Men and women were separated, with many of the men massacred or detained in the camps. The women were kept in various detention centers where they had to live in intolerably unhygienic conditions, where they were mistreated in many ways including being raped repeatedly. Serb nationalist soldiers or policemen would come to these detention centres, select one or more women, take them out and rape them. The Serbs had the upper hand due to heavier weaponry (despite less manpower) that was given to them by the Yugoslav People's Army and established control over most areas where Serbs had relative majority but also in areas where they were a significant minority in both rural and urban regions excluding the larger towns of Sarajevo and Mostar. The Serb nationalist military and political leadership received the most accusations of war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) many of which have been confirmed after the war in ICTY trials. Most of the capital Sarajevo was predominantly held by the Bosniaks. In the 44 months of the siege, terror against Sarajevo residents varied in intensity, but the purpose remained the same: inflict suffering on civilians to force the Bosnian authorities to accept Serb demands. The VRS surrounded it (alternatively, the Serb forces situated themselves in the areas surrounding Sarajevo the so-called Ring around Sarajevo), deploying troops and artillery in the surrounding hills in what would become the longest siege in the history of modern warfare lasting nearly 4 years. Throughout the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina, mosques and other islamic-structures were systematically destroyed by Serb and Croat armed forces. Among the most important losses were two mosques in Banja Luka which includes the Arnaudija and Ferhadija mosques. Most of the Bosniaks speak the Bosnian language, a South Slavic language of the Western South Slavic subgroup. Standard Bosnian is considered a variety of Serbo-Croatian, as mutually intelligible with the Croatian and Serbian languages which are all based on the Shtokavian dialect. As such, Serbo-Croatian is an arbitrary term applied to a language spoken by several ethnic groups, including the Bosniaks, and is for various reasons controversial for native speakers who do not use the term. As result, paraphrases such as "Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB)" or "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS)" tend to be used in English on occasion.