A Serbian Orthodox church, completed just two months before the Serbs launched their attacks on the city, offers a commanding hilltop view of the entire district. That was one of the many places from which snipers regularly shot at the unarmed people below, Dobrinja residents explained. Some suspect the church was built specifically with that purpose in mind. Dobrinja's residents could only huddle in fear, unable to fight back. The destruction there defies words.
Buildings are totally gutted, many are unrecognizable.
Even those who passed the war elsewhere in Sarajevo were shocked when the Serbs pulled back and they could finally see what had happened there. The former 1984 Olympic athlete's village in Dobrinja, near the Sarajevo airport, lies in ruins. The barrel in the foreground has a warning painted on it saying there are land mines nearby. I also crossed the bridge into Grbavica, the last Serb-held suburb to be turned back to government control under the Dayton accords. Here, the damage was inflicted by the Serbs themselves, who burned, looted, and destroyed everything they could before they left.