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Archive blog · Today in history

Today in history, 26 October: NATO's air campaign (Operation Allied Force)

NATO began air strikes against the FRY on 24 March 1999, without explicit Security Council authorisation, and suspended them on 10 June after 78 days.

The recorded event closest to today's date in the archive calendar.

Date of the event
Place
Unknown
Evidence status
Evidence status: Documented. Supported by contemporaneous documents, institutional reports or independent studies that corroborate one another.
Two side-by-side black-and-white aerial views of an airfield installation labelled 'pre strike' and 'post strike'.
Pre-strike and post-strike assessment photograph of the Pristina military airfield, used by Maj. Gen. Charles F. Wald during a Pentagon press briefing on NATO Operation Allied Force on 16 April 1999.Photo: U.S. Department of Defense · 1999-04-16 · Domen publik (Public domain)

NATO began air strikes against the FRY on 24 March 1999, without explicit Security Council authorisation, and suspended them on 10 June after 78 days.

The strikes began after Holbrooke announced on 23 March that his final talks with Milošević had failed [1] [2]. According to NATO, more than 38,000 sorties were flown, 10,484 of them strike sorties [3]. The legality debate and the civilian casualties of the bombing are covered on the NATO page and in the related research article.

Full event record, with sources and map

Historical context

1999

From the Reçak massacre to the entry of KFOR: six months that saw failed negotiations, NATO's intervention, the mass expulsion of Albanians and crimes documented by international courts.

Read the chapter “1999: Reçak, expulsions and the end of the war”

Sources

  1. [1]Tribunali Penal Ndërkombëtar për ish-Jugosllavinë (ICTY). Prosecutor v. Milutinović et al., Judgement, Volume 1 of 4. 2009-02-26. IT-05-87-T. https://www.icty.org/x/cases/milutinovic/tjug/en/jud090226-e1of4.pdf. Accessed 2026-09-16. — para. 398
  2. [2]Fred Abrahams, Benjamin Ward. Under Orders: War Crimes in Kosovo. 2001-10-26. https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/kosovo/. Accessed 2026-09-16.
  3. [3]NATO. Kosovo Air Campaign (March–June 1999): Operation Allied Force. 2024-10-21. https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/operations-and-missions/kosovo-air-campaign-march-june-1999. Accessed 2026-09-16.
  4. [4]Ivo H. Daalder, Michael E. O’Hanlon. Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo. Brookings Institution Press, 2001-10-01. https://www.brookings.edu/books/winning-ugly/. Accessed 2026-09-16.

This post is created automatically from the archive's checked data and from public news feeds. Not one sentence was written by artificial intelligence. Published: .