Freedom fighters look to Kosovo's example, but should they?

The Russians immediately adduced an answer: Kosovo was "training Syrian militants", Moscow's representative to the UN charged. But the more persuasive response came from the Syrians themselves. To them Kosovo was not so much a training site as a place of pilgrimage. As one of the Syrians explained, Kosovo "gives us hope that we can rise above the differences and make the transition to democracy in Syria something viable".

It is not easy to recognise this now, but the Syrian opposition has begun life in a less hostile international atmosphere than that endured in the 1990s by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Designated a terrorist organisation by most western governments almost from the time of its birth, the KLA succeeded not only in convincing them to accord it legitimacy; it even incited Nato to stage an unprecedented war of intervention on its behalf, leading to Kosovo's de facto independence from Yugoslavia. The world's most powerful military alliance repudiating the United Nations and risking the indignation of Russia to serve as the air force of an unknown group of guerrillas subsisting on grass: could there be a more commanding template of triumph than this for the insurrectionists across West Asia?

Yet, despite its unrivalled success, the story of the KLA remains a mystery to most people. Disbanded in 1999, it has become the subject of countless conspiracy theories. In his timely new book, The Kosova Liberation Army: Underground War to Balkan Insurgency, 1948-2001, Oxford historian James Pettifer tries to fill this void by piecing together the complex history of the organisation, locating its conceptual origins in Kosovo's underground resistance movements of the 1940s and tracing its evolution into a sophisticated insurgent group through the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Kosovo is the Jerusalem of the Balkans, a forlorn piece of landlocked territory that stirs fanatical passions among its claimants. In the Serbian imagination, Kosovo is the crucible in which the Serbian nation was forged. Some of the grandest churches and monasteries erected by King Stefan Dusan lay in Kosovo. It was on Kosovo's soil that the Serbs' most humiliating defeat was enacted, when, in 1389, Ottoman Sultan Murad I's troops vanquished Prince Lazar's army. The Serbs' sense of themselves was shaped most of all by the memory of Lazar's death on Kosovo's battlefield - his yearning to "die in battle than to live in shame".

After more than four centuries of Ottoman rule, the Serbs finally wrested Kosovo from their exhausted overlords in 1912. They rapidly repopulated it with Serbs, incorporated it into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1918 and marginalised the ethnic Albanians who had proliferated under Ottoman rule. But Serbian rule lasted only until 1941, when Italian-controlled Albania took possession of Kosovo.

Facing persecution, the Serbs either fled or joined the resistance movement against the Axis powers, which was divided between Draza Mihajlovic's Chetniks (who sought to revive the Royalist past) and Josip Broz Tito's multi-confessional Partisans (who were fighting for a communist future). Ethnic Albanians became infected with the idea of nationalism, and the prospect of securing an irredentist Greater Albania prompted many to join pro-Nazi militias. Allied with Himmler's SS Skanderbeg, the Albanian nationalist Balli Kombëtar's Kosovo contingent terrorised the Serbs in Kosovo and Montenegro. The nationalist sentiment was so rabid that even the communists among ethnic Albanians endorsed a union with Albania. Tito attempted to placate them with promises of a Yugoslav federation.