A half dozen gaunt, unshaven, villagers, some clutching old hunting rifles, peered nervously around the side of a stone barn.
On the road in front of the barn, they had dumped two spiked metal tracks from an old haying machine on the cobblestones to block traffic. Another group of men, most in motley camouflage uniforms, darted behind a barricade a few yards away. They peered out from behind the pile of old planks, tires, bricks and sacks filled with dirt."Snipers," hissed Shaiquer Maloku, 31, one of the villagers, warning a visitor. "Move out of the road. A man was shot and killed here two days ago by the Serbs."
The rebels here in the Southern Serbian province of Kosovo, fighting to carve an independent state from one of the two republics that remain in Yugoslavia, have dug trenches around villages they control. Joined by the men who remain in the villages, they talk heroically of fighting to the death.
The government troops are slowly strangling the rebel strongholds, having seized the main road from the insurgents over the past few days. The shattered houses along the road, many with gaping holes, speak of fierce combat.
Since these assaults began, the ethnic Albanians who make up 90 percent of the province's 2 million people have largely abandoned a tactic of peaceful resistance in their drive for independence.
The United States, in an effort to stay the hand of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, has threatened NATO intervention unless the soldiers are withdrawn from the province and negotiations with a moderate ethnic Albanian leader are resumed.