Please Click on: Why Greece should worry about guerrilla operations?
Greece’s last guerrilla war took place in 1946-49, when the Greek communists attempted to take over the country by force of arms. Government forces, aided by the US, defeated the insurgents in a bloody contest that cost Greece more dearly than three years of Nazi occupation between 1941 and 1944. Memories of the communist insurrection have faded with the passage of years. The Greek armed forces, thanks to NATO membership and decades of tension with neighboring Turkey culminating in the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, still remain oriented toward large-scale operations aimed to defend against a Turkish conventional attack. However, since the fall of communism in 1989 and the implosion of the Eastern Bloc, the security situation in the Balkans has gone through radical changes. The political collapse of Yugoslavia, and the vicious wars of separation that followed, have not only changed the map, returning us to an outline reminiscent of pre-WWI years, they have also nurtured new threats reminiscent of the “liberation wars” of the 1960s. Primary among these new “asymmetric” threats is the resurgence of Albanian nationalism and the emergence of irregular “freedom fighters” like those of the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army.