‘Holy Warriors’ Brought Bosnians Ferocity and Zeal : Muslims who flocked to the Balkans to help the government were fighters and role models. Many of these moujahedeen now threaten stability elsewhere.

For a U.N. official, they are the “madmen of God.” For soldiers of the Bosnian army, they were brave, valiant allies--to be feared as much as respected.

To the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led Implementation Force, they remain a potential trouble source, and between 100 and 200 may still be in this country. Hundreds more have already left, and some have been implicated in criminal acts as far away as France.

In the spring of 1995, as the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina still raged, these moujahedeen--Muslim “holy warriors” from Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Arab countries such as Egypt--came to Zavidovici, a rustic town of 20,000 in central Bosnia that is home to the largest furniture and wood-processing plant in the former Yugoslav federation.

Since June 1993, the Bosnian Serbs had been blockading Zavidovici from pine-covered hills less than 1 1/2 miles away, and in two years they had blasted the factory town astride the Bosna River with an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 howitzer and mortar rounds. The situation was desperate.

Soon after the moujahedeen, bearded and toting only the lightest of infantry weapons, arrived from Vlasic Mountain near Vitez, they were dispatched to the most important and dangerous position in the Bosnian line, opposite the steeply sided mountain of Podsijelovo.

“Our commander said, ‘Can you take this hill, and when?’ They said, ‘We will take it when Allah says so,’ ” recalled Enes Saletovic, a communications technician with the Bosnian army’s 328th Mountain Brigade.

For eight months, the moujahedeen, under the command of a strong-willed Albanian named Sabahudin, waited and watched, keeping mostly to themselves. From their tents, they used loudspeakers to direct the muezzin’s wailing call to prayer toward the Bosnian Serbs--a psychological tactic intended to demoralize and terrify their enemies.

One day at 4 a.m., the moujahedeen got the signal they had been waiting for. Under cover of darkness, the men in Arab headdresses, turbans and flat Afghan caps silently set out for the mountain that had been a cornerstone of the Serbs’ position for two years.

The Muslims carried nothing but rifles, knives and grenades.

In less than 10 minutes, as Bosnian soldiers tell it, the moujahedeen overran the enemy’s trenches and killed 60 Serbs, losing 15 of their own. Three Serbian battalions were routed or knocked out of commission, according to the Bosnians.

Last September, the moujahedeen once again proved their mettle by spearheading the Bosnian government’s biggest offensive in the region, the battle for the town of Vozuca, which Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic vowed would be defended as fiercely as Russians protected Stalingrad in World War II.

The attack, in concert with two Bosnian army corps, trapped hundreds of Serbs in a pocket and reportedly left as many as 500 dead.

“The moujahedeen don’t like to capture,” said one Bosnian army soldier who served shoulder to shoulder with them. “They like to kill. Whenever they could kill with their knives, they would do so.”

Yet when last year’s peace accord demanded the departure of all foreign fighters in Bosnia, many people on whose behalf the moujahedeen had been risking their lives heaved sighs of relief.

“They are superb fighters,” Saletovic said. “But you can’t argue with them. It’s best to have nothing to do with them.”

For the greatly Europeanized Bosnians, the moujahedeen, often the product of poor rural environments and a strict Islamic upbringing, were uneasy allies at best.

In Zavidovici, the moujahedeen used bullhorns to warn men and women swimming together in the river to separate.

Residents were told that, if they wanted to be defended, they had to stop drinking rakija, the ubiquitous local brandy. The mayor agreed, and the liquor trade went underground.

Even U.N. peacekeepers were rattled by the presence of the foreign zealots.

“It’s like when you know there are Gurkhas in the trenches across from you. You’re always afraid of getting your throat cut,” an official of the former U.N. Protection Force said, referring to the Gurkha soldiers of Nepal, renowned for their prowess with their beloved kukri daggers.

For the hard-pressed Bosnian government of President Alija Izetbegovic, which until February 1994 was fighting two enemies, the Bosnian Serbs and Croats, the moujahedeen were a godsend.

They began arriving in 1992. At first, a Canadian U.N. officer said, they engaged in combat operations, and then they started training the Bosnians to fight.

But their influence went beyond military instruction.

The religious example of the moujahedeen did much to inspire the Bosnian army’s own 7th Muslim Brigade, a unit based in the grimy steel-mill city of Zenica that U.N. military officials said was placed under direct control of the Bosnian army commander, and which included both Bosnian and foreign soldiers.

Rediscovering their religious heritage after nearly half a century of official Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and mimicking the appearance of Afghan and Palestine Liberation Organization warriors, the men of the 7th wrapped headbands with Koranic sayings around their foreheads and chanted ‘Allahu akbar!’--’God is great!’--while clumping along in combat boots during their morning runs outside Zenica.

Bosnian generals so esteemed the foreign volunteers that they were used as shock detachments.

“The moujahedeen troops are held in reserve and never given defensive tasks. Their presence indicates imminent conflict,” French army Maj. Herve Gourmelon said last year in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. “If a moujahedeen unit is there, we know by experience that we shall have problems.”

Although their number never exceeded 800, according to an internal U.N. report, the radical Islamic warriors posed a major worry for the Western nations that sent troops to Bosnia to enforce the U.S.-brokered peace accord.

In November, a month before the NATO-led deployment began, an American working for the United Nations’ Sector Northeast office at Tuzla was killed.

William Jefferson, 44, of Camden, N.J., was robbed of his car and wallet and shot three times in the head, and his body was dumped in the forest near Banovici, U.N. officials said.

The belief is widespread that the American, who was married and had a son, was slain by the moujahedeen in a case of mistaken identity.

In October, the Muslim fighters had sworn vengeance after a British soldier shot and killed one of their members in the town of Gornji Vakuf, British army officials said.

“These are the madmen of God. Their major cause is to fight a war against the Christians who are killing Muslims,” said Cheikh Tidiane Sy, a Muslim Senegalese who served as senior political and civil affairs officer with the U.N. office in Tuzla.

Their core, Sy said, was made up of “the foreign legion of Afghanistan,” but there were some French and British Muslims, and even a Brazilian.

When the 20,000-strong U.S. contribution to the Implementation Force began deploying, the Americans were adamant that the Sarajevo government adhere to a commitment it made during peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, and force the moujahedeen out of the country.

Hundreds left, and although as many as 200 may have stayed, NATO officials say they believe that the threat posed by the foreign fighters has diminished.

NATO officials believe that some moujahedeen have blended in by going to work as drivers or employees of the Muslim humanitarian organizations that also served as recruitment or financing agencies for the fighters.

Some of the foreigners have been granted passports by the Bosnian government, and some--the Bosnian government says only 50--have stayed on by marrying Bosnian women.

“We keep our eyes open all the time,” said British army Lt. Gen. Michael Walker, commander of all NATO ground forces in Bosnia. “We do get quite a lot of reports, and normally there’s no smoke without fire.”

And what of the combatants who heeded the warnings and left the country?

In the opinion of Maj. Gen. Hassan Alfi, Egypt’s interior minister, the Bosnian veterans now represent the same menace to law and order as the foreigners who fought and trained in Afghanistan.

Already, France--home to 3 million Muslims, the largest Muslim population in Western Europe--is feeling the Bosnian war’s side effects.

Some returnees from Bosnia have joined preachers from North Africa seeking to Islamize youths of Arab origin who live in the rundown suburbs of Paris and other French cities, French officials say.

On March 29, a booby-trapped van in Lille led police to an apartment in the nearby city of Roubaix, where a furious shootout ensued, with the suspects using submachine guns and grenades against besieging law enforcement officers. The building caught fire and burned down, and the bodies of four people--three of Arab origin and one Frenchman--were found in the debris along with six AK-47 assault rifles.

The link to Bosnia soon surfaced. A chase near the Belgian border led to a second shootout in which the occupant of the Roubaix apartment, Christophe Caze, 27, a former medical student who had converted to Islam and served in a Muslim battalion’s medical unit here, was slain.

Caze’s gang is now blamed by French police for at least six holdups along the French-Belgian border and a botched attack with a rocket-propelled grenade on a Brinks armored car.

The source of the members’ weapons appears to have been Bosnia, because they used firearms and ammunition made in Eastern Europe and readily available in the former Yugoslav federation.

French investigators also believe that Caze was able to rally his accomplices because of his battlefield experience and his religious fervor.

“It was enough here that one person served in Bosnia. This sort of thing will repeat itself,” a high-ranking French police official said.

Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Sarajevo contributed to this report.