Operation
Two elite Croatian brigades, which captured Knin during Storm, the 4th Guards Brigade and the 7th Guards Brigade, entered Bosnian territory and attacked north from the area around Bosansko Grahovo, which had been captured during the summer.
The first phase of the Operation (Maestral 1) began on 8 September and the first Serb lines were broken quickly. Opposing the Croatians were 7 light infantry brigades, one motorized brigade and two armored battalions of the Serb forces. The city of Šipovo fell quickly and the 7th Guards Brigade captured the strategically important mountain pass of Mliništa. Jajce was captured on 13 September and the first phase ended on that day at 18:00 hours, at which time about 2,000 square kilometers had changed hands.
Following this, began the second phase of the operation, Maestral 2, during which Drvar was captured on September 14, and the operation ended on 30 September. When it ended, only the city of Mrkonjić Grad remained between Croat forces and the Serb capital of Banja Luka. Mrkonjić Grad was captured soon after, during Operation Južni potez (8-12 Oct 1995.)
At the same time, the Fifth Corps of the Bosnian Army from Bihać, on the left wing of the Croatian advance, launched its own simultaneous offensive and captured Krupa, Bosanski Petrovac and Ključ and began advancing on Prijedor, located west of Banja Luka. Although such Bosnian actions were not part of Operation Maestral, the advancement of the two armies were coordinated as part of a general offensive in western Bosnia.
Read more about this topic: Operation Mistral
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. The only idea of wit, or rather that inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of “Wut,” is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)
“Waiting for the race to become official, he began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design. Only the addition of the missing fragments of the puzzle would reveal if the picture was as he guessed it would be.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)