Kosovo Liberation Army: The Inside Story of an Insurgency

5. The KLA at War

61 5 The KLA at War A convoy came out of a police station, traveled through the edge of the town, traversed a traffic circle, and proceeded down a main road to a railroad crossing. There was good intelligence that the convoy would move between 10 and 11 p.m. One observer was stationed at the police station, another by the edge of the village that the convoy would have to pass, a third at the traffic circle. Five fighters were within five meters of the road on the far side of the railroad track. When the convoy left, the observers passed word to each other and then to a fourth observer who would be able to see the convoy approaching the railroad crossing. The fighters opened fire just as the leading edge of the convoy reached the railroad track, and killed five policemen and wounded three others. Later, the KLA followed three policemen known by everyone to have abused us and our mothers. We found out that they would be eating at a restaurant located across from a bus station with several stalls and adjacent to a bus parking area. An observer was posted outside the police station and another some distance further away. The observer informed the attackers of the entry of the police into the restaurant, and then when they were about to leave. Three KLA soldiers had positioned themselves in a hidden area inside the bus station and opened fire on the police, killing all three. To become a KLA soldier you had to prove yourself in a fight of this sort. In both settings, an essential part of the planning was to identify an escape route. In the case of the restaurant attack, the fighters were instructed to melt away immediately into the civilian population, and at the first opportunity to appear openly in the civilian population in civilian clothes. —confidential interview 62 kosovo liberation army Military actions that were precursors to KLA operations began in the late eighties with armed resistance to Serb police trying to take Albanian activists into custody. By the early nineties they included organized attacks on police convoys, police stations, and individual police and secret-service officials infamous for their abuse of Albanian civilians . By mid-1998 the KLA was engaged but badly outnumbered and outgunned in frontal warfare.1 During the NATO bombing campaign in 1999, necessity forced a return to guerrilla warfare, now more often aimed at Serb military units than at police and collaborators.2 The KLA claimed as many as twenty-four thousand fighters at the end of 1998 (the actual number was closer to fifteen thousand, as chapter eight explains). That number had dwindled to fewer than five thousand by the end of the NATO bombing campaign.3 As the conflict escalated, Serbia increased the firepower of its special police units and introduced regular army forces. The KLA responded by improving its coordination among local armed elements, erecting chains of command, establishing a “General Staff,” and introducing uniforms and other features of army organization. Having begun with courageous acts of defiance, the KLA now embraced the strategy of bringing about international intervention on the side of the Kosovars. Purity of tactical guerrilla doctrine was regularly sacrificed to that overriding strategy. Even before the first sporadic attacks on police convoys, stations, and agents in Kosovo, many leaders of what was to become the KLA understood that theirs was a political and not predominantly a military campaign. They also knew that military action could help them in winning this political campaign, while they accepted the reality that they would win few battles militarily once the Serbs brought their overwhelming firepower and manpower to bear on scattered and not very well-coordinated guerrilla forces. KLA’s Strategic Goals and Objectives The Kosovo Liberation Army’s overarching strategic goal was an independent Kosovo. To achieve this goal it had to pursue a number of strategic objectives: 1. Show that it was possible to resist; 2. Survive efforts by the Milosevic regime to annihilate it; 3. Eliminate key members of the Serb police, military, and security apparatus , including ethnic Albanian collaborators and spies; 4. Defend civilians; 5. Keep open the arms-supply routes to Albania; 6. Interdict Serb supply routes through the Llap region; The KLA at War 63 7. Build international sympathy, by implanting into geopolitical discourse the ideas that the Serb forces in Kosovo represented a...