Trailed by Tanks, Bosnians Face Exodus Without End : Balkans: Homeless refugees in doomed town steel themselves for yet another move in their tragic flight.

As mortar shells crash on the outskirts of this Muslim city, Tifa Cosic ponders the next destination on her family’s journey through progressive stages of suffering and terror.

Her husband was sliced to death by shrapnel two months ago while defending their lakeside home in Jajce, leaving her with four young children to care for amid the unrelenting onslaught of Bosnia’s Serbian rebels.

Last week, when Jajce fell, Cosic and her children fled on foot through forests and mountains to the village of Konavlje, chased as they made their harrowing four-day escape by Serbian shells and sniper fire.

When the Serbs followed with tanks and cannon, the Cosices and 40,000 other expelled Muslims and Croats found the strength to move farther south, arriving en masse at Travnik, already inundated with earlier victims of the Serbs’ reviled tactic of “ethnic cleansing.”

As each major Bosnian city on the path between Serbia and rebel-held areas of Croatia has been shelled into submission, the victors have driven out all Muslims and Croats to guard against insurrection that could eventually undermine Serbian rule over the vast tracts they plan to annex to Serbia. Jajce is the latest conquest. Its residents--including the Cosices--are only a handful of the 2 million civilians who have been displaced, wounded or killed in the expansion process.

Now, after a sleepless weekend on the floor of an unheated schoolhouse choked with the smell of unwashed bodies, excrement and fear, Cosic has been roused from exhaustion by approaching gun blasts to realize that her family’s harrowing journey may have only begun.

“We just keep going from one place to another,” said the 35-year-old mother, dazed and defeated by the sorrowful exodus in which hundreds from Jajce are believed to have died. “We are not safe here, either, but we don’t know where else to go.”

Travnik, where the prewar population of 70,000 has swollen to more than 100,000, is widely seen as the next target on the Serbian rebels’ march toward the capital of Sarajevo, less than 50 miles away. In a pincers movement from the north and east, Serbian forces have captured 70% of Bosnia-Herzegovina since launching their deadly offensive in March and have given every indication they will roll over Travnik very soon.

The precursors of conquest abound in Travnik, a once-scenic, multiethnic city in the mossy hills that flank the Lasva River. Windows everywhere have been shattered by the daily shelling. The mosque’s minaret is gouged on the north side. Parks, hillsides and play fields have been dug up to provide enough space for the fallen defenders’ graves.

At the city’s main intersections, road signs serve only as reminders of where Bosnia’s besieged Muslims can no longer go: Jajce, Kljuc and Kotor Varos, now in Serbian hands. The cherished cities of Mostar and Sarajevo, cut off by another flank of the meandering 1,000-mile-long front line.

Already the exodus from Travnik has begun, with more than half of the 40,000 Jajce refugees having left for somewhat safer venues such as Zenica to the east and the border region with Croatia, a longer and more dangerous journey south.

Those lucky enough to have salvaged a tractor, motorbike or battered compact car during their flight from Jajce now trundle along the last two escape routes from Travnik, their vehicles piled precariously with children, bags and boxes. On the rutted mountain track to Gornji Vakuf, muddy sheep and donkeys laden with firewood evacuate to the south, prodded along by peasants aware that refuge in Travnik can only be fleeting.

The tidal wave of Bosnians displaced by the 7-month-old war has gripped international relief workers with fears about the impending winter. A shrinking number of cities still in the hands of government forces have been inundated with “ethnic-cleansing” victims, many of whom may have to move elsewhere as the heavily armed Serbian guerrillas advance.

One international refugee worker said his agency plans to move its warehouse from nearby Vitez east to Zenica to catch up with the roving refugees and to escape the shelling drawing ever nearer.

Meanwhile, the homeless in doomed Travnik are steeling themselves for another move.

“Those fleeing Jajce were abused in every way. They were shot at, shelled, robbed of what little they tried to take away with them,” said Samija Kanafija, a civil defense worker trying to organize aid for the 1,400 displaced at the abandoned schoolhouse, one of a dozen refugee centers in Travnik. “We’ve had refugees here for more than two months, although it is not very safe here, either. When the shelling is heavy, we have to move everyone to the west side of the building, which has no windows that can break and scatter glass.”

With so many Jajce refugees despairing of where else to go, the school’s few toilets and washbasins have been dangerously overwhelmed. The risk of disease and epidemics hangs palpably in the crowded and frigid rooms, where upward of 50 people share body heat and illness under too few blankets on floors covered with cardboard.

Relief agencies like the Muslim-supported Mehamet organization and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees have been trucking food, blankets and medicine into Travnik across 200 miles of steep and muddy mountain tracks.

Although Travnik is a cold and ill-prepared haven, many of those chased here by war and “ethnic cleansing” say they will stay because they have no place else to go.

Hazi Lozic was released only a week ago from the notorious Serb-run Manjaca detention camp north of Jajce, where his jailers beat him, mutilated him with a staple gun and fed him so little that he dropped from 207 pounds to less than 128 during four months of imprisonment. He last saw his wife and daughter at their home in Kljuc when he and other Muslim men were rounded up for internment in June; camp survivors have no means of determining the whereabouts or well-being of loved ones from Serb-held cities.

“How can I leave here when I don’t know where my family is? Besides, where would I go?” asked the wizened Muslim, who is only 44 years old. “We are already exhausted, and the mortars landing so close here scare us. But we have no choice but to wait and hope.”