PRISTINA: With the world on high alert over foreign fighters joining jihadist ranks in Syria and Iraq, Balkan states are launching efforts to clamp down on recruiting in their region, considered fertile ground by Islamists.

Of the more than 20 million people in southeast Europe, more than five million are Muslims, and an economic slump in weak states battered by past wars has fired up some of the disenfranchised.

They live in countries formed from the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, whose economies were devastated by the wars of the 1990s, as well as Albania, one of the poorest states in Europe.

Published in Dawn, October 1st , 2014