Tracing the Scars of NATO’s Air Strikes in Kosovo

On March 24, 1999, Kosovo's landscape was permanently altered as the first bombs fell from warplanes overhead, and missiles were launched by warships in the Adriatic Sea. Forty Serbian military targets in Yugoslavia were hit in the first 24 hours, mainly in Serbia and Kosovo.

It was the beginning of NATO's air campaign known as 'Operation Allied Force,' which would last for 78 days. Its aim was to end the escalating conflict and humanitarian crisis by forcing Slobodan Milosevic's regime to pull its forces out of Kosovo.

"We will systematically and progressively attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate and ultimately - unless President Milosevic complies with the demands of the international community - destroy these forces and their facilities and support," NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Wesley Clark, told journalists at NATO headquarters after the first day of air attacks.

But military installations and convoys were not the only targets destroyed by the air strikes. Hundreds of civilians were also killed when refugee columns were mistakenly identified as Serbian military targets.

According to Human Rights Watch, an estimated 500 civilians were killed during the NATO air strikes, while the number of massacres and forced deportations of Kosovo Albanians by Serbian forces increased after the air campaign commenced.

What remains today is rubble, the skeletons of buildings and a few memorials strewn across the countryside, the lasting scars of the military operation launched 20 years ago.

The outskirts of Ferizaj/Urosevac

Photo: Valerie Plesch.

The ruins of a Serbian army barracks where soldiers may have slept before NATO's bombing campaign started. Located on a hilltop overlooking Ferizaj...