page_title: Operation Stinger
section_title: Una River valley
hierarchical_section_title: Operation Stinger / Timeline / Una River valley
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of Banovina area between Dvor and Kozibrod in Croatia
context_page_description: Operation Stinger was an offensive undertaken by the forces of the SAO Krajina, an unrecognized Croatian Serb region opposing the Republic of Croatia, against positions held by the Croatian police in the region of Banovina on 26–27 July 1991, during the Croatian War of Independence. It was primarily aimed at police stations in Glina and Kozibrod, as well as police-held positions in a string of villages between the town of Dvor and Kozibrod. In addition to Glina and Kozibrod, heavy fighting took place in the village of Struga, north of Dvor, where Croatian Serb forces employed a human shield consisting of Croat civilians taken from their homes in Struga and the nearby village of Zamlača.
  The Croatian Serb rebels captured the police station in Glina, but were stopped in Struga before the Yugoslav People's Army arrived there to create a buffer zone and, according to the JNA, assist the Croatian police to evacuate. On 29 July, as the non-Serb civilian population left Kozibrod and the villages to the south of it, the police station in Kozibrod was evacuated as well. The fighting resulted the bulk of the region being transferred to Croatian Serb and JNA control.
context_section_description: The advance against Croat-held villages along the Una was also preceded by an hour-long mortar bombardment of the area. More than 250 rounds were fired, commencing on 26 July at 10:00, after which the infantry was ordered to advance. The attacking force consisted of 50 SAO Krajina special forces troops drawn from Knin, 50 policemen and 700 conscripts. The JNA estimated that there were about 240–280 Croatian police and ZNG personnel deployed in the area from Struga to Kozibrod. The SAO Krajina plan saw a battalion led by Braco Orlović advancing north from Dvor through the village of Zamlača to approach the village of Struga. Once there, it was to maintain its position and advance gradually if possible. Additional forces were meant to outflank and pin down the Croatian defending force: a platoon of special forces led by Nikola Sundać, reinforced by a platoon of conscripts, was tasked with bypassing Struga and interdicting traffic along the road between the village of Unčani and Struga, preventing any access from the direction of Kozibrod. Another special forces platoon led by Željko Sanader was tasked with seizing the villages of Volinja and Kuljani before advancing towards Kozibrod, while the second battalion attached to the attacking force—led by Mićo Popović—engaged Croatian troops near Divuša, Golubovac Divuški and Kozibrod.
  After Orlović's battalion entered the undefended village of Zamlača, the Serb rebels moved from one house to the next, ransacking homes and forcing any civilians they found to move to the main road. Approximately 50 civilians were captured in the village, they were then forced to walk in front of an armed vehicle towards Struga, forming a human shield. By 13:00, all the units earmarked for the advance between Dvor and Kozibrod had achieved their initial objectives, except for the platoon commanded by Sundać. By 14:30, Struga was under attack. The defending force in Struga was first engaged by the outflanking force and had no knowledge of what had happened in Zamlača. As the human shield and the SAO Krajina force reached Struga, the defending troops were reluctant to fire against them. As a consequence, three Croatian policemen deployed in one house were surrounded and subsequently surrendered. Their captors stripped them, ordered them to run and then killed them. Unsure how to deal with the situation, the Croatian forces withdrew from the southern part of the village. The unit protected by the human shield moved very slowly and took six hours to move from Zamlača to the centre of Struga.
  The armed vehicle and the soldiers following the human shield were ambushed in the centre of Struga by a single policeman and a civilian who threw a hand grenade and ran towards the vehicle, carrying three more hand grenades strapped to his waist. As the hand grenades exploded, gunfire erupted allowing the civilians held as human shields to run away. The policeman and civilian who carried out the ambush were both killed; sources identify the two as reserve policeman Mile Blažević and traffic policeman Željko Filipović. Shortly before 16:00, the Croatian forces counterattacked, causing the bulk of Popović's troops to flee. Popović and his remaining five or six soldiers retreated. At least five SAO Krajina troops were killed and twenty wounded in fighting in Struga. By 18:00, the battalion led by Orlović had lost 80 percent of its personnel to desertion. Prompted by the desertions and heavy shooting in Struga at 19:00, Bogdan Vajagić, the commanding officer of the SAO Krajina units subordinated to the Dvor headquarters, requested that the JNA intervene. The JNA informed Vajagić that a unit was dispatched from Petrinja, allowing him to break off further fighting with the Croatian police and send two platoons as reinforcements to Glina as reinforcements at Vasiljković's request. JNA tanks reached Struga at 19:50 to establish a buffer zone. Croatian forces there offered to leave the village if the JNA provided them with one armoured personnel carrier and escorted them to Hrvatska Kostajnica. The JNA complied with the re
caption: Map of the Una River valley from Dvor to Kozibrod; The purple line bisecting the map represents the international border between Croatia (left) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (right)
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