Bosnia and Herzegovina’s World Cup roster reads, in part, like a registry of the towns its players’ families fled three decades ago — and one of those towns is Srebrenica.
Esmir Bajraktarević, a young forward being called the “Milwaukee Messi,” was born in Wisconsin to parents who came from Srebrenica, the eastern Bosnian city whose name became synonymous with the 1995 genocide carried out against Bosniak Muslims during the war.
He isn’t alone in carrying that history onto the pitch. Left back Sead Kolašinac was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1993 — his family having left Bosnia as the country descended into conflict. Right back Amar Dedić was born in Austria after his parents fled northern Bosnia. Midfielder Benjamin Tahirović was born in Sweden to refugees who escaped besieged Sarajevo.
The Bosnian war, which lasted nearly four years in the 1990s, displaced roughly a third of the country’s pre-war population permanently. That exodus scattered families across Europe and beyond — including to Milwaukee.
Team captain Edin Džeko, a 40-year-old striker, grew up in Sarajevo during the siege and has spoken about playing soccer in the breaks between sniper fire. He said he couldn’t have imagined a professional career after watching the football pitches in his neighborhood become what he described as “fields of scorched earth.”
Džeko left Sarajevo not long after the war ended. His path — and the paths of Kolašinac, Dedić, Tahirović, and Bajraktarević — together outline the geography of a war that the squad now carries into competition.
Bosnia’s starting lineup against the United States wasn’t just a tactical selection. It’s also, almost incidentally, a map of where a country’s people ended up when the shelling stopped — Germany, Austria, Sweden, Wisconsin.
Whether Bajraktarević, still young and unproven at this level, can shoulder that weight on the field remains to be seen in the matches ahead.
