“So you were not scared to come here?” he asks, as in a crouch he drives another nail into a roughly-hewned wood pole to be a crossbeam for a new vegetables storage shed he is building.

The village of Osve is deep in the woods of north Bosnia, a two-hour drive from Sarajevo, the last leg along a rutted narrow dirt track surrounded by forest much of which is still heavily mined from the Balkans war more than 20 years ago.

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A sign erected by the European Union on the main road to the village warns there are hundreds of unexploded and buried weapons in the area, some of the almost 1 million antitank and antipersonnel mines about roads, fields, tracks and rail lines left over from the bitter conflict.

There are several heavily-bearded men working in proximity to the hammerer who look on from their equally taxing work ploughing drainage trenches and rebuilding the ruins of an abandoned Serbian village, all but bombed to oblivion.

“No guns here, you see, we are supposedly terrorists with hammers and hoes,” Hadzic says smiling broadly and raising a hammer as he invites his “guests” to join him in rebuilding the whole village he bought from Serbians for just 5000 euros ($7500) who no longer wanted to return to their ravaged ridge line homes.

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“If you really thought I was a terrorist you wouldn’t come here,” he said as he hastily made strong herbal tea on a makeshift tabletop. “But you were free to come you were not scared so if you thought I was an ISIS guy and you know what they are doing, you would not come.”

A ROAD THAT LEADS TO ISIS?

News Corp Australia’s visit is not the first by an Australian, an imam from Melbourne having also recently visited to check on property he bought there two or three years earlier.

This has now added to suspicions of his political extremism in the eyes of authorities.

Australian Islamic preacher Harun Mehicevic, who in Melbourne runs a controversial Islamic prayer group Al-Furqan, bought property in the village through his parents around 2013/14 before visiting the site himself last year.

His centre has been directly linked to five young men arrested and or charged in relation to last year’s alleged plot to attack and behead police at an Anzac Day commemoration as well as others linked directly to Islamic State - including slain recruiter Neil Prakash.

There is no house on the land he bought, just a hilltop rolling green with an old plum orchard and a stream that he intimated he wanted to grow fruit and vegetables on.

It is not clear why he would choose this obscure place to make such an “investment”.

A SALAFIST ENCLAVE IN EUROPE

Osve hit he headlines last year amid claims it had become a jihadi training camp, with residents practising their shooting and marksmanship before making their way to join Islamic State forces in Syria and Iraq via lax Turkish borders.

Certainly at least six Islamic State jihadists, possibly more, prior to moving to Syria had lived or passed through the remote village whose land was being bought up by ultra conservative Salafi Sunni Muslims.

Today there are 14 family groups living in the village.

Former rock band guitarist turned Salafist community leader Izet Hadzic claimed while he and others remain suspected of supporting Islamic State they were actively working with authorities, notably the Bosnian, Russian, Croatian and Italian intelligence services, to expose the network of extremist supporters in eastern Europe. So far Bosnia has provided one of the highest per capita of ISIS recruits in Europe with 330 fighters. The number has tripled since June 2014.

Hadzic denies being a terrorist but readily admits to being a salafist, followers of the ultra conservative ​or ​fundamentalist​ form of Islam​​ faith.

DEFENDER OF THE FAITH

A former frontman for a ZZ Top and Queen covers rock group, Hadzic readily admitted there had been several people from his community who had travelled to Syria to join Islamic State.

These include Amir Dzinic, who left with his wife and nine children - two of whom had also became Islamic State fighters. Emir Alisic also took his large family of six while Emrah Fojnica who became a suicide bomber in Iraq. Dzinic bought land in Osve before he and Alisic left for Syria in 2013.

But Hadzic said those that remained wanted peace, did not support those ideals and prayed to God they never come back.

He said he remembered Mehicevic visiting the village and was not really sure why he would want to buy land there except his son-in-law had seen a story of land buy-up and thought it a good idea.

He said ironically the son-in-law had since split from Mehicevic’s daughter and travelled to Syria to join Islamic State.

“We met for half an hour and he asked for land to buy so I sold it to him,” he said. “I never checked information I just ask for identity. That was it. He gave approval to his parents to make the purchase and so later on his parents came here and bought the land. That was a few years ago. I never saw him again, he never came here again.”

“I think Harun has same problem as me here because he didn’t want to join ISIS here. He probably rejected ISIS ideology the same so they made some kind of problems for him in his country because he rejected ISIS propagators too.”

IT’S ALL IN THE BEARDS

Hadzic readily admits jihadists had been attracted to his village but said none were prepared to do hard work so left to fight. He said ironically it was known he was working with intelligence authorities to expose jihadists and so was now receiving death threats from ISIS and its supporters.

While rejecting Islamic State, he questioned who were the real terrorists in the world.

“In Syria all of them are guilty, there is ISIS, Russia, Turkey, United States all of them killing someone but they have convinced the world terrorists are guilty for everything. Guilt cannot be on the one side ever,” he said.

He added just because he and his community were viewed by some as a “terror community” simply because they were Salafist, with all men having flowing beards.

“Santa Claus and ZZ Top have long beards but no-one is calling them terrorists,” he said.