Into South Ossetia with dull-eyed Alik

It's all been a bit of a surreal blur since I arrived in Gori on Saturday afternoon, just in time to see the horrific results of Russian bombing. Was Moscow really dropping bombs on apartment blocks in another country?

When Mikhail Saakashvili, the Georgian president, suggested this could happen at an interview a couple of months ago I laughed at him - ­ it seemed absurd. Now here was a Georgian woman weeping over her dead son as the apartment block behind her smouldered in the aftermath of a Russian bombing attack.
 
The real horror came on Sunday, though. A colleague and I decided to get as far as we could towards the border with South Ossetia, the breakaway province at the conflict's centre.

Anyone who had travelled north from Gori in the morning had reported sniper fire and gun battles, and we vowed to turn back at the first sign of trouble. But there was none. So we drove, and drove, right up to the abandoned Georgian checkpoint at the de facto border.

A small puppy paced terrified around the inside of a blackened hut; a calendar emblazoned with a photograph of a youthful Saakashvili hung forlornly on the wall. All around was eerie silence.

We decided to move further, towards the Russian checkpoint. As we approached it, we could see Tskhinvali, capital of South Ossetia, below us in the valley, plumes of smoke rising from its shattered centre. We planned to ask about the situation and then turn back.

But the Russian checkpoint turned out to be an Ossetian post manned by a ramshackle band of Ossetian paramilitaries who looked like the bad guys out of a Russian B-movie about the Chechen war - ­ bearded, toothless men wielding their weapons with glee and barking orders at us in heavily accented Russian. The Russians themselves were nowhere to be seen.
 
All our entreaties to be allowed to return to Gori were turned down, and the Ossetians insisted on escorting us into the ruined provincial capital. Our driver, a Georgian, would be killed, they said, and they'd decide what to do with us afterwards.

It had been a horrific misjudgment on our part to bring a Georgian anywhere near people who had just seen their city destroyed by Georgians.

When I first visited Tskhinvali two years ago, it was a sleepy, boring place with a population of only 10,000, but with a colourful separatist leadership and interesting geopolitical implications. Then, few editors were interested in a place they couldn't pronounce and had never heard of.
 
Now, by a combination of accident and idiocy, my colleague and I were the first Western journalists to get in after the Georgian bombardment and the Russian counter-attack. There was a scene of devastation ­ - the town was in ruins, the charred remains of Georgian tanks littered the streets and women wailed over the dead.

But the most disturbing thing was the faces of the Ossetian fighters. Our captor, Alik, who told us he hadn't slept for six days, was a volatile youth, brimming with fury. He told us of the horrors the Georgians had visited on Tskhinvali and promised a devastating counter-offensive and massacre.

"Nobody wanted to help us," Alik yelled. "The UN and the US sat there while we got bombed. It was the Russians who saved us. One more day and this whole place would no longer exist, and nor would any of us."

It took a small miracle to get our Georgian driver out alive. On Tuesday, as the war came to a close, there were reports of massacres in Georgian villages inside the conflict zone ­ Ossetian militias checking the ethnicity of residents and treating all Georgians to a bullet in the head.

It's impossible to verify, but having looked into the dulled eyes of Alik, a man who lost all fear and all humanity during the conflict, the rumours are not hard to believe. ·