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:
“That’s the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“If I have renounced the search of truth, if I have come into the port of some pretending dogmatism, some new church, some Schelling or Cousin, I have died to all use of these new events that are born out of prolific time into multitude of life every hour. I am as bankrupt to whom brilliant opportunities offer in vain. He has just foreclosed his freedom, tied his hands, locked himself up and given the key to another to keep.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)