They Are Killing Us All

By Paul Quinn-Judge/Beslan

Sometimes it is the gift of children to keep their parents strong. Elena Kasumova felt her hope dying as she huddled last Friday with her son Timur, 9, in the sweltering gym of Beslan school No. 1. The hostage nightmare was into its third day: many children had stripped to their underwear, some fainted from thirst, and others drank their urine. The 16 guerrillas Kasumova could see, mostly Chechens in their 20s, were by now tired and tense. The ceiling beams were draped with bombs. Some were hanging so low that the taller women banged their heads on them as they went to the toilet. From the bombs came tangled wires snaking through the tight rows of children and connected to two spring-loaded detonator pedals held down by the feet of two guerrillas. If either man allowed his foot to stray, the hostages were told, the room would explode. "Bear this in mind," one of the guerrillas said, referring to the Russian commandos who surrounded the building. "They are planning a storm. We will defend you to the last bullet and then blow ourselves up. We have nothing to lose. We came here to die."

So it fell to Timur to encourage his mother as best he could. He massaged her feet and kissed her. He told her stories about all the water and juice they would drink when it was finally over. "He was so good to me," says Kasumova, a department head at the school, of her son, who, like the other children, became a soldier that day.

Just after 1 p.m. the explosions came. "A wave of burning hot air hit me," Kasumova says. "I saw two severed legs lying next to me." Through the smoke, she saw children climbing out a window. She and Timur clambered through the opening and ran. "The guerrillas opened fire on us, and I saw one child go down and then another."

Russian special forces returned the rebel fire, joined by armed locals--frantic fathers and uncles who, one general said, "got in the way." The first explosions were followed by more, until the roof of the gymnasium collapsed. Half-naked children, some burned or bleeding, streamed out of the school as helicopters directed fire at the building. Some terrorists escaped, according to police, after swapping their camouflage uniforms for warm-up suits. In the mayhem, one young woman who made it to safety, shocked and disheveled, wailed, "They are killing us all!"

By the time it was over, more than 300 hostages had died, and more may lie buried in the rubble. The massacre was the most ghastly episode in a terrorist spree that has shattered public confidence in the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had built an image as a leader whose uncompromising toughness could bring security to Russians. For more than a decade, the Kremlin has waged a brutal war to prevent the secession of the republic of Chechnya. But it has done little to defuse the lethal determination of Chechen terrorists, who Moscow says have links to Islamic fundamentalist groups, including al-Qaeda.

The latest terrorist onslaught began two weeks ago with some 150 rebels briefly taking over two districts of Grozny, the Chechen capital, and killing at least 120. Three days later, a blast at a Moscow bus stop injured four. The explosion of two passenger planes the same day, believed to be the work of two Chechen suicide bombers, left 90 dead, and finally, on Aug. 31, a woman blew herself up outside a busy Moscow metro station, killing eight others.

That was all a mere prelude to the atrocity that began the next day. For the first day of school in Beslan, a midsize town of 30,000 located about 900 miles from Moscow, parents brought snacks for the children. Students brought flowers for their teachers, and some carried balloons. They were just lining up in the schoolyard when dozens of men in black ski masks and camouflage appeared. "This is a seizure!" they shouted, as panicked families tried to flee. A few lucky children hid behind heating-system boilers and got away; the rest were herded into the gym. When a parent tried to calm the families down, a guerrilla walked over, put his assault rifle to the man's head and killed him. The guerrillas ordered some girls to clean up the blood.

Despite Putin's pledge not to storm the school, special forces and other crack troops came pouring into the surrounding area. To avoid being overwhelmed by narcotic gas like their comrades had been in the October 2002 Moscow theater siege--in which 41 terrorists and 129 hostages died--the rebels quickly smashed the school's windows. After reviewing the situation, an officer from the secretive Alpha antiterrorist unit told a senior Beslan legal figure that the Moscow theater siege "was a kindergarten compared to this."

The rebels were furious that Putin would not negotiate with them. "No one will have a single mouthful of water until he contacts us," the Chechen leader announced. Finally, he allowed a bucket of water to be brought in. People dunked boys' white shirts and girls' pinafores into the bucket and passed the wet clothes down the rows so each hostage could squeeze and suck a little water out of them. But the children would not stay quiet as ordered. The fighters stood a male hostage against a wall. "If you don't shut up, we'll kill him. After that, we will kill a woman, then a child." The terrorists rejected offers of safe passage, of swapping children for adult hostages and even of food and water, fearing they could be drugged or the delivery could provide cover for an attack. Twenty-six women with babies were allowed to leave; at least one had to choose which child she would leave behind.

On Friday morning, a deal was struck for members of the rescue service to remove some corpses from the gym. Dressed in red-and blue-striped coveralls, with the initials of the search-and-rescue service prominently displayed on their backs, six officers approached the entrance. The men weren't wearing bulletproof vests or carrying guns as they arrived in front of the school to pick up the bodies at 1:05 p.m. That's when two great explosions ripped the air and the final battle began. The security forces appeared unprepared for the chaos, implying that the government had not abandoned its commitment to negotiate. But something had gone awry.

The government said that Russian forces killed 26 captors but that some of the terrorists may have escaped. Putin appeared on television and pledged to mobilize the nation against the "total, brutal and full-scale war" being waged on Russia. For the children of Beslan, it has already arrived.