the place and time in which it is held and the decades and centuries its participants have traveled through; apartheid and colonialism, the Falklands, the Middle East, the Balkans often looming over the tournament even from continents away.
So the ghosts of Srebrenica have followed Bajraktarevic and Bosnia and Herzegovina to this World Cup and their Group B match with Switzerland at noon Thursday in Inglewood.
Author Amela Koluder, herself a former Bosnian refugee, has written: “A refugee is someone who survived and who can create the future.”
In Bosnian, Bajraktarevic translates to flag bearer. In driving his penalty kick past Donnarumma that night in Zenica, Bajraktarevic not only sent Bosnia and Herzegovina into the World Cup, he showed the country a way forward, leading it on a path to a future full of promise and hope.
“The objective of the genocide against Bosniaks in eastern Bosnia was not simply to kill people in the present; it was to destroy a community’s future,” Emir Suljagic, director of the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial and the country’s former deputy defense minister, told the Southern California News Group. “The men and boys of Srebrenica were murdered, families were shattered, entire populations were expelled from their homes. Esmir’s story reminds us that genocide is ultimately an assault on continuity – on children, grandchildren and generations yet unborn.
“That is why this moment resonated so deeply. Esmir is not remarkable because he is a victim’s descendant. He is remarkable because, despite everything that was done to his family and his people, he grew up, pursued his dreams and succeeded at the highest level. The laughter, joy and achievements of young Bosnians today are proof that the project of extermination failed. Life prevailed where others intended death.”
‘It’s in my blood’
The World Cup also holds healing powers, providing nations a platform to redefine themselves before a watching world. And so Koluder is right – Bajraktarevic and Bosnia’s journey is really a survivor’s tale told by the child of refugees, a child determined that the final chapter of his family’s story, his nation’s story, would not be written by a monster.
“If Esmir’s story says anything,” Suljagic said, “it is that the future belongs to those who survived and rebuilt, not to those who tried to destroy them.”
Bajraktarevic’s parents, Elmer and Emina, were born in Srebrenica, a small mining town – whose name literally means silver mining – in the mountains of eastern Bosnia near the Serbian border.
“My parents lost a good part of their family,” Bajraktarevic recently told reporters. “It’s a tragedy and something I will never forget. Srebrenica is something I will never forget. It’s a part of me and who I am. It’s in my blood.”
The Bosnian War started April 6, 1992, after the international recognition of the independent Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina following the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Eighteen days later, General Ratko Mladić was promoted to lead the Bosnian Serb Army (VRS), the military for the Republika Srpska, a self-proclaimed secessionist republic within the newly independent Bosnia and Herzegovina.
On May 2, forces under the command of Mladić blockaded Sarajevo, beginning the four-year Siege of Sarajevo, the longest siege of a city in modern warfare history. Mladić shut off the city’s water and electricity and all roads leading in and out of Sarajevo. The city was constantly shelled by the VRS and snipers routinely gunned down civilians waiting in bread or water lines.
Another key part of Mladić’s strategy was ethnic cleansing. Srebrenica is within the Republika Srpska. At the time, nearly three-quarters of its population was made up of Bosnian Muslims, with the remaining 25% Bosnian Serbs. Mladić and secessionist officials believed if the VRS could capture Srebrenica and eliminate its Muslim population, it would undercut the viability of a Bosnian Muslim state.
The Bosniak villages around Srebrenica were also an early target of Mladić. Nearly 300 villages near Srebrenica in the first three months of the war alone were destroyed by the VRS.
“We’d be poorer without the Muslims,” Mladić told CNN’s Christine Amanpour. “It’s good to have them around but in smaller concentration.”
In July 1995, VRS troops laid siege to Srebrenica, which had been declared a safe haven by the United Nations. Dutch troops, part of the international peacekeeping force, were no match for Mladić’s men.
“Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid,” Mladić told the crowd while his troops handed out candy to the children.
But on July 11, the VRS and a Serb paramilitary unit fittingly named The Scorpions began 11 days of systematically killing Bosniak Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica and surrounding villages, burying them in mass graves in meadows, fields and forests. By the end of the massacre, 8,372 had been slain. Another 25,000 to 30,000 Bosniaks, primarily women and children, were raped, beaten and tortured and forcibly moved out of Srebrenica.
Suljagic, a Bosnian Muslim from Srebrenica, also encountered Mladić in Srebrenica during the siege. At the time Suljagic, then 20, was working as an interpreter for the UN, a job that saved his life. Mladić looked at Suljagic’s identity card, asked him what he was doing and told him he could go, Suljagic wrote in his 2005 memoir “Postcards from the Grave.”
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“I survived because Mladić felt like God that day,” Suljagic wrote. “He had absolute power to decide over life and death. I used to dream about him for months, reliving the encounter. … I feared I would go mad trying to explain to myself why he spared me, who was just as insignificant to him as my friends must have been whose execution he ordered. I never found an answer.”
Resilience meets opportunity
Mladić was found guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2017 and sentenced to life in prison.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan would later characterize the Srbrenica massacre as “a terrible crime – the worst on European soil since the Second World War.”
Among the dead was Bajraktarević’s grandfather, Elmer’s dad, as well as two of Elmer’s brothers.
Two of Emina’s brothers were also killed trying to flee Srebrenica. Elmer and Emina were able to escape from Srebrenica, spending two years on the run before finally finding safety in Switzerland.
They relocated to the U.S. in 2001 as part of a refugee program, eventually settling in Appleton, which has a Bosnian community made up of largely refugee families like the Bajraktarevićs who fled the Yugoslav wars.
“Esmir’s story is ultimately an American story as much as a Bosnian one,” Suljagic said. “A family survives genocide, finds refuge in the United States, raises a child in freedom, and that child grows into an athlete capable of inspiring millions. That is a testament to the resilience of survivors, but also to the opportunities that refuge and safety can provide. There is something profoundly hopeful about that.”
In Appleton, the Bajraktarevićs kept up many of the family traditions from Bosnia: food, language and soccer. One of the family’s first home videos is of a young Esmir dribbling across their front lawn while wearing a replica Bosnia jersey of his hero, Edin Dzeko.
Before long, Bajraktarević was dribbling through and around opponents all over the Midwest, earning him the nickname “The Milwaukee Messi,” in homage to Argentine superstar Lionel Messi.
Bajraktarević was just 17 when he signed with the New England Revolution in Major League Soccer. He also caught the eye of coaches in the U.S. national team pipeline. He made his debut with the U.S. Under-19 squad in 2022 and then played six times for the U.S. U-23s in 2023-24.
In January 2025, the Revolution sold Bajraktarević to Dutch powerhouse PSV Eindhoven. That same month, he made his debut for the U.S. national team in a match with Slovenia.
But by the following July, Bajraktarević had a change of heart, or rather, he realized where his heart had been all along. He petitioned FIFA to switch his sports citizenship to Bosnia. On Sept. 7, he made his Bosnia debut in a UEFA Nations League match against Netherlands.
“The decision for me was very easy,” he told reporters at the time. “It was something I knew I wanted to do since I was little. It was just a process that took a while. I’m very happy I made it.”
“Esmir’s choice demonstrates something important about the Bosnian diaspora,” Suljagic said. “Integration and belonging in a new country do not erase attachment to the old one. He is a product of both worlds. The fact that he chose Bosnia is a reminder that identity can be additive rather than exclusive. It speaks to the enduring connection many diaspora families maintain with the country their parents were forced to leave.”
The greatest revenge
Bajraktarević’s first goal for Bosnia came in a November World Cup qualifying match against Romania. He received the ball on the right side of the 18-yard box, dribbled to his left to the top of the box and then blasted a shot over the Romanian defense that curled into the top corner of the net.
“This is something I dreamed about since I was little,” he said.
So there he was four months later, having led PSV Eindhoven to one Dutch league title and well on its way to another, standing behind the penalty spot in Zenica in another moment he, and a nation, had spent a lifetime dreaming of.
Standing a few meters behind with the rest of the Bosnia starters was Dzeko, the former Manchester City star, Bajraktarević’s childhood hero and now his teammate. Dzeko closed his eyes. So did Bosnia coach Sergei Barbarez.
“Then I heard this explosion of joy,” Dzeko wrote.
The goal was both a defining moment for Bajraktarević and Bosnia in the truest sense and an act of defiance by a child of Srebrenica. Mladić would never have the last word.
“For a small country that is so often associated internationally with war, genocide and political crisis, it was a rare moment of collective joy,” Suljagic said. “Sport cannot solve our problems, but it can briefly remind us of who we are beyond them. For ninety minutes, Bosnians at home and across the diaspora experienced something that transcended politics, ethnicity and geography.
“The penalty kick itself was a moment of extraordinary composure from a young player carrying immense pressure. For many Bosnians, it symbolized confidence, self-belief and a sense that a new generation is beginning to define the country’s story on its own terms.”
As Bosnia celebrated into the fiery glow of the flare-lit night and into the next morning, Suljagic posted a photo on social media of Bajraktarević moments after his World Cup-clinching penalty kick, his hand over his heart while his teammates celebrated around him.
“There was a plan so that this boy could never be born,” Suljagic wrote on the post, “so that my children would never be born, so that none of our children would ever be born. Their laughter is our greatest revenge.”
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