February 28, 1998 – June 10, 1999 · Kosovo Theater
February 28, 1998 – June 10, 1999
The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had been waging a guerrilla insurgency against Serbian security forces since 1996, but full-scale war erupted in February 1998 when Serbian police and military launched massive counter-insurgency operations that killed entire families in villages suspected of harboring KLA fighters. The Račak massacre of January 1999 — in which Serbian forces killed 45 Albanian civilians — crossed a threshold that NATO could not ignore after Srebrenica. When peace negotiations at Rambouillet failed in February 1999, NATO launched its air campaign. Serbian forces simultaneously accelerated a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, expelling over 850,000 Kosovo Albanians into Albania and Macedonia in a matter of weeks. The combined weight of NATO bombing and international pressure finally forced Yugoslav forces to withdraw from Kosovo in June 1999.
Commanders