Events
A special operation was planned and executed by the federal military commanders to entice rebel forces from besieged Grozny. That plan involved leading the Chechen separatist fighters to believe that a safe exit would be possible out of the city to the mountains in the south of Chechnya. On February 2, 2000, they were allowed to leave the city and were then caught in minefields and attacked by federal artillery and the air force. Fleeing the ambush, a large group of armed fighters arrived in Katyr-Yurt.
Journalists who managed to report on the area confirmed the use, by the Russians, of the vacuum bomb on the town. Vacuum bombs are dropped by parachute, and, when a couple of meters from the ground, release a cloud of petrol gas. The gas then reacts with the air, causing an explosion and then a vacuum, sucking away oxygen from living people, thus killing them. They are banned by the Geneva Conventions.
The residents, including many civilian refugees who had fled the fighting Grozny, were not warned in advance or told of safe exit routes by the Russian side. The sudden heavy bombardment of the village began in the early hours of the morning and subsided at approximately 3 p.m. At that time, many of the villagers attempted to leave, believing that the military had granted a safe passage out of the village. As they were leaving by road, planes appeared and bombed the cars.
The final atrocity came in the afternoon of February 4. The Russians told the Chechens they would be able to leave in a convoy of buses with white flags attached. The convoy which the Russians themselves dispatched for the Chechens was then bombed by the Russians.
Ultimately, the bombing lasted for two days and resulted in the deaths of at least 170 civilians (some 363 according to one estimate), all of them formally citizens of Russia. Many more were injured.
Read more about this topic: Bombing Of Katyr-Yurt
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them.
Still, you can’t listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
““The ideal reasoner,” he remarked, “would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.””
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)