US NATO peacekeeping troops pulled out of a large-scale weapons-search operation in the ethnically-divided Kosovan town of Mitrovica yesterday, as a mob of Serbs attacked their armoured vehicles with rocks, stones, iron bars and lumps of wood.
Operation Ibar was designed as a large-scale demonstration of NATO unity and a clampdown on armed extremists, both Serb and Albanian, following a fortnight of widespread criticism of NATO's lacklustre security performance in Kosovo.
Instead it ended in a disaster for the US troops taking part.
"We were put in a position where we either had to withdraw or shoot", said a US NATO official in the northern, Serb-dominated part of the city where the search operations were taking place. "We came here to save lives, not to kill."
The senior NATO commander, Germany's Gen Klaus Reinhardt, said yesterday the operation would continue until he was satisfied that the threats to law and order had been crushed. But US troops confirmed they had withdrawn.
To further the humiliation of the US paratroopers, French soldiers and Italian policemen had to protect their withdrawal.
At first the operation, involving NATO troops from 11 countries, had gone according to plan. Just before first light, a heavily-armed convoy of US soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, based in the US military sector in eastern Kosovo, arrived in the north of Mitrovica in the middle of a blizzard.
Humvee armoured jeeps, mounted with heavy machineguns and grenade-launchers, set up road-blocks and surrounded three apartment blocks due to be searched by the US paratroopers from the 82nd, known as the "All American".
About 150 US troops wearing body-armour and carrying assault rifles and grenade-launchers, accompanied by UN policemen, French riot police and guard dogs searched more than 50 flats, uncovering three Kalashnikov assault-rifles as well as hunting weapons and a quantity of ammunition.
But then trouble flared after a gang of Serb extremists surrounded a US Humvee and tried to attack an Albanian interpreter working with US troops, accusing him of being an Albanian terrorist.
The French brigade commander in Mitrovica, Gen Pierre de Saqui de Sannes, attempted to negotiate with the local Serb leader, Mr Oliver Ivanovic, but to no avail. A crowd of up to 300 Serbs attacked a UN police vehicle, and then turned on the US troops, seen by the Serbs as hostile following NATO's bombing campaign of Yugoslavia last year.
As the snow fell, a line of 60 US soldiers confronted the Serb crowd outside the block of flats they had just searched. The Serb crowd turned on the Americans, who withdrew into a vehicle park as the increasingly violent mob taunted and jeered them. In less than an hour the American convoy was driving out of the northern part of the city at top speed, as their vehicles came under a barrage of rocks, stones, iron bars and insults from the Serbs.
"Who can we put in here apart from the French?" asked an exasperated Gen de Sannes. "Most nationalities of NATO troops in Kosovo refuse to come here. At the slightest provocation, one of these Americans or Serbs is going to get killed. And then there's no going back."
As he spoke, 100 Serbs broke through lines of French troops and attacked a German armoured personnel carrier.