Combat troops, grounded abroad for days by bad weather in Bosnia, finally began their mission as a huge U.S. airlift got underway.
By mid-afternoon, nearly a dozen planes flew from bases in Germany and Italy into the former MiG base at Tuzla.
They dropped off troops, vehicles and supplies for the advance guard of Americans leading a NATO takeover from UN troops in Bosnia peacekeeping operations.
U.S. Air Force officials hoped to average 20 planes a day as long as the frigid Balkan weather allows.
The Air Force flew 16 Hercules C-130 flights into Tuzla last week before freezing fog and low clouds put the operation on hold.
As the ground-hugging wintry fog lifted, the planes that landed Monday dropped off air control equipment that should make bad-weather landing easier.
This will speed up a deployment that will eventually put 20,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Bosnia.
They are part of a 60,000-strong NATO-led force charged with holding the dividing lines among post-war Bosnia's Serbs, Moslems and Croats.
The base, some 15 kilometers from the industrial city of Tuzla, will be home to about 1,000 Americans, part of the biggest U.S. military initiative in Europe since World War II. They include 800 combat troops from the Italian-based Third Battalion, 325th Infantry Airborne Control Team, that will take over patrol duties from Swedish soldiers now guarding the base.
Sarajevo shivered Monday as a feeble flow of Russian heating gas made little impact and the winter-bound city faced even tighter rationing of supplies.
The cash-strapped Bosnian capital, already short of water and electric power, relies on natural gas pumped from Russia for much of its heating and cooking.
But Sarajevo, in the first week of Bosnia's official peace, can afford to pay for only about 40 percent of its current gas needs.
In January, demand will rise and the shortage will become more acute.
"Next month the gas company might have to cut back from feeding some homes every two days to supplying them only every three," said Tony James, a British engineer attached to the office of the Special Coordinator for Sarajevo.
"It's not a political or an ethnic problem, it's purely commercial," said James. "The gas they pay for, they get. The Russians are digging their heels in about being generous and it's affecting everyone: Bosnian government, Serb Republic and Serbs in Belgrade."
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