A two-man SAS reconnaissance team was covertly inserted into the UN " safe area " of Srebrenica where a Dutch UN battalion was supposedly protecting the population and thousands of Bosniak refugees from threatening Bosnian Serb forces . The SAS team attempted to call in airstrikes as Serbian forces attacked but were frustrated by UN bureaucracy and ineptitude , they were finally ordered to withdraw and the city fell to the Bosnian-Serb army led by General Ratko Mladić in July 1995 , resulting in the genocidal execution of some 8,000 cilivans . The SAS patrol commander wrote a series of newspaper articles about the tragedy , but was successfully taken to court by the MoD in 2002 to stop the publication
genocidal execution of some 8,000 cilivans
Srebrenica massacre
History of the Special Air Service