Late in the afternoon of July 11, 1995, the Bosnian Serb army, under the command of General Ratko Mladic, seized the northeastern Bosnia town of Srebrenica. Declared a “safe area” by the United Nations two years earlier, the predominately Muslim community had swollen from a prewar population of 9,000 to over 40,000, many of whom had been “cleansed” from elsewhere in Bosnia. As Mladic's troops swarmed over the town, the women, children, elderly, and many of the men took refuge two kilometers away in the United Nations's Srebrenica headquarters, staffed by a Dutch battalion, in the village of Potocari. Meanwhile, the remaining Srebrenica men and boys—some 10,000 to 15,000—fled through the woods on foot, trying to reach Muslim-controlled territory, nearly 40 miles away.