The imam in the Bosnian mountain village spoke in flawless American English. Any suggestion that his area was an extremist stronghold was false, insisted Edis Bosnic.

“We are enemies of the state only because we are calling people away from vice, drugs and alcohol and urging them to come back to decent values,” he said.

The ultra-strict approach to Islam known as Wahhabism or Salafism which Mr Bosnic practises in the village of Gornja Maoca is spreading in Bosnia – and hundreds of parents blame its followers for recruiting their sons to fight in the battlefields of the Middle East for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

Some 250 Bosnians have gone to fight in Syria or Iraq since 2012 - the biggest proportion of the population of any European country except Belgium. Around 45 have been killed and around 50 have returned home.