SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — When Fadhil Hamdani first came to Bosnia from Iraq in 1979 he had no idea he would stay so long. But after prolonged studies, marriage to a Bosnian woman, the birth of five children and citizenship, the years turned into decades.

Now he says he feels more Bosnian than Iraqi.

But the Bosnian government does not agree. It views him as a threat to national security and is putting Mr. Hamdani and other foreign fighters who have lived in Bosnia for many years on notice of deportation.

Arabs, the largest group among hundreds of foreign fighters, fought alongside the Bosnian Muslim Army during the war here, from 1992 to 1995, against Serbs and Croats. In return, they were given Bosnian citizenship.

Most left after the war, which tore apart Muslim, Serbian and Croatian communities and cost around 100,000 lives. But a number stayed on and settled down.

Bosnian officials say their policies are merely reversing decisions that were illegally made at the war’s end. But Bosnian politicians and international officials say that the reversals are primarily motivated by a broader concern: that Bosnia should not be seen as a haven for Islamic militants.

Western officials and local politicians, mostly the Muslims’ former opponents, have accused the former fighters of promoting radical Islam and damaging Bosnia’s reputation in the process.

“Some of their structures have been very active in promoting radical activities in the form of Wahhabism,” said Dragan Mektic, Bosnia’s deputy security minister, in a recent interview, referring to a strict form of Islam. “The public feel endangered.”

Western governments have been encouraging the move.

Miroslav Lajcak, a Slovak diplomat who is the high representative of the international community in Bosnia and the senior international official here, has increased pressure on the government to move ahead with the deportations. So far, only two former combatants have actually been expelled, both last year.

“The presence of foreign fighters isn’t particularly useful for building a modern democratic state,” said a Western diplomat closely involved with the review, who spoke on the customary diplomatic condition of anonymity.

While many former fighters who stayed have managed to fit into Bosnian society, others stand out. Imad al-Hussein, a former medical student from Syria with a thick beard, became the public face of the Muslim fighters, or mujahedeen, after the war. He is one of six former fighters the government wants to expel first. The government has not publicly outlined its case against him.

His views do lie outside the norms of most Muslims here. For instance, he says that suicide bombings are justifiable but only within Israel. He said in a long interview that he and his former comrades had always acted within the law in Bosnia. But in response to the threat of being removed from his family’s home by force, he said: “I keep asking myself, will I be able to contain my instincts. If you defend yourself on your doorstep you become a martyr. And that is a great temptation.”

Other veterans are tensely biding their time, and they contend that there is nothing to connect them to any form of illegal activity. “If there was any evidence against us, then why have they let 12 years pass without prosecuting us,” said Raffaq Jalili, a Moroccan wounded in the war.

Bosnia is still recuperating from the war, and international officials who play a large role here are working to resolve stark differences among the Muslim, Serbian and Croatian populations. The high representative — currently Mr. Lajcak — still has the power to make laws and fire local politicians.

Both Saudi Arabia and the United States say that Islamic extremists have used Bosnian passports to travel between the Middle East and Europe; some Bosnian government officials say that has been impossible to confirm.

Western intelligence services and their Bosnian counterparts also claim they have uncovered two major plots in the past six years by Islamic extremists in Bosnia to attack Western targets.

In October 2001, six Algerians were arrested by the Bosnian police and later were sent to prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In 2005, a Swedish man of Bosnian heritage and a Turk who had lived in Denmark were accused of possessing explosives and vests for making a suicide bomb. They were convicted and sentenced to prison in January.

It is not known how many foreign fighters remain in Bosnia — estimates vary wildly from more than a dozen to several hundred. The government says that a commission reviewed a list of more than 1,000 names and has revoked citizenship for about 420 people so far. Mr. Hamdani was the first to be notified by the commission, a year ago.

From 1996 to 2001, many of the former fighters occupied Bocinja, which had been a Serbian village in central Bosnia. The fighters lived there under Islamic Shariah law until they were evicted by the government, and they dispersed throughout central Bosnia.

Mr. Hamdani came to Bosnia when he was 18 and studied engineering in Zenica. By the time the conflict in Bosnia broke out in 1992, he was married and had two children.

It was only natural to fight for his adopted country, he said, as Bosnian Serb forces, backed by neighboring Serbia, attacked Muslims across the country. In February 1995, nine months before the end of the war, he was granted citizenship.

As with all the other cases under review, he had no right to appear before the commission, which met behind closed doors and sent him its decision in the mail.

“I think that it does not matter when you arrived in this country,” he said in an interview. “What matters is which unit you served with during the war.” Serbs and Croats say that Muslim members of the government gave out citizenship too freely.

Mr. Jalili, a former Moroccan customs officer, bears burn marks across his face and a deformed ear from a rocket-propelled grenade. In a hillside cemetery near Zenica, he showed the unmarked concrete pillars that mark the graves of Arab fighters from his unit.

Now he and his wife and two children live in Zenica on a disabled veteran’s pension. In March, he, too, was notified by mail that his citizenship had been revoked.

“When I first came here, everyone welcomed me,” he said. “Now we are being kicked out like dogs.”

The government says its grounds for removing citizenship are that at the end of the war, the government was not properly functioning, and therefore, passports issued then were not legitimate.

“Citizenship can be revoked upon the discovery of any procedural irregularity, even if you now fulfill the conditions for naturalization anyway,” said Darryl Li, a legal researcher from Yale who is studying the veterans’ cases. “Someone living in Bosnia for 15 or 20 years with a wife and children here now finds himself in the same legal situation as a new immigrant, except half his life has been bureaucratically erased.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company