Operation Deliberate Force: NATO's Intervention in Bosnia, 1995

Operation Deliberate Force: NATO's Intervention in Bosnia, 1995


Operation Deliberate Force is the first ever authoritative, inclusive and richly illustrated account of the combat operations run by all of the involved parties during the four dramatic weeks in Bosnia in August and September 1995. During the early 1990s, a series of savage wars was fought in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Jugoslavia (SFRJ). The third of the conflicts in question, the war in Bosnia, was in its third year as of 1995. Already internationalised by multiple domestic and foreign actors, it was about to reach its peak and result in a major showdown. The war in Bosnia was foremost fought between Bosnian Serbs, supported by Belgrade; Bosnian Croats, supported by Zagreb; and Bosnian Muslims. It was characterised by widespread atrocities against civilians, which prompted hundreds of thousands to flee. The United Nations attempts at finding a negotiated settlement proved fruitless, despite the deployment of a sizeable contingent of peacekeepers. On the contrary, the Bosnian Muslims began receiving ever larger amounts of clandestine support from Iran, and also from Saudi Arabia and several other allied countries in the Middle East, while the USA began supporting the Croats. Upon constantly increasing popular pressure, the United Nations requested the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to intervene. Officially at least, NATO initiated Operation Deliberate Force on 30 August 1995: deploying as many as 400 combat aircraft, over the following two weeks it flew 3,515 sorties against 338 Bosnian Serb targets. The damage caused by this assault forced the Serbs to lift the siege of the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, remove heavy weapons from the UN-declared exclusion zone around the city, and safeguard other UN safe areas.