Partisans (Yugoslavia)

National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia
Participant in World War II in Yugoslavia
Flag of the Yugoslav Partisans
Active	1941–1945
Ideology	Communism, Marxism-Leninism Yugoslav national liberation
Leaders	Josip Broz Tito
Headquarters	mobile, attached to the Main Operational Group
Area of operations	Axis-occupied Yugoslavia
Strength	80,000–800,000 (see below)
Became	Yugoslav People's Army
Allies	Allied powers, National Liberation Movement (Albania)
Opponents	Axis powers, Germany, Italy, NDH, Bulgaria, Hungary, Chetniks, Balli Kombëtar
Battles and wars	Battle of Neretva, Battle of Sutjeska, Raid on Drvar, Battle of Belgrade, Syrmian Front (most notable)

The Yugoslav Partisans or the National Liberation Army, officially the National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia, was Europe's most effective anti-Axis resistance movement during World War II, often compared to the Polish resistance movement, albeit the latter was a mostly non-communist autonomous movement. The Yugoslav Resistance was led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia during World War II. Its commander was Marshal Josip Broz Tito.

One of two objectives of the movement, which was the military arm of the Unitary National Liberation Front (UNOF) coalition, led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) and represented by the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ), the Yugoslav wartime deliberative assembly, was to fight the occupying forces. Until British supplies began to arrive in appreciable quantities in 1944, the occupiers were the only source of arms. The other objective was to create a federal multi-ethnic communist state in Yugoslavia. To this end, the KPJ attempted to appeal to all the various ethnic groups within Yugoslavia, by preserving the rights of each group.

The objectives of the rival resistance movement which emerged some weeks earlier, the Chetniks, were the retention of the Yugoslav monarchy, ensuring the safety of ethnic Serb populations, and the establishment of a Greater Serbia through the ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs from territories they considered rightfully and historically Serbian. Relations between the two movements were uneasy from the start, but from October 1941 they degenerated into full-scale conflict. To the Chetniks, Tito's pan-ethnic policies seemed anti-Serbian, whereas the Chetniks' royalism was anathema to the communists. In the early part of the war Partisan forces were predominantly composed of Serbs. In that period names of Muslim and Croat commanders of Partisan forces had to be changed to protect them from their predominantly Serb colleagues.