Modern Era · Europe · War

1992

Siege of Sarajevo begins

April 5, 1992

Bosnian Serb gunners took up positions in the hills around Sarajevo and began shelling the multi-ethnic city below. The siege would last almost four years, the longest in modern warfare. Snipers shot women in bread lines. An estimated eleven thousand Sarajevans died. The phrase never again, engraved after 1945, had worn off Europe's memory.