Mihrije Berisha, holding her 1 1/2-year-old daughter, returns to her home in Suva Reka, Kosovo, after living in the forest for three months. (By John Ward Anderson — The Washington Post)

When the Yugoslav military launched its offensive in this area at the end of April, torching and looting homes believed to belong to Kosovo Liberation Army sympathizers, all but the oldest people in Siqeva fled into the surrounding hills.

The elderly felt they were safe from army and police brutality. When the government forces pulled back, the rest of the population came down from the hills.

A second offensive followed in the middle of May. Since half the houses in the village had been destroyed, the older people gathered in the home of 85-year-old Sulejman Berisha at the edge of the village. Sulejman and a 90-year-old male relative, Jahir Berisha, slept in a room to the right of the porch. Sulejman's wife, Vahide, 66, and a female relative, Shehide, 77, slept in a room on the left.

"I pleaded with them not to stay. I said, 'It's better for you to flee because they will come to kill you,' " recalled Sulejman's son, Hajdim. "But my father said, 'They came before and did not kill us. I will not leave this place.' "

Having fled to the hills above the village for a second time, the younger members of the Berisha clan could see Serbian militiamen move into Siqeva. They carried away everything that could be carried away – stoves, refrigerators, television sets, furniture, video equipment, loading their booty onto trucks. They recognized men from the neighboring Serbian village of Brnica among the looters.

It was six days later – May 20 – that the younger villagers dared return to Siqeva. When they went into Sulejman's house, they found the corpses of the two old women stretched out on their beds. The floor was littered with a dozen bullet casings from an automatic rife. Across the hallway, in the room the men had been using, lay the body of Jahir. A hole in the floor suggested that someone had thrown a hand grenade into the room.

The younger men found Sulejman's body in a stream at the bottom of his garden, covered by a bloodstained leather coat. His hands were manacled behind his back and his corpse bore signs of the explosion that had killed Jahir. They concluded that Sulejman had been handcuffed and dragged back into his room for execution by hand grenade.

"My father was beaten badly," Hajdim said. "I could see the marks on his face."

Another body was found nearby – that of a young man in his late teens. It lay in a pool of blood and bore signs of a beating. Evidently the man was an ethnic Albanian refugee who had come down out of the hills in search of food and had been captured by the militiamen surrounding Sulejman's house.

In Srbica

As Serbian and Yugoslav forces departed today, the killing continued.

At 9 a.m. 13-year old Adile Koliqi witnessed the execution of her father Kadri in the middle of a road that passes through the heart of the Kosovo's Drenica region.

Kadri was a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has been fighting for the province's independence from Serbia for more than a year. To escape the military assault that engulfed Drenica from March 20 until last week, he had spent much of the past two months hiding in the nearby Berisha Mountains.

Today, he made a fateful miscalculation that the arrival of NATO troops in Kosovo meant he and his five children could return safely to their home in the village of Obrinje. He set out with them, carrying a pistol in a holster and an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. As he passed in front of a house that had seemed empty, several Yugoslav troops called out to him in Serbian, and the family froze.

A brief but tense conversation ensued. Adile said she did not know what was said because she speaks only Albanian – since ethnic Albanians withdrew from public schools in 1989 to protest government repression, almost no children here have learned to speak Serbian.

Adile said the Yugoslav soldiers walked over to her father and took away his guns. Then he started walking faster. "He was trying to get away because they knew they were going to shoot him," Adile said. They shot him then, from the roadside and from a balcony of the house where they were keeping watch.

Later, tears streaming down her face, Adile said she saw his blood run across the highway. His last words had been in Serbian. She didn't understand them.

Hours after the killing, only a dozen or so people had ventured onto the road, because government troops remained in the area, and NATO forces were still nowhere in sight. Every home within miles appeared to have lost its roof, windows and doors to fire and looting by government troops; their walls were scorched and pockmarked by shelling. Artillery fire echoed in the distance, from beyond a green hill covered by wild flowers and weeds, and a few columns of smoke rose to the west.

One young refugee returning home along the road, 10-year old Agron Shaqiri, said his family had spent the past month hiding in the mountains and asked a reporter: "When is NATO coming?"

In Suva Reka

One day in early April, a backhoe showed up at the town cemetery here and dug 34 graves. Today, no one is certain who is buried here, where they came from or how they died. Thirty of the graves are marked by stakes, some with a number painted in aquamarine, some with no notation at all. Four have names on them.

Townspeople say Serbian forces buried 34 people at this mass grave site in Suva Reka in early April. (By John Ward Anderson – The Washington Post)

"We think they're all local – including an engineering professor who paid 50,000 marks to government troops but was killed anyway," said Nexhat Palushi, 26, who lives in a village near Suva Reka, a town of 20,000 in southern Kosovo. "A lot of them we think were dead in their homes for about a week after the start of the war, and the Serbs then buried all of them at the same time."

Suva Reka and its surrounding communities were at heart of a campaign of expulsions by Yugoslav and Serbian forces who pushed most of the residents out of the region. Today, the town has been demolished. It is nearly deserted, save for a large contingent of Kosovo Liberation Army members patrolling the streets.

Toward the center of town, Mihrije Berisha, 25, was returning home with her year-old daughter and 3-week-old son after hiding in the forest since the beginning of the war, unsure what she would find but expecting the worst. She was accidentally separated from her husband and the rest of her family during the exodus and now is uncertain where they are.

The gates of neighboring houses were all ajar, revealing burned-out hovels. Berisha moaned and caught her breath as she entered her own property. Serbs and Gypsies had ransacked the main house, a neighbor said. Clothing and other personal belongings were scattered everywhere, and there was a foul smell. Everything of value had been taken.

In a second dwelling on the property, the Toyota in the garage had been set afire, and the blaze had spread to the other rooms. But in truth, the structure was salvageable.

"It's okay. I'm happy. We have all these things. We have something," she said. "Now, we have a place we can rest our heads."

In Djakovica

Before NATO's air campaign began, there were nearly 90,000 people in Djakovica. By this morning, a few thousand at most remained. They had spent the last 80 days or so hiding in basements by day and moving like shadows by night to avoid the next burning rampage by Serbian militiamen.