Thousands of Kosovo refugees fleeing Serbian forces are being trained and equipped for war by the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army at bases along the mountainous Albanian-Yugoslav border. While the ranks of this new army are filled by young men and women, truckloads of new uniforms, machine-guns and rocket launchers are arriving in northern Albania for a planned offensive.
"The Serbs thought that by clearing the terrain they would also be pushing back the Kosovo Liberation Army - but the opposite is happening," said the commander of one base high in the snow-covered Prjokletiie mountains.
With the rebels worried that these bases, some less than a mile from the frontier, will be shelled, we were not allowed to know the camp's location or the commander's name. But this makeshift base - little more than a wide group of converted farm houses and tents - was a hive of activity.
Young recruits in new uniforms - mostly US or German camouflage pattern imported from Europe - clustered around demonstrators, brandishing machine-guns and anti-tank rocket launchers. During the afternoon loud detonations echoed from surrounding hills as recruits practised firing the rockets and mortars.
Many of them appeared stunned by the continuing ethnic cleansing which they have just seen.
"I ran from my house a week ago. I was working for an aid agency, I was a target," said Ms Giylinaze Sylia, from the northern Kosovo town of Pec. "I saw the police. They put masks over their faces; they went out and stole everything."
Ms Sylia has no news of her 74-year-old mother and younger sister who lived with her in the town, one of the first from which the population was expelled.
"I am very angry, very frustrated and very sad," she said. "Now I am a doctor, I trained originally as a pharmacist. I look after the soldiers when they are on the firing range in the afternoons, in case they get hurt. I prefer to train with a gun because then maybe I can fight."
More recruits arrive all the time along the dirt road that leads to the base, some from across western Europe, after last week's call to arms in which the KLA urged some of the 300,000 ethnic Albanian men among Europe's emigre population to return home to fight.
"Thousands of men are coming from everywhere," said the KLA's British spokesman, Mr Pleurat Sejdru. "We hope to launch a new offensive."
The hope of unit commanders is that this offensive will break through Serb lines to link up with at least one of five enclaves still being held by the guerrillas inside Kosovo. KLA officials say these enclaves are cut off, with thousands of civilians in each running out of food and medical supplies.
The KLA has urged the West to air drop supplies to prevent mass starvation. "We can fight, but we also have to look after our civilians," said a spokesman at its office in the Albanian capital, Tirana.
The new recruits are young, cheerful and inexperienced. The more seasoned units remain out of sight, on the border itself, where they fight daily duels with Serb forces.
Leading the recruits yesterday in weapons training was a man in his mid-30s called "Cowboy Jim", because his uniform is American. He also wears a camouflaged stetson hat.
Recruits are easy to find, with tens of thousands of Kosovans still streaming across the border in the most systematic campaign of ethnic deportation seen in Europe since the second World War.
"Volunteers are no problem, we have about 1,000 a day wanting to join," said the base commander. A thick-set man in his early 40s, he is a former officer of the Communist-era Yugoslav army - before it was purged of non-Serbs. He said he also fought for the mainly-Muslim Bosnian government forces in the war against Bosnian Serbs.
"We are training hard at all these camps. We are getting the force ready to make the punch," he said. Whether that punch will work is another matter.
Western military experts say the KLA remains short of experienced soldiers and the fire-power needed to take on the Yugoslav army.
"Tanks, artillery, that's the problem," said the commander. But he said the KLA was full of confidence following NATO air strikes and the impending US deployment of 24 of their most modern attack helicopter, the Apache, to Albania.
Albania is keeping its own threadbare forces carefully out of the way of the impending battle, and much of the border area is now, in effect, garrisoned by the KLA.
The West, meanwhile, has been turning a blind eye. At a second hilltop base yesterday a lone white jeep carrying monitors of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe rumbled up the winding mountain road as explosions rocked an adjacent hillside.
But the monitors did not stop to talk to the KLA or even get out of their jeep, merely turning around and going home.
The United States is considering supporting the KLA. A private company, Military Personnel Resources Incorporated (MPRI), made up of former US forces personnel, is ready to provide training to the guerrillas if Washington agrees.
MPRI made its name by providing the planning expertise in 1995 which led Croatia to clear Serbs from their province of Krajina.
If Kosovo is to be retaken, NATO would prefer to see KLA lives expended rather than its own. But undertaking direct training of the rebels would be politically risky, with Russia likely to demand the right to send Serbia compensatory military aid.