A wounded Georgian woman lies in front of an apartment building, damaged by a Russian airstrike, in the northern Georgian town of Gori Photo: AP
The ground shook and a series of explosions rippled through the air. From the middle of a housing estate in the Georgian town of Gori a huge fireball rose into the sky, twisting and mushrooming as if in slow motion. Choking dust swirled above the debris, darkening the sky. A brief silence followed and then the screaming started.
Georgia conflict: Screams of the injured rise from residential streets
By Adrian Blomfield in Gori
For two days, Georgia has been convulsed by a Russian air and ground assault in a conflict that has escalated rapidly from a localised war against separatist rebels in South Ossetia into a full-scale military confrontation.
But this was the first time that Russian bombs had struck a residential area.
The fighter jets responsible for the devastation had been targeting a military barracks in the built-up outskirts of Gori, a Georgian town 15 miles from the Ossetian frontier. They missed.
Just one of their bombs struck the base. At least two others fell in a compound of long, low-slung apartment blocks, five of which were quickly reduced to blackened shells. A third hit a small secondary school, which crumbled to the ground in a pile of rubble and twisted girders.
From the gutted buildings, survivors began to emerge, some hobbling, others bleeding from shrapnel and flying glass, all covered in a cloak of soot and dust.
Then they brought out the dead.
In front of a row of garages, a corpse, covered in a chalk-like film, lay on the ground. Kneeling beside the body of her son, a middle-aged builder identified by neighbours as Iano, the white-haired woman cursed the Russians, then cursed God. Then she beseeched his forgiveness and cursed the Russians again.
“You have taken my boy, you pigs, you criminals,” she said in a low voice, before turning her face towards her dead son as she tenderly stroked his matted hair. “I loved you like I loved no other. Now be with God.”
Standing to one side, her frail husband propped himself up on a walking sticks and stared into space, blank incomprehension in his eyes.
Up a small flight of steps in a nearby courtyard, a young man, bare-chested and kneeling on the ground, cradled the head of his brother in his lap. Shaking off hands offered in comfort from neighbours, he moaned in agony and begged – in ever more frantic tones – for his brother to live.
Still wailing, he was hauled away from the body by Georgian troops who bundled the corpse into the back of a Lada. His face streaked in his brother’s blood, the man raced to keep up with the car, his hand repeatedly pawing the rear window.
Slowly, his legs buckling beneath him, he began to fall behind. Giving up the chase, he knelt unmoving in the middle of the road, his face staring in the direction of the receding car.
More dead were brought out of the buildings, among them a mother and her daughter who were laid side by side in the back of a military truck.
Those who survived stood in small groups on the road outside their shattered homes, bewilderment etched on their faces.
Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians, and insists that the offensive in Georgia is not war but a “peacekeeping mission”.
Few of the people of Gori believe that. So powerful were the bombs aimed at the barracks that they shattered windows in a half-mile radius. Even if all had hit their intended target, the chances of collateral damage would have been high.
As a lone fire engine battled the inferno, with flames spreading across the roofs of two blocks of flats, this small part of Gori began to resemble another scene of Russian military retribution: Grozny.
The Chechen capital was pounded into submission in 1999 on the orders of Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, with little regard for civilian life. By the time Chechen rebels lost the city, barely a single building stood intact, forcing residents to eke out an existence in cellars and basements for six years until Moscow finally began serious reconstruction in 2006.
While the bombing of Gori has not been remotely comparable, Grozny was in the back of many peoples’ minds as they took shelter.
“We know what the Russians are capable of,” said Nina Kogiddze, a teacher who was flung to her kitchen floor by the force of the blast as she was brewing coffee. “Do you think that when they fight wars, they abide by civilised rules? They hate Georgians. They would be happy to kill us all.”
No official death toll from the apartment bombings has been released as yet, but there can be no doubt that the casualty rates would have been much higher if most of Gori’s residents had not fled the previous day, after the first Russian bombs fell.
It was fortunate, too, that the school holidays were under way.
“If classes were in progress, we would have a hundred children dead,” said Givi, the headmaster of the Lyceum College, as he surveyed his devastated school.
Other Russian bombing raids in Gori killed at least two civilians in another block of flats in a nearby suburb.
On the road to Tskhinvali, South Ossetia’s ramshackle capital, and the main stronghold of the Moscow-backed rebels, Russian jets maintained their bombardment, strafing Georgian artillery positions in the fields near the frontier.
The rebels, who have been reinforced by Russian tanks and ground troops, claimed to have retaken the town after intense hand-to-hand fighting.
Georgia says it still controls a significant portion of Tskhinvali and claims to have shot down four Russian jets yesterday. Georgian officials showed to Western reporters the papers of one Russian pilot they claimed to have captured.
Russia also launched air strikes across Georgia’s wider territory for a second day, striking an airport at Kutaisi in the west and the country’s main Black Sea port of Poti.
“The Russians are now bombing civilian targets at will, including a port, an airport and a railway station where 17 people were killed,” said Shota Utiashvili, an interior ministry spokesman.
Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s pro-western president, was preparing to declare martial law, a process that would involve the full mobilisation of every man of fighting age, Mr Utiashvili said.
Against the might of the million-strong Russian army, it is unclear how effective such a strategy would be. Reservists have already been drafted onto the front line, but few have any battle experience and most have had just a week’s training.
When a bomb fell close to their positions, one company of new recruits scattered frantically for cover, ignoring pleas and orders from their commanders to remain in place.
“On Tuesday I was a bank clerk,” one fresh-faced reservist said. “Then they woke me up in the middle of the night and gave me half-an-hour to report. I’ve been up on the front line and I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
Given the challenges, it may prove difficult for Mr Saakashvili to sustain morale.
Already his tactics seem to have back-fired, analysts and diplomats say that he may have launched military actions with the intention of forcibly reclaiming South Ossetia, which broke away from Georgia in a short but brutal war 17 years ago. His gamble may have been that Russia would not intervene militarily.
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