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Local residents pass by a damaged building in Gori, Georgia
Local residents pass by a damaged building in Gori, Georgia. Photograph: Sergei Grits/AP
Local residents pass by a damaged building in Gori, Georgia. Photograph: Sergei Grits/AP

'I got my children out minutes before the bombs fell'

This article is more than 15 years old
Stories of survival and destruction from residents of the Georgian town hit by Russian jets that missed their target

There wasn't much left of Kostia Asershvili's living room. His chandelier sat in the middle of a glass-strewn carpet. The windows in the children's bedroom had been blown out.

Next door had fared worse. Kostia's neighbour was killed when a bomb landed on his roof.

Across the road, other blocks of flats in the town of Gori had suffered the same fate: scorched and twisted metal lay in the courtyard, surrounded by clothes, bricks, pillow feathers - and the smell of burnt flesh.

"I was lucky. I got my children out 15 minutes before the bombs fell," Kostia said, showing off his wonky door lintels and broken windows. He added: "I don't know who's to blame for this war. The only thing I know is that it isn't me."

Ostensibly, the Russian jets that bombed Kostia's house were aiming for a Georgian tank base a couple of miles away. The bombs did not reach their target.

Perhaps they weren't meant to. Instead, they landed on a residential district of Gori - the town that has borne the brunt of Russia's vengeful bombardment of Georgia after President Mikhail Saakashvili's unsuccessful attempt last week to seize back the breakaway province of South Ossetia.

Georgian tanks rolled into the mountainous enclave, 14 miles away from Gori, last Thursday; on Sunday they withdrew from South Ossetia's capital, Tskhinvali. Despite having turfed the Georgians out, Russia today continued to bomb targets beyond the conflict zone all across Georgia.

With the tiny country's air defences flattened, the Russian air force can now fly insouciantly across Georgian airspace. Georgia yesterday said Russian planes had launched 50 attacks overnight - a claim Moscow denies.

Two Russian fighters did lob bombs on to a disused, communist-era aerodrome near the border with Azerbaijan; others hit a radar station in the capital Tbilisi, sending panic-stricken residents fleeing from their beds at dawn, and crippling the international airport.

"It was 5am. We saw the planes loop over the forest. They then released their rockets. There was a huge cloud of dust," Fridon Akobia, a 41-year-old border guard on the river crossing into Georgia, said. He added: "We didn't know where the bombers were going to hit."

Russia's indiscriminate bombing strategy appears to have no real military objective. Instead it looks like a vindictive post-facto exercise in collective punishment.

In Gori, residents returned to examine their homes, wrecked in the weekend bombing. The five-story block across the road from Kostia's was a blackened ruin: the upper stories had disappeared, its neat vine trellis staved in as if by a giant fist.

"We lived on the fifth floor. We fled just before the attack started," Nana Tetsladzi, 35, said. Her husband, Giorgy, 35, got out too. But Nana's pregnant neighbour Marca, who lived below on the second floor, wasn't quick enough.

"She and her husband were both killed. I don't know what happened to their seven-year-old boy," she said. "He may be in hospital." In the courtyard were the mangled remains of Marca's white car. She had been trying to flee in it when the Russians struck.

Nana opened up her garage to show off her surviving possessions: a dust-covered television set, blankets, and a rack of glass jars. "This is all we have left," she said, tearfully.

Most inhabitants of Gori have fled. Some clearly left in a hurry: down one sidestreet, someone had left a generously sized red bra hanging in the front garden. A few bakeries remained open today, churning out loaves of delicious round bread. Most of the town is undamaged; its shops and bombed market are shut.

In the afternoon a fleet of ambulances drove past Gori's main square - adorned with a statue of Stalin, who was born here. Among those who stayed, the mood was anger, directed not just at neighbouring Russia but also at the west, which, they said, had failed spectacularly to help Georgia in its moment of need.

"If Europe and the US don't stop Russia, in 20 years time you'll see a new wall going up in Berlin," Paata Aspanadze - who had driven to Gori to visit his elderly mother - warned. "Russia wants to get back its empire. Today they kill us and my family; tomorrow they will kill you."

Paata did not agree that Saakashvili's attempt to reclaim South Ossetia was, as many have suggested, a reckless and ill-thought-out gamble bound to provoke Russia's wrath. Instead, he painted Georgia's conflict with Russia as nothing less than a struggle for survival.

"If we say to Russia, 'OK, have two bits of Georgia,' then Georgia's independence will be finished,' he said.

Others decried Russia's hypocrisy, for encouraging separatism in Georgia while ruthlessly crushing it in next-door Chechnya, the scene of two brutal Kremlin wars.

"Russia is completely to blame. Georgia is an independent, sovereign country. They are just trying to grab our land," Paata's brother Nukri said during a family reunion over fizzy Georgian juice at his mother's upstairs flat.

"Why is the world not doing anything? Russia is using the same excuse, of protecting its citizens, that Hitler used in 1939."

It is so far not yet clear what impact this crisis will have on the political fortunes of Saakashviili, Georgia's pro-US leader. Moscow has demanded that he step down, accusing him of genocide and other crimes.

Nobody doubts that the conflict has set back Georgia's attempt to join Nato by years, if not decades. At the same time, Georgia is more isolated than ever before. The country's international airport is scarcely operational: to reach Georgia, you have to fly via Armenia or Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. A bumpy, if picturesque, 10-hour car journey then threads through wine-growing eastern Georgia, past horse-drawn carts transporting melons through fields of yellow sunflowers.

But the abiding emotion in Georgia at the moment is fear – fear of where the Russian jets may strike on their next languid bombing run.

"People are scared," said Lika Teravze, a parliamentary researcher in Tbilisi. "Russian bombers woke us at 4.50am this morning. We ran out into the street to see what the noise was. We were looking into the sky wondering where the bombs would fall."

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