Warriors and the brutal reality of Bosnia: ‘Nato held an exercise so we could make our show’

In November 1999 the BBC aired the two-part drama Warriors, about British soldiers on a peacekeeping mission in the Bosnian War. The drama was based on years of extensive research and made with the cooperation of the British Army. The show’s title comes from the Warrior armoured vehicles, eight of which the Army loaned to the production. Also on hand were around 40 members of the Royal Green Jackets, an infantry regiment that was deployed to Bosnia in the late 1990s, who took roles as background extras. The soldiers also helped train the actors – who included Matthew Macfadyen, Damian Lewis, and Ioan Gruffudd – and took the actors out on the town while on location in the Czech Republic.

The Royal Green Jackets, however, took a leave of absence on one particular day – when director Peter Kosminsky staged a mass grave scene. In the story, the British soldiers supervise an exchange of dead bodies between the Croats and Muslims. As peacekeepers, the Brits are forbidden to get involved but have to unload the mutilated, bagged-up remains of 98 Muslims from a truck and into the mass grave. After filming, Kosminsky found the soldier in charge – a warrant officer named Phil Jeffreys – having a contemplative smoke. “Bit close to the bone, guv’nor,” Jeffreys said. The soldiers had seen it happen in Vitez.

Indeed, Warriors (now finding a new audience on iPlayer) is frighteningly authentic: civilians crucified; children burned alive; British soldiers forced to hand over refugees, who are then marched off to be executed. “Everything in the show was real,” says Kosminsky. “We didn’t make any of it up.” 

Also on the iPlayer is a discussion about the serial between Kosminsky, Macfadyen, and Lewis. In preparation for the talk, Kosminsky watched Warriors for the first time as a viewer. “With everything going on in the world,” he says. “It seemed very contemporary in surprising ways.”

The Bosnian War – which took place between April 1992 and December 1995 – was fought between Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats, and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), part of the ongoing fallout from the breakup of Yugoslavia. A campaign of ethnic cleansing saw 2.2 million people – mostly Muslims – displaced. Around 100,000 people were killed. In 1995, Serbs massacred 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica – the worst atrocity in Europe since the Second World War.

British soldiers were first deployed in 1992 as part of a UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR). As peacekeepers, their role was to protect aid convoys and establish safe zones. “They were going out there to do good,” says Kosminsky. “They’d been trained to kill, and they were actually quite excited by the idea of going out to stop people being killed. But when they got there, they weren’t able to. They had to stand by because of the UNPROFOR mandate.” He adds: “They felt powerless to do any good. They were forced to spectate on something horrendous.”

The UNPROFOR mandate meant they weren’t allowed to interfere in the conflict – even helping to move refugees was seen as assisting the ethnic cleansing. As their captain says in Warriors: “We don’t take sides, we don’t move refugees. We are not here to start ethnic cleansing. We are not here to redraw the ethnic map of Bosnia… you are not allowed to fire unless your life is directly threatened.”

According to the National Army Museum, even the term “peacekeepers” was a misnomer. “The UN troops were often referred to as ‘peacekeepers’, but this was not their role,” says the museum’s website. “There was no peace to keep in Bosnia, and UNPROFOR did not have the mandate to enforce a ceasefire.”

“They had to watch neighbour butcher neighbour in a particularly one-sided and bloody civil war,” says Kosminsky. “It affected them profoundly.”

Kosminsky – who came from a current affairs and documentary background – was originally inspired by news footage of a soldier in Bosnia. The soldier was toeing the party line about their peacekeeping efforts, but Kosminsky was struck by something. “What I saw in his eyes was despair,” he says.

Kosminsky and his team began a years-long process of researching and interviewing soldiers who’d been there. He recalls one story – told to him personally by a warrant officer – about a Muslim woman who forced her decapitated baby into the soldiers’ hands, as if they’d be able to fix it. “I sat in the canteen at the army base in Warminster and he started to describe this incident,” says Kosminsky. “He was a very tough character. He became very emotional and so did I. It was terribly upsetting. We talked for over an hour and I said to him, ‘How are you coping? What do people say when you tell them about this? He looked at me like I was an idiot. He said, ‘I’ve never told anyone this.’ A lot of these people were talking for the first time about these matters.”

The stories were conflated – some characters in Warriors experience the events of several men – but it’s all true. Matthew Macfadyen – in his first filmed role – plays Pte James, a big-hearted Scouser who’s hit by an onslaught of trauma. Damian Lewis – also a relative unknown at the time – is Lt Loughrey, who leaves behind a pregnant fiancé and has an affair with an interpreter. And Ioan Gruffudd plays Lt Feeley, who falls in love with Almira, a married Bosniak woman – an ultimately doomed relationship.

It took two years to convince the British Army to help and seven years overall to get the project made. One major issue was getting permission to use the army’s Warrior vehicles. “You can’t buy Warriors on the open market,” says Kosminsky. “The manufacturer said they manufacture for the Army.”

Not only did Kosminsky’s team have to persuade the Army to loan out the Warriors, the Warriors then had to travel from a base in Bad Fallingbostel, Germany, to the filming location in the Czech Republic – along with the Royal Green Jacket crew and support vehicles in case the Warriors broke down. “Which they did all the time,” says Kosminsky.

There were further complications: the Czech Republic had only joined NATO a few months earlier, and there was law – dating from the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 – that no foreign soldier was allowed on Czech soil. “We had to persuade the Czech government to allow in military vehicles belonging to a foreign power,” says Kosminsky. “Remember, this wasn’t that long after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the end, the only way it was possible was through Nato. This was bizarre. After much discussion and persuasion, Britain and the Czech Republic decided to hold a Nato exercise, and the purpose of the exercise was to make our show. There was a vote in the Czech parliament to pass a special bill to allow this Nato exercise to take place on their territory – to allow the Warriors to be brought in from Germany, to allow us to make our show.”

Kosminsky recalls being stood in the Czech town of Turnov when the Warriors finally rolled in. “I remember standing there in the snowstorm at night,” he says. “We never knew if the Warriors would actually arrive until they arrived. Suddenly, we heard this roar of engines. They’re bloody noisy, the Warriors. These eight vehicles plus support vehicles started driving into the location – it was very moving because I’d been trying for seven years to set this thing up.”

One of the drama’s most powerful moments comes when they discover a massacre in Ahmići, a village where Croats killed 120 Bosniaks. Among the dead is a little boy, apparently burned alive. One of the soldiers had been playing Nintendo with the boy just days earlier. Damian Lewis’s Loughrey, realising that Croat neighbours had watched the massacre – and are still in their homes across the village – loses his composure. The scene plays on the real event, when Lieutenant-Colonel Bob Stewart – now a Conservative MP for Beckenham – discovered the massacre site on April 22 1993. “I found mass graves,” Stewart said, recalling the events in 2014. “I will never forget it.”

Stewart, writing about the massacre following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, recalled how he showed the Ahmići site to members from the Security Council of the United Nations. “Some were immediately sick which was predictable,” he wrote. “It was a foul situation.” Stewart detailed other experiences in Bosnia: “I saw villages and towns full of civilians being shelled by artillery; fathers, mothers and children lined up and shot outside their houses; and even one person crucified and then shot (I believe) on a barn door.” The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Republic of Yugoslavia was established afterwards. Stewart later gave evidence at four tribunals relating to war crimes.

The production of Warriors was not that far removed from the real events. Kosminsky hired actors from the region, some of whom were personally involved or affected by the war. “All the people we cast were from the former Yugoslavia,” says Kosminsky. “Partly because they had to speak Serbo-Croat. I wanted that authenticity. I didn’t want British actors doing silly accents. So, you have these young British actors – Matthew, Damian, and Ioan – playing young British soldiers coming into a place of which they knew virtually nothing. Opposite them are Yugoslavs – actors playing Croats, Serbs, or Muslims. Many had been combatants in the battle.”

At the time Warriors was made, NATO was bombing Serbia and Kosovo as part of the Kosovo War. Branka Katic – a Serbian actress who played Almira – would phone her mother in Belgrade every night. “To check her mother was still alive,” says Kosminsky. “Bombs were being dropped on Belgrade by Brits – and by day Branka was playing a Muslim who’s in love with a British soldier... When you’re working on something as immediate as this, when the events you’re depicting are as close to the time when you’re shooting, with authentic people, all kinds of complications occur.”

Talking to the Daily Telegraph back in 1999, special effects supervisor Ken Lailey described how he saw his SFX work playing out for real on CNN. “I was watching the news,” he said at the time. “And I sat there with my mouth open, absolutely chilled that it was exactly what we had filmed.”

Warriors’ most shattering moment, however, happens away from the bombs. Macfadyen’s Pte James is charged with clambering onto that truck full of bodies – the same bodies that will be lumped into the mass grave – to find the one survivor buried among them. Black goop – the residue of 98 dead – drips from beneath the truck. James later describes how the bodies beneath his feet felt like “walking on pillows that move” and that he can no longer defrost a chicken. “The smell of it and the feel of it,” he says – all taken from real accounts.

Macfadyen’s character personifies Warriors’ portrait of masculinity – a man trained to fight and protect but rendered impotent. It erupts in a searing, nerve-seizing moment, as Pte James clambers out of the truck and confronts the Croat commander responsible for the corpses. James tries to provoke the Croat – by exposing himself and daring the Croat to rape him. “That came straight from an interview,” says Kosminsky.

Macfadyen is better known for mild-mannered roles – most obviously Tom Wambsgans, the self-serving posho from Succession – but he’s a force of nature in Warriors. Nails-hard but cracked inside, he’s a sunken soul and painfully vulnerable. The look that Kosminsky described from news footage – the look in the soldier’s eyes that originally inspired Warriors – is etched onto Macfadyen for the latter part of the serial. Indeed, as the soldiers return home after six months, prone to flashbacks and violent outbursts, the depiction of trauma is pinpoint accurate: the isolation and detachment, like they exist on another plane of reality.

Warriors won multiple awards, including a Bafta for Best Drama Serial. But not everyone was impressed. One of the principal actors – whom Kosminsky declines to name – came face-to-face with a senior army officer at a party. The officer squared up to him. “Because he was so upset with the depiction of people falling apart,” says Kosminsky. “The things we showed – one officer injuring his wife in the middle of a flashback, the officer holding a gun to his ahead and having to be stopped by a junior soldier, and the story of Pte James, who was a Liverpool fan and became traumatised sitting in the Kop – those are real events. This senior officer understood so little about the soldiers over whom he had authority – and what they had actually gone through – that he thought it was a grossly misleading depiction.”

That’s perhaps why Warriors was an important work of real-life drama. “We talk glibly about peacekeeping,” says Kosminsky. “I wanted to try and convey what the reality of peacekeeping can be like for young squaddies who came back very, very changed by the experience.”

Warriors is streaming on BBC iPlayer