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NATO Clashes For First Time With Macedonia's Albanian Gunmen
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, March 7 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - NATO-led peacekeepers in Kosovo (KFOR) clashed for the first time Wednesday with Albanian gunmen fighting near the Macedonia-Kosovo border, according to a KFOR spokesman.
U.S. troops have shot and wounded two Albanian fighters not far from the Macedonian village of Tanusevci - the focus of cross-border unrest involving ethnic Albanian fighters and Macedonian troops. Macedonian sources say the gunmen were trying to reinforce their positions in the village, reports the BBC.
KFOR soldiers "injured two armed men after a brief exchange of fire" near the Albanian-populated village of Mijak, in southern Kosovo, KFOR spokesman Richard Heffer told reporters.
Heffer said the gunmen had pointed their guns, threatening KFOR soldiers who then opened fire.
Another gunman was detained, while a fourth fled towards the Macedonian village of Tanusevci, near Mijak, believed to be the stronghold of ethnic Albanian fighters calling themselves the National Liberation Army (UCK), he said.
The conflict and heightened tensions in the region have caused observers to speculate that NATO troops could be sucked into combating the ethnic Albanian insurgency.
The incident was the first armed engagement involving KFOR troops since the peacekeepers started reinforcing the border last week to help contain the insurgency, reports CNN.
KFOR troops beefed up their presence on the border after weeks of clashes between Albanian gunmen and Macedonian, which recently has led to the arrests of six suspected Albanian fighters.
In Debelde, a village just next to the border with Albania, U.S. Major Jim Marshall of the KFOR group monitoring the area, said that one of the two injured, suffering from gun-wounds in the abdomen and leg, had been transferred to a hospital at the U.S. military base Bondsteel.
KFOR soldiers could not find the other injured man, and peacekeepers believed his associates had picked him up.
Peacekeepers have tried to contact Albanian gunmen to pass on the message "Stop the violence, do not resist," Marshall said.
He also called on Debelde villagers to cooperate with KFOR and help them transmit the message to the UCK.
Three Macedonian soldiers were killed near the village of Tanusevci Sunday, while Macedonian security officials reported an exodus of the local population fleeing a possible widening of clashes, reported the Washington Post.
Macedonian police spokesman, Stevo Pendarovski, told the Post that about 300 ethnic Albanians, mostly women and children, have fled their homes since Monday in villages along the border.
The northwest border of Macedonia, along the frontier with Kosovo, has seen violent clashes between Macedonian forces and ethnic Albanian gunmen of the UCK since the end of January.
On Sunday, Macedonia closed the border with Kosovo, demanding an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council as well as the creation of a buffer zone between the two regions.
A landmine explosion on the edge of the buffer zone between Kosovo and Serbia, which killed two Yugoslav soldiers and seriously injured two others, also highlighted the growing insecurity in the region, the BBC adds.
In a bid to secure the area, the Macedonian city of Skopje mobilized army reservists and police, as KFOR observers said they had spotted between 75 and 150 Albanian fighters in the area, armed with automatic weapons, rocket launchers and machine guns.
However, the Macedonian defense ministry insisted that as many as 300 fighters have been active there.
NATO on Tuesday voiced the idea of letting Yugoslav forces into the southern tip of a buffer zone - occupied by another band of Albanian fighters thought to be linked to the Macedonian group - which adjoins Macedonia, Kosovo and southern Serbia.
The idea is to crack down on cross-border sorties by ethnic Albanian gunmen using the zone as a safe haven.
The zone was established in June 1999 at the end of the Kosovo conflict to keep Kosovo's NATO peacekeepers and Yugoslav troops apart.
Albanian fighters operating out of the zone have between 700 and 1,500 men fighting for the predominantly Albanian region to be linked to Kosovo, or at least to be given autonomy from Serbia.
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