Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas in front of the Yugoslav border watchtower at Kosare, near the Albania-Yugoslav frontier post of Morine. (Reuters)

By Peter Finn and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 23, 1999; Page A1

TIRANA, Albania, April 22 – A ground war is already being fought in Kosovo. It is a guerrilla war, marked by hit-and-run ambushes against Yugoslav forces by a makeshift rebel army that must ration bullets. Villages are taken with bolt-action carbines but lost within hours to 82mm shells. Uniformed men with assault rifles fire at army tanks – and then flee. New recruits arrive so raw that they can be used only for food detail.

Mixed in among it all are thousands of stranded, hungry refugees seeking protection from a rebel force unable to destroy a single fixed-artillery position let alone retake the villages from which the civilians have fled.

Nasty, limited, and seemingly unwinnable, this is the Kosovo Liberation Army's war one month into NATO's aerial assault against the Serb-controlled government of Yugoslavia.

As the Western alliance contemplates introducing its own ground forces into Kosovo, it is being drawn closer to the ethnic Albanian guerrillas and their war to liberate the province from rule by Serbia – Yugoslavia's dominant republic. NATO is seeking to maintain its distance from the KLA, declining to supply the rebels with weapons or an open endorsement of their goal of an independent Kosovo. But NATO's arm's-length approach is difficult because the alliance and the rebels are waging a common battle against the Belgrade government, and because the KLA has emerged in recent weeks as the sole legitimate political force representing the province's 1.6 million ethnic Albanians.

As it becomes entangled with the rebels, NATO is struggling to evaluate the military potential, structure and ideology of a shadowy insurgent group that is now in rapid flux on the battlefield – in its leadership ranks and in its political standing among Kosovo Albanians. The KLA has shown glimpses of many faces in its seven years of existence – communist, nationalist, democratic, Islamist, criminal. It is a movement that at points has seemed deeply factionalized, inept and unsophisticated; at other times it has surprised both the West and its opponents in Belgrade with its effectiveness and resilience.

While it is now struggling desperately on the battlefield, the KLA has already scored an important political victory: This ill-organized, poorly armed group of students, peasants and former political prisoners has forced its insurgency in an obscure corner of Europe to the top of the international agenda. While the battle for the future of Kosovo is far from over, it is clear that the Kosovo Liberation Army will be central to its final outcome – just as its leadership always insisted that it would be.

Surviving the Offensive

Although the KLA had attempted since last autumn to stockpile supplies and ammunition for what it anticipated would be a spring fighting season, many of its stores were depleted in skirmishing that began in December and intensified in January and February. Top KLA officials have complained in recent weeks of being chronically short of ammunition.

A key part of the Yugoslav military's strategy against the KLA has been to drive a large number of civilians out of their homes, removing any base of civilian support for the rebels and creating an immense logistical distraction – a "population bomb," in the words of one Western military official.

Sokol Bashota, a top official of the KLA's political directorate, admitted that the tactic had largely worked. "We have a big, big problem with civilians," he said in a telephone interview. "They are going from place to place. There is not enough food. There is not enough aid. We don't know how to help them, although we are trying."

At the same time, the Yugoslav army has driven the KLA from large swaths of territory in Kosovo once controlled by the rebels. While casualty figures are impossible to obtain, it is believed that many guerrillas have been killed, and hundreds, if not thousands have fled to the mountains or to the temporary refuge of northern Albania.

Despite these setbacks, the KLA has managed to remain active inside Kosovo and to preserve its basic military command structure.

At least 10 isolated clusters of territory in the province – typically between 6 and 10 miles on a side – remain under loose rebel control, although the situation changes on an almost daily basis, and Yugoslav military units, at least until recently, were able to move pretty much where they wished, Western officials said.

KLA sources said the rebels have established a small corridor from northern Albania, near the border town of Tropaje, to about seven miles inside Kosovo, and are attempting to reach the Kosovo town of Junik. They hope that NATO, using Apache attack helicopters, will punch a much larger corridor into Kosovo, allowing trapped refugees to flee – and, the KLA hopes, the re-supply of the rebels.

Nearly 8,000 new recruits, including Albanian-Americans, have been taken to training camps in northern Albania in the last month before entering Kosovo where they hope to fight.

Western and KLA officials officials report that the shortage of ammunition has eased in the last 10 days. Widespread revulsion in Albania at the forced expulsions of ethnic Albanians has prompted the government to assist the guerrillas much more directly, turning over trucks and ammunition to the rebels, according to Western and Albanian officials. Also, NATO airstrikes have helped the KLA achieve scattered tactical victories, including the capture of stocks of weapons and ammunition. One such success occurred near the village of of Terpeze in southern Kosovo last week when rebels seized a large number of munitions.

KLA officials have denied receiving any significant assistance from NATO countries or from Western special forces teams believed to be operating inside Kosovo. But an indirect relationship between the two forces is emerging. Rebel officials conduct regular satellite telephone discussions with designated contacts about both tactical and strategic military matters, and these contacts in turn relay helpful information to NATO's target planning staff in Belgium.

The principal impediment to closer military cooperation at this stage, sources report, is that NATO continues to use a cumbersome process for selecting its targets, involving advance planning and immense logistical support. That fact, more than anything else, is preventing KLA soldiers from acting as spotters for Western warplanes. "Sometimes," Bashota said, "they are doing the right thing and going to the right place, and sometimes not."

Since NATO warplanes began attacking military columns in Kosovo a week or so ago, Yugoslav units have been forced to move in smaller concentrations and at night. The result has been to make them more vulnerable to the guerrilla-style raids that KLA soldiers trained for throughout the winter.

As in any army under military stress, the KLA has allowed a group of experienced military officers to assume increased authority over the past month, sidelining for the moment a more politically-minded and possibly more moderate group of leaders who had backed the peace accord worked out with Western countries in Rambouillet, France, in February.

"This is now a soldier's war," said one Western official. On the Defensive

The KLA's military response to the offensive has been led by a combat veteran named Bislim Zyrapi, a former brigade commander in the Bosnian Muslim militia during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia. Now the military chief of staff for the KLA, Zyrapi works from a roving command headquarters inside Kosovo and stays in touch with the six zone commanders by satellite telephone.

Hashim Thaci, the KLA's political leader, is also in Kosovo, according to KLA sources. Less clear is the role played by Azem Syla, who some Western officials say could be its de facto military commander. Suleiman Sulemi, a former Yugoslav soccer star who was publicly named the top military commander two months ago, is now playing a less prominent role, the officials say.

The chief of military operations is a man called Drini, who was a captain in the Yugoslav army's artillery and air defense branch until 1993.

Another man named Ramush, who formerly served in the Yugoslav army and the French foreign legion, commands the Dukagjin zone in western Kosovo. He and a man named Remi, who controls the Llap zone in northeastern Kosovo, are generally considered the most able regional commanders in the KLA.

The areas that have been under the most pressure, and suffered the greatest losses, have been Drenica in central Kosovo – long a KLA heartland – and Ershale, in northern Kosovo. Drenica alone has been attacked in four separate military offensives by government forces since March 21, according to Bashota. Command posts in these areas are now moved constantly, and few rebel troops may remain there. But stronger forces are evidently still deployed near the Albanian border and in the areas around the cities of Orahovac, Urosevac, and Klina, and the village of Likovic.

A Western official who closely monitors the war said there is broad agreement that these remaining forces will be unable to defeat the Yugoslav government forces now in Kosovo, even if they work more closely with NATO warplanes. "To do that, they would have to destroy all Serb weapon platforms" in Kosovo, a task that they are incapable of accomplishing with the AK-47 assault rifles and shoulder-fired, rocket-propelled grenade launchers that remain in their arsenal.

Put another way, the official said, the KLA is no longer powerful enough to function as a ground force that can drive the Yugoslav army out of Kosovo. "I don't see any scenario in which NATO ground forces would enter a Kosovo emptied of Serb forces by a combination of NATO airpower and the KLA," the official said.

NATO policy currently assumes the opposite – that the pounding of Yugoslav units from above and mounting harassment from KLA rebels on the ground will eventually create an environment "permissive" enough to allow NATO ground forces to enter with little opposition. But exactly what role the West expects the KLA to play in this scenario remains unclear

In part, NATO's ambivalence reflects its fears about touching off a conventional arms race in the Balkans by moving sophisticated weapons to the KLA – Russia might then become an overt supplier to Belgrade. But the current policy also stems from worries about the KLA itself.

The Beginnings

The KLA was a radical movement born in response to radical Serbian nationalism. In 1989, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, capitalizing on the province's near-mythical status among Serbs as a repository of Serbian nationalism, had stripped Kosovo of its autonomy. Tens of thousands of Kosovar Albanians were tossed out of their jobs. Hundreds of intellectuals, human rights lawyers and political activists were imprisoned.

Initially, however, ethnic Albanian politics were dominated by a reclusive intellectual, Ibrahim Rugova, who advocated Kosovo's independence through nonviolent means. Rugova and his League of Democratic Kosovo established a parallel state, including a separate school and health care system. The KLA ' had no popular support and no organization.

The death knell for peaceful protest was the end of the Bosnian war in 1995 and the Dayton agreement, which ignored the claims of Kosovo's Albanians for a restoration of their political rights.

"Milosevic was brought to the table and the Kosovo issue was sacrificed," said Ylber Hysa, executive director of Kosovo Action for Civic Initiatives, until he was expelled from Pristina, the capital, with other refugees in the last month. "It was a sign for Kosovars that only those who engaged in armed struggle in Yugoslavia get anywhere."

By early 1998, the KLA was rising and visible enough because of hit-and-run operations against police that U.S. special envoy to the Balkans Robert Gelbard felt compelled to condemn them as "a terrorist group."

For all its recent political successes, the KLA remains an object of suspicion in the West. There is concern about the group's role in a post-conflict Kosovo, especially its alleged designs on unifying Albanians from Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia in a greater Albanian state.

The source of the KLA's arms and funding remains murky. The KLA, through the Homeland Calling fund, draws on Albanians abroad who pay 3 percent of their income to the cause, raising tens of millions of dollars annually, according to western sources and KLA information on its fundraising.

Although the KLA denies any links to criminal activities, Western law enforcement officials say ethnic Albanian criminal gangs are funneling some profits to the war effort. "Turkish [drug] trafficking groups are using Albanians, Yugoslavs and elements of criminal groups from Kosovo to sell and distribute their heroin," according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration office in Rome. "These groups are believed to be a part of the financial arm of the [KLA's] war against Serbia. These Kosovars are financing their war through drug trafficking activities, weapons trafficking and the trafficking of other illegal goods . . . as well as contributions of their countrymen working abroad."

KLA officials deny involvement with criminal activity. They also say that the West's role in Kosovo after the current war will set the democratic rules of play – for the KLA as for others. And, KLA officials argue that despite their political kinship with Albanians in the region, they recognize that a Greater Albania is not viable.

Visar Reka, a KLA official in Switzerland, said that although the KLA has in the past received arms from the Middle East, the group has rejected Islamic fundamentalism, and that the relationship between the KLA and Islamic radicals has soured to the point where the arms supply has dried up. He didn't, however, rule out the KLA returning to the Middle East for support if it continues to be battered without NATO support.

The KLA professes bewilderment at the West's disdain and frustration at NATO's strategy, which has not provided the kind of space on the ground that the KLA had hoped it could exploit. "The international community should have accepted the KLA as an ally in a war against the same enemy," said Jakup Krasniqi, spokesman for the provisional government of Kosovo. "Why has the West not embraced us? We ask ourselves that question all the time."

Counting Casualties

Although the rebels continue to take casualties, they are inflicting some, too. In an Albanian military hospital in Tirana, a 28-year-old KLA unit commander who goes by the code-name Bresheri, is recovering from a sniper bullet to the abdomen that exited his right buttock.

Bresheri was leading a group of 70 rebels in the village of Batusha a few miles from the Albanian border Monday morning when it came under sustained shelling from Yugoslav artillery. The guerrillas waited out the barrage in bunkers, but the assault was fierce, and within hours one guerrilla was dead and a number were wounded.

Bresheri radioed for help and another unit of 70 men joined him. At dusk, a Serbian special forces unit, known to the KLA as the "grasshoppers," swept into Batasha. For hours in the darkness, the two sides fought house-to-house. In one farmyard, a KLA regular called Milahim, turned to see a Serb descending on him from behind with a knife. He shot and killed him, but almost immediately he was shot in the neck and back by fire coming from two directions. As Bresheri ran in an S-pattern in a field skirting the village, he too was shot and two others beside him were also by snipers.

By dawn, the Serbs pulled back, but the shelling resumed and 11 wounded, including Bresheri and Milahim, were being transported to Albania for medical treatment.

As he recovers from his wounds, Bresheri, a graduate of a Yugoslav military school, remains optimistic, noting that he personally accepted the surrender of a Yugoslav army soldier last week.

"He came into our position and said, 'I don't want to fight. I'm not crazy," said Bresheri, who said he let the soldier flee toward Montenegro in civilian clothes after questioning him. A KLA captain, Karagaci, who also is in the military hospital in Tirana, said he witnessed a Yugoslav officer execute soldiers for desertion.

"They are beginning to panic," said Karagaci. "And we are having successes."

Finn filed from Tirana, Smith from Skopje, Macedonia.