Radical Wahabi fundamentalists have been leafleting mosques throughout Bosnia Herzegovina urging Muslims not to join the country’s police and army.
“Those are forces devoted to a fake god who we should fight against with all of our powers,” read the leaflets, which Wahabis have been putting in mosque collection boxes.
Members of Bosnia’s Muslim community dismissed the leaflets as a “desperate and insane appeal”.
The leaflets also contained several passages from the Koran which had been “misinterpreted” and “used out of context”, they said.
Similar leaflets were found in mosque contribution boxes just before the bombing of a police station in the central Bosnian town of Bugojno on 27 June that killed one policeman and injured six others.
Wahabi leaflets first appeared in Bosnia when the government decided to contribute to NATO forces in Afganistan and Iraq. The leaflets accused the government of “betraying our Islamic brothers” in these countries.
Bosnia’s imams are said to be deeply concerned by the bombing in Bugojno and the reappearance of wahabi pamphlets. Bosnian mosques are not well protected and it is impossible to monitor people entering them, according to the imams.
The Wahabi movement first appeared in the Balkans during the 1990s wars, when ‘mujahadeen’ from Islamic countries came to Bosnia to fight on the side of local Muslims.
Wahabi cells have been radicalising supporters, running training camps and plotting violence in recent years, according to a number of terrorism experts
Bosnia state security agency OSA director Almir Dzuvo said in July there were some 3,000 well equipped radical Islamist militants in Bosnia, who posed a serious terrorism threat to the country.