Ratko Mladic Arrested

The Associated Press is reporting this morning that Ratko Mladic has been arrested in Serbia by the Serbian Security Intelligence Agency.  Mladic, who was the commander of Bosnian Serb forces during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War, was indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal for genocide for overseeing the massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, amongst other atrocities committed by his forces as an intentional strategy.

AP photo of Mladic c. 1995

After the signing of the Dayton Accords in 1995, members of Delta Force participated in the hunt for the Mladic, Radovan Karadzic, and other suspected war criminals.  I decided not to write about this hunt in "Wanted Dead or Alive" for two reasons: a) Delta was hunting for a large class of individuals (with some success, even if the two biggest targets eluded them) rather than one man, so it did not quite fit into my definition of "strategic manhunts" wherein one man is the focus; and b) There just isn't much material on the hunt aside from "Dalton Fury"'s anecdotes in Kill Bin Laden and a few paragraphs in an obscure Naval Postgraduate School thesis on manhunting (and JSOC personnel are understandably reluctant to discuss details of any of their operations).

There is probably a really good story behind this hunt waiting to be told, and maybe with Mladic finally apprehended somebody will step forward to tell it.