The lands that today comprise Croatia were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the close of World War I. In 1918, the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes formed a kingdom known after 1929 as Yugoslavia. Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, although it took four years of sporadic but often bitter fighting to expel Yugoslav forces. CIA’s World Factbook is a public resource providing basic intelligence on 258 world entities, including country profiles and one-page factsheets. Le