A REGIMENT of 750 British troops were sent to Kosovo yesterday amid fears of a new civil war.
At least 23 people have been killed and hundreds wounded in the province's worst bloodshed since the 1998-99 conflict.
The first soldiers from the Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Wiltshire Regiment flew out last night to try to keep feuding Albanians and Serbs apart.
The unit is currently Britain's "Spearhead Battalion", ready to be sent anywhere at 24 hours' notice.
Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon could not say for how long they would remain in the Balkans.
But he said: "The battalion will not be there indefinitely and I hope it will only need to be for a very short period of time."
The rest of the unit, based in Hounslow, West London, fly out today and tomorrow.
They will be joined by around 300 US, Italian and German troops.
Nato - which runs Kosovo with the UN - begged for reinforcements after violence erupted in the northern town of Mitrovica on Wednesday and rapidly spread elsewhere.
Muslim Albanian gangs torched several Serb churches and homes.
A 300-strong mob yesterday hurled grenades at Finnish UN troops protecting a church in central town Lipljan.
Serbs retaliated by burning mosques in Serbia and threatening to murder local Albanians.
UK intelligence chiefs were last night probing claims that foreign Islamic fanatics were behind the unrest.
A senior Whitehall official confirmed: "There's a lot of groundwork being done to find out whether outsiders are involved in this."
In 1999 a Nato force led by Britain and America invaded Kosovo - then part of Serbia - to stop Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing.
But yesterday's deployment will further stretch the over-burdened Army and embarrass MoD chiefs.
They pulled 900 troops from Kosovo last year ahead of the Iraq war, believing Kosovo was peaceful enough.
An Army source said last night: "With so many soldiers and equipment exhausted from the Iraq war, we need this like a hole in the head.
"With the scant resources we have, we simply cannot be everywhere at once and be expected to do an adequate job." |
