The commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army's northern region in Albania is a hard man to find. On the door of his office - a borrowed apartment in a nearby town - is a padlock and a brief notice giving opening hours: from 8.30 until 12, then from two until three.
At all other times the head of Northern Command, called Plaku (Old Uncle), is simply unavailable.
Even the notice is no guide. On many afternoons Plaku simply fails to unlock the padlock, and none of the soldiers loitering in the dusty streets outside knows where he is, except his son, a teenager already bossing the soldiers about. He knows where dad is, but won't say.
It is arrangements like these which make NATO nervous about co-operation with the rebels, even as they begin to push into the province from neighbouring Albania to link up with their units trapped inside.
The alliance began last week to bomb artillery positions close to rebel front lines after the KLA sent NATO location details. Planes have struck Serb artillery around the mountain village of Batusha, south of the town of Decani, where rebel units have gouged a five-mile salient into Serbian lines after attacking out of Albania.
The strikes came several days after the KLA sent details of Serb positions via a satellite phone link with a group of KLA officers based near NATO headquarters in Brussels. NATO is coy about referring to the three-strong KLA unit in Belgium, but officials admit that in recent days it has been forwarding a stream of data to the alliance about Serb positions.
The KLA hopes massive strikes will destroy Serb positions south of the town of Decani, to allow rebels from Albania pushing east to link up with other units based around the town of Glojane who are now pushing west.
But alliance officials say that co-operating with the KLA, which has only a handful of radios and satellite phones, is problematic.
Sometimes the rebels send data hours late.
The KLA is, in any case, ill-equipped for offensive action, even with air support. It lacks tanks and heavy weapons, and has few trained soldiers. The few good units seen in action last year are now trapped in the province, with untrained volunteers forming the new army being built in neighbouring Albania.
Those who are trained often appear to be under clan direction. At one base here in northern Albania young military policemen in black jumpsuits, apparently with good clan connections, gave directions on what the supposed commanders - men with experience in the former Yugoslav army - could say and do.
One commander, explaining his supply problems to visiting journalists, quickly reverted to stirring patriotic slogans when a military policeman drifted into range.
Last year the KLA expanded rapidly, with different clans and villages taking up the cause, often ignoring the more prudent advice of the handful of soldiers with military experience. In the spring of last year the KLA grabbed one fifth of Kosovo, then lost much of it in a series of Serb counterattacks.
International monitors and diplomats say the KLA remains a jumble of small units. Although it has carved out its Batusha salient, progress is slow. The KLA has neither the experience nor weapons to attack.
The Serbs fear to counter-attack at the Batusha salient because it would mean their tanks would have to break cover, and might be bombed by NATO. "It's basically a stalemate," says one monitor. "The KLA can't reinforce and the other side can't move."
Meanwhile Western diplomats worry about co-operation with NATO for a different reason. They fear that helping the KLA might help it take over the province if Serb forces are defeated.
"The bombing co-ordinates have been fed in," says one Western diplomat. "If the KLA wants to act as a de facto ally, let it, but that doesn't mean it will get favours from us when it is all finished."
The KLA's problem is that for years its leaders were ignored as they agitated, in exile, for Kosovo to take up arms against the Serbs. Until war broke out last year, Kosovo's Albanians had supported a pacifist, Mr Ibrahim Rugova. The French-educated intellectual campaigned for independence through passive resistance.
When in 1990 Serbia removed the autonomy Kosovo had enjoyed, Mr Rugova oversaw the creation of a "parallel state", with separate schools, hospitals and even parallel elections - which saw him elected as president.
The KLA was formed by a rival party, the Patriotic League of Kosovo (PLK), made up of exiles based in Switzerland and Germany who since 1981 have agitated for armed resistance.
Throughout the nineties Mr Rugova's politics seemed to make sense to ordinary Kosovars, as Serbian forces tore into other parts of Yugoslavia when they fought their own independence wars. One Rugova supporter, who will not be named, says the PLK's problem was that it was operating from a distance: "They went to Germany in 1981. We don't trust them. The ones who were out of the country don't have weight."
But Mr Rugova's hopes of Western support dried up in 1995 when the Dayton peace conference sorted out Bosnia but made no reference to Kosovo. That put the PLK back in the saddle, and it organised the KLA, which went into action in late 1997.
At failed peace talks in Rambouillet in February, the KLA were shoe-horned into a show of unity by Western negotiators, forming a "provisional government" with the KLA's Mr Hashim Thaci as head and Mr Rugova as his deputy.
But the Serbian onslaught in Kosovo has seen this shattered: Mr Rugova is now a prisoner of the Serbs in Belgrade, offering compromise peace deals which supporters say are made under duress and the KLA's spokesman, Mr Jakup Krasniqi, labels "worse than treason".
Enmity is high because Mr Rugova's "prime minister in exile", Mr Bujar Bukoshi, is refusing to release cash from a sizeable fund raised by Kosovo's 300,000-strong emigre population for use by the KLA. Mr Bukoshi controls his own version of the KLA, named FARC.
Lower down the scale, however, ordinary Kosovans seem not to notice the bitter political battles at the top. The chant of "Rugova-UCK" - the initials of the Albanian for KLA - were commonly heard during demonstrations by Kosovans last year.
Most would explain that they regarded Mr Rugova as their president and the KLA as their army. This has caused nervousness among some KLA leaders who fear that, without a clear leader of their own, they may lose at the ballot box to Mr Rugova in any future elections.
Yet for now the KLA and FARC are working together. The KLA force at Batusha is fighting to link up with forces inside Kosovo controlled by FARC general Ramush Hajredini.
The explosive growth of the KLA, from dozens to thousands last year, has made it unwieldy. There is still no overall commanding officer, only a 12-strong governing committee, dominated by the PLK, which is unable to make swift command decisions.
And while KLA officials in Western Europe make the right democratic noises, those closer to the coalface seem more authoritarian. Mr Krasniqi, ironically a defector from the Rugova camp, talks of the KLA being the "will of the people" and says the KLA should run a future Kosovo, without elections for "at least a year".
At the KLA office in Albania's capital, Tirana, another spokesman, Swiss-based Mr Visar Reka, insists the KLA will respect democracy.
Despite its inadequacies, the KLA remains an active army. Serb forces have managed to wipe out many of Kosovo's civilians but the rebels, short of ammunition and food, remain in the hills and forests.
While NATO is worried about the political implications of giving military help to this army with no leader, it also fears using its own troops in a ground operation against the Serbs.
This, in the end, may see NATO shelve its doubts and give air support, and perhaps some arms, to the KLA, hoping that the combination of bombs and bullets will destroy the Serb forces or so weaken them that a NATO ground force will meet little resistance.