Muslim-led government forces and their Bosnian Croat allies closed in on a strategic Serb-held town in central Bosnia in heavy fighting Thursday.
Government forces were reported to be just 1.2 miles north of Kupres. The Croats were about six miles to the south, with some forces reportedly reaching the southern edges of Kupres this afternoon.Government soldiers returning from the front to Bugojno, a garrison outpost 12 miles northeast of Kupres, boasted that the town was about to fall. Truckloads of fresh troops poured into Bugojno, buoyant in anticipation of a major victory.
U.N. officials reported heavy shelling - 3,400 explosions within 24 hours - and intense infantry fighting north of Kupres. They also reported steady shelling between Kupres and Croat-held Tomislavgrad, to the south.
The rare coordinated attack could open a new chapter in the 21/2-year civil war. Thousands of civilians fled Kupres in anticipation of the assault.
The town of 3,500 sits on a plateau linking Serb-held territory in northwest Bosnia and neighboring Croatia with Serb land in central Bosnia.
Muslim-Croat control of the plateau could allow their forces to push north and link up with government troops to try to cut Bosnian Serbs off from Serbs in neighboring Croatia.
"We are on the outskirts of Kupres," said Razija Mehic, spokeswoman for the government army's 7th Corps in Bugojno. "This will be our major victory in the 21/2 years of war."
Serbs call the plateau "the gates of Bosnia." It was one of the first regions they captured after war began in April 1992, at which time Kupres was 51 percent Serb, 40 percent Croat and 8 percent Muslim.
The bitterness of the Serb-Croat fighting in Kupres at the outset of the war may explain why it is the first place the Croats are cooperating militarily with the government against the Serbs.
Paul Risley, a U.N. spokesman in Zagreb, Croatia, said the shelling indicated the participation of Bosnian Croats because the Muslim-led army doesn't have the artillery for round after round.
U.N. military observers and journalists were being kept away from the front. U.N. officials, who would not be named, said army units of neighboring Croatia had been spotted in the Kupres area in support of the Bosnian Croats.
Bosnia's majority Muslims and Croats formed a federation under U.S. auspices last March. But the Croats had not joined coordinated military action against the Serbs.
Croatian television and the newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija carried pictures Thursday of Croat troops inside Donji Malovan, a Serb stronghold just six miles south of Kupres. The newspaper said government forces were near a tunnel about 1.2 miles north of the town.
Croatian radio said this afternoon that Bosnian Croat troops were on the southern edges of Kupres.