khosq.com

TBILISI, GEORGIA – Virtually everyone
believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly provoked a
Russian invasion on August 7, 2008, when he sent troops into the
breakaway district of South Ossetia. “The warfare began Aug. 7 when
Georgia launched a barrage targeting South Ossetia,” the Associated
Press reported over the weekend in typical fashion.

Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn't start it on August 7,
nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August
6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian
villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the
two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its
invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the
Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki
tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war.

Regional expert, German native, and former European Commission
official Patrick Worms was recently hired by the Georgian government as
a media advisor, and he explained to me exactly what happened when I
met him in downtown Tbilisi. You should always be careful with the
version of events told by someone on government payroll even when the
government is as friendly and democratic as Georgia's. I was lucky,
though, that another regional expert, author and academic Thomas Goltz,
was present during Worms' briefing to me and signed off on it as
completely accurate aside from one tiny quibble.

Goltz has been writing about the Caucasus region for almost 20
years, and he isn't on Georgian government payroll. He earns his living
from the University of Montana and from the sales of his books Azerbaijan Diary, Georgia Diary and Chechnya Diary.
Goltz experienced these three Caucasus republics at their absolute
worst, and he knows the players and the events better than just about
anyone. Every journalist in Tbilisi seeks him out as the old hand who
knows more than the rest of us put together, and he wanted to hear
Patrick Worms' spiel to reporters in part to ensure its accuracy.

“You,” Worms said to Goltz just before he started to flesh out the
real story to me, “are going to be bored because I'm going to give some
back story that you know better than I do.”

“Go,” Goltz said. “Go.”

The back story began at least as early as the time of the Soviet
Union. I turned on my digital voice recorder so I wouldn't miss
anything that was said.

Patrick Worms

“A key tool that the Soviet Union used to keep its empire together,”
Worms said to me, “was pitting ethnic groups against one another. They
did this extremely skillfully in the sense that they never generated
ethnic wars within their own territory. But when the Soviet Union
collapsed it became an essential Russian policy to weaken the states on
its periphery by activating the ethnic fuses they planted.

A poster on a wall in Tbilisi, Georgia

“They tried that in a number of countries. They tried it in the
Baltic states, but the fuses were defused. Nothing much happened. They
tried it in Ukraine. It has not happened yet, but it's getting hotter.
They tried it in Moldova. There it worked, and now we have Transnitria.
They tried it in Armenia and Azerbaijan and it went beyond their
wildest dreams and we ended up with a massive, massive war. And they
tried it in two territories in Georgia, which I'll talk about in a
minute. They didn't try it in Central Asia because basically all the
presidents of the newly independent countries were the former heads of
the communist parties and they said we're still following your line, Kremlin, we haven't changed very much.”

He's right about the massive war between Armenia and Azerbaijan,
though few outside the region know much about it. Armenians and Azeris
very thoroughly transferred Azeris and Armenians “back” to their
respective mother countries after the Soviet Union collapsed through
pogroms, massacres, and ethnic-cleansing. Hundreds of thousands of
refugees fled savage communal warfare in terror. The Armenian military
still occupies the ethnic-Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh region in
southwestern Azerbaijan. It's another so-called “frozen conflict” in
the Caucasus region waiting to thaw. Moscow takes the Armenian side and
could blow up Nagorno-Karabakh, and subsequently all of Azerbaijan, at
any time. After hearing the strident Azeri point of view on the
conflict for a week before I arrived in Georgia, I'd say that
particular ethnic-nationalist fuse is about one millimeter in length.

“Now the story starts really in 1992 when this fuse was lit in
Georgia,” Worms said. “Now, there's two territories. There's Abkhazia
which has clearly defined administrative borders, and there's South
Ossetia that doesn't. Before the troubles started, Abkhazia was an
extremely ethnically mixed area: about 60 percent Georgian, 20 percent
Abkhaz, and 20 percent assorted others – Greeks, Estonians, Armenians,
Jews, what have you. In Ossetia it was a completely integrated and
completely mixed Ossetian-Georgian population. The Ossetians and the
Georgians have never been apart in the sense that they were living in
their own little villages and doing their own little things. There has
been inter-marriage and a sense of common understanding going back to
distant history. The Georgians will tell you about King Tamar – that's
a woman, but they called her a king – and she was married to an
Ossetian. So the fuse was lit and two wars start, one in Abkhazia and
one in South Ossetia.”

Georgia

South Ossetia is inside Georgia, while North Ossetia is inside Russia.

“The fuse was not just lit in Moscow,” he said. “It was also lit in
Tbilisi. There was a guy in charge here, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a little
bit like [Serbian Nationalist war criminal in Bosnia Radovan] Karadzic.
He was a poet. He was an intellectual. But he was one of these guys who
veered off into ethnic exclusivism. He made stupid declarations like Georgia is only for the Georgians.
If you're running a multi-ethnic country, that is really not a clever
thing to say. The central control of the state was extremely weak. The
Russians were trying to make things worse. There was a civil war
between Georgians and Tbilisi. But the key thing is that here there
were militias, Georgian militias, and some of them pretty nasty.”

Thomas Goltz

Thomas Goltz then interjected his only critique of Patrick Worms'
explanation of events that led to this war. “It started in 1991,” he
said, “but it went into 1992 and 1993, as well.” Then he turned to me.
“This guy, [Zviad] Gamsakhurdia, was driven from power from across the
street. They bombed this place.” He meant the Marriott Hotel. We stood
in the lobby where Worms had set up his media relations operation.
“There's a horrible picture in my Georgia book of this facade.”

“Of this building?” I said.

Marriot Hotel (right), Tbilisi, Georgia

“Yeah,” Goltz said. “That was December 1991. He fled in December 1991.”

“Where did he go?” I said.

“To Chechnya,” Goltz said. “Of course. He led the government in
exile until he came back in 1993 then died obscurely in the mountains,
of suicide some people say, others say cancer. Then he was buried in
Grozny.” He turned then again to Patrick Worms. “1991,” he said. “Not
1992.”

“1991,” Worms said. “Okay.”

So aside from that quibble, everything else Worms said to me was
vouched for as accurate by the man who literally wrote the book on this
conflict from the point of view of both academic and witness.

“So in 1991,” Worms said, “things here explode. And basically it gets pretty nasty. Thomas can tell you what happened. Read his book,
it's worth it. And by the time the dust settles, there are between
20,000 and 30,000 dead. Many atrocities committed by both sides, but
mostly – at least that's what the Georgians say – by the Abkhaz. And
the end result is everybody gets kicked out. Everybody who is not
Abkhaz or Russian gets kicked out. That's about 400,000 people. 250,000
of those still live as Internally Displaced Persons within Georgia. As
for the rest: the Greeks have gone back to Greece, the Armenians to
Armenia, some Abkhaz to Turkey, etc.

Abkhazia (upper left)

“When it's over,” he said, “you've got two bits of Abkhazia which
are not ethnic Abkhazia. You've got Gali district which is filled with
ethnic Georgians. And you've got the Kodori Gorge which is filled with
another bunch of Georgians. So there the end result was a classic case
of ethnic-cleansing, but the world didn't pay much attention because it
was happening at the same time as the Yugoslav wars. Ossetia was
different. Ossetia also had a war that started about the same time, and
it was also pretty nasty, but it never quite succeeded in generating a
consolidated bit of territory that Ossetians could keep their own. When
the dust settled there, you ended up with a patchwork of Georgian and
Ossetian villages. Before the war, Ossetians and Georgians lived
together in the same villages. After the war they lived in separate
villages. But there were still contacts. People were talking, people
were trading. It wasn't quite as nasty as it was in Abkhazia.

“Now fast forward to the Rose Revolution,” he said.

The Rose Revolution was a popular bloodless revolution that brought
Georgia's current president Mikheil Saakashvili to power and replaced
the old man of Georgian politics Eduard Shevardnadze who basically ran
the country Soviet-style.

“The first thing that Misha [Mikheil Saakashvili] did was try to
poke his finger in [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's eyes as many
times as possible,” Worms said, “most notably by wanting to join NATO. The West, in my view, mishandled this situation. America gave the wrong signals. So did Europe.”

“Can you elaborate on that a bit?” I said.

“I will,” he said. “But basically the encouragement was given
despite stronger and stronger Russian signals that a Georgian accession
to NATO would not be tolerated. Fast forward to 2008, to this year, to the meeting of NATO heads
of state that took place in Bucharest, Romania, where Georgia was
promised eventual membership of the organization but was refused what
it really wanted, which was the so-called Membership Action Plan. The
Membership Action Plan is the bureaucratic tool NATO uses
to prepare countries for membership. And this despite the fact that
military experts will tell you that the Georgian Army, which had been
reformed root and branch with American support, was now in better shape
and more able to meet NATO aspirations than the armies of Albania and Macedonia which got offered membership at the same meeting.

Tbilisi, Georgia

“Just a little bit of back story again, in July of 2007 Russia
withdrew from the Conventional Forces Treaty in Europe. This is a
Soviet era treaty that dictates where NATO and
the Warsaw Pact can keep their conventional armor around their
territories. Russia started moving a lot of materiel south. After
Bucharest, provocations started. Russian provocations started, and they
were mostly in Abkhazia.

“One provocation was to use the Russian media to launch shrill
accusations that the Georgian army was in Kodori preparing for an
invasion of Abkhazia. Now if you go up there – I took a bunch of
journalists up there a few times – when you get to the actual
checkpoint you have a wall of crumbling rock, a wooden bridge, another
wall of crumbling rock, a raging torrent, and a steep mountainside
filled with woods. It's not possible to invade out or invade in unless
you've got air support. Which is why the Abkhaz were never able to kick
these Georgians out. They just kept that bit of territory.”

He paused and looked over at Thomas Goltz as though he was bracing for a critique.

“I'm just doing what I've done already,” he said, “but this time I'm getting advice from an expert on how I'm doing.”

Thomas Goltz silently nodded.

Tbilisi, Georgia

“Kodori provocations,” Worms continued, “and other provocations.
First the Russians had a peacekeeping base under a 1994 agreement that
allowed them to keep the peace in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia. They
added paratroopers, crack paratroopers, with modern weaponry there.
That doesn't sound a lot like peacekeeping. A further provocation: they
start shooting unmanned Georgian aircraft drones out the sky. One of
them was caught on camera by the drone as it was about to be destroyed.
The United Nations confirmed that it was a Russian plane that did this.
It probably took off from an airbase that the Russians were supposed to
have vacated a few years ago, but they never let the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] in to check.

“The next provocation: On April 16 Putin signs a presidential decree
recognizing the documents of Abkhazians and South Ossetians in Russia
and vice versa. This effectively integrates these two territories into
Russia's legal space. The Georgians were furious. So you have all these
provocations mounting and mounting and mounting. Meanwhile, as of July,
various air corps start moving from the rest of Russia to get closer to
the Caucasus. These are obscure details, but they are available.

A poster on a wall in Tbilisi, Georgia

“Starting in mid July the Russians launched the biggest military
exercise in the North Caucasus that they've held since the Chechnya
war. That exercise never stopped. It just turned into a war. They had
all their elite troops there, all their armor there, all their stuff
there. Everyone still foolishly thought the action was going to be in
Abkhazia or in Chechnya, which is still not as peaceful as they'd like
it to be.

“The Georgians had their crack troops in Iraq. So what was left at
their central base in Gori? Not very much. Just Soviet era equipment
and not their best troops. They didn't place troops on the border with
Abkhazia because they didn't want to provoke the Abkhaz. They were
expecting an attempt on Kodori, but the gorge is in such a way that
unless they're going to use massive air support – which the Abkhaz
don't have – it's impossible to take that place. Otherwise they would
have done it already.

“So fast forward to early August. You have a town, Tskhinvali, which
is Ossetian, and a bunch of Georgian villages surrounding it in a
crescent shape. There are peacekeepers there. Both Russian peacekeepers
and Georgian peacekeepers under a 1994 accord. The Ossetians were dug
in in the town, and the Georgians were in the forests and the fields
between the town and the villages. The Ossetians start provoking and
provoking and provoking by shelling Georgian positions and Georgian
villages around there. And it's a classic tit for tat thing. You shell,
I shell back. The Georgians offered repeated ceasefires, which the
Ossetians broke.

A poster on a wall in Tbilisi, Georgia

“On August 3, the head of the local administration says he's
evacuating his civilians. You also need to know one thing: you may be
wondering what these areas live off, especially in Ossetia, there's no
industry there. Georgia is poor, but Ossetia is poorer. It's basically
a smuggler's paradise. There was a sting operation that netted three
kilograms of highly enriched uranium. There are fake hundred dollar
bills to the tune of at least 50 million dollars that have been
printed. [South Ossetian “President” Eduard] Kokoity himself is a
former wrestler and a former bodyguard who was promoted to the
presidency by powerful Ossetian families as their puppet. What does
that mean in practice? It means that if you are a young man, you have
no choice. You can either live in absolute misery, or you can take the
government's dime and join the militia. It happened in both
territories.

“On top of that, for the last four years the Russians have been
dishing out passports to anyone who asks in those areas. All you have
to do is present your Ossetian or Abkhaz papers and a photo and you get
a Russian passport on the spot. If you live in Moscow and try to get a
Russian passport, you have the normal procedure to follow, and it takes
years. So suddenly you have a lot of Ossetian militiamen and Abkhaz
militiamen with Russian passports in effect paid by Russian subsidies.

Tbilisi, Georgia

“So back to the 3rd of August. Kokoity announces women and children
should leave. As it later turned out, he made all the civilians leave
who were not fighting or did not have fighting capabilities. On the
same day, irregulars – Ingush, Chechen, Ossetians, and Cossacks – start
coming in and spreading out into the countryside but don't do anything.
They just sit and wait. On the 6th of August the shelling intensifies
from Ossetian positions. And for the first time since the war finished
in 1992, they are using 120mm guns.”

“Can I stop you for a second?” I said. I was still under the
impression that the war began on August 7 and that Georgian President
Saakashvili started it when he sent troops into South Ossetia's capital
Tskhinvali. What was all this about the Ossetian violence on August 6
and before?

He raised his hand as if to say stop.

“That was the formal start of the war,” he said. “Because of the
peace agreement they had, nobody was allowed to have guns bigger than
80mm. Okay, so that's the formal start of the war. It wasn't the attack
on Tskhinvali. Now stop me.”

“Okay,” I said. “All the reports I've read say Saakashvili started the war.”

“I'm not yet on the 7th,” he said. “I'm on the 6th.”

“Okay,” I said. He had given this explanation to reporters before, and he knew exactly what I was thinking.

“Saakashvili is accused of starting this war on the 7th,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “But that sounds like complete bs to me if what you say is true.”

Thomas Goltz nodded.

*

I later met wounded Georgian soldiers in a Tbilisi hospital who
confirmed what Patrick Worms had told me about what happened when the
war actually started. I felt apprehensive about meeting wounded
soldiers. Would they really want to talk to someone in the media or
would they rather spend their time healing in peace?

My translator spoke to some of the doctors in the hospital who
directed us to Georgian soldiers and a civilian who were wounded in
South Ossetia and felt okay enough to speak to a foreign reporter.

Kaha Bragadze

“Every day and every hour the Russian side lied,” Georgian soldier
Kaha Bragadze said. “It must be stopped. If not today, then maybe
tomorrow. My troops were in our village, Avnevi. On the 6th of August
they blew up our troops' four-wheel-drives, our pickups. They blew them
up. Also in this village – it was August 5th or 6th, I can't remember –
they started bombing us with shells. Two soldiers died that day, our
peacekeepers. The Ossetians had a good position on the hill. They could
see all our positions and our villages, and they started bombing. They
went to the top of the hill, bombed us, then went down. We couldn't see
who was shooting at us.”

Kaha Bragadze's leg wounded by shrapnel from a Russian air strike

“Which day was this?” I said. “The 5th or the 6th?”

“I don't remember,” he said. “But it started that day from that place when two Georgians were killed.”

“Were they just bombing you the peacekeepers,” I said, “or also civilians and villages?”

“Before they started bombing us they took all the civilians out of
their villages,” he said. “Then they started damaging our villages –
houses, a gas pipe, roads, yards. They killed our animals. They
evacuated their villages, then bombed our villages.”

Another Georgian soldier, Giorgi Khosiashvili, concurred

Giorgi Khosiashvili

“I was a peace keeper as well,” he said, “but in another village. I
was fired upon on August 6th. On the 5th of August they started
shooting. They blew up our peacekeeping trucks. They put a bomb on the
road and when they were driving they were blown up. They also mined the
roads used by civilians. On the 6th of August they started bombing
Avnevi. And at this time they took the civilians out of Tskhinvali and
sent them to North Ossetia [inside Russia].”

“I saw this on TV,” said Alex, my translator. “They took the civilians, kids, women, and put them on the bus and sent them to North Ossetia.”

A civilian man, Koba Mindiashvili, shared the hospital room with the
Georgian soldiers. He, too, was in South Ossetia where he lived outside
Tskhinvali.

Koba Mindiashvili

“When they started bombing my village,” he said, “I was running away
and the soldiers wounded me. They robbed me and shot me in the leg with
a Kalashnikov. I don't know if it was Russians or Ossetians. They took
my car, took my gold chain, and shot me.”

“They didn't care if it was a house or a military camp,” Giorgi Khosiashvili said. “They bombed everything.”

“You actually saw this for yourself?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “I saw it. It was the Russian military airplanes. If
they knew it was a Georgian village, they bombed all the houses. Many
civilians were killed from this bombing.”

“It was Russians or Ossetians who did this?” I said.

“It was Russians,” he said. “The Ossetians don't have any jets.”

*

Back at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Tbilisi, Patrick Worms
continued fleshing out the rest of the story. “Let me tell you what
happened on the 7th,” he said. “On the 6th, while this is going on, the
integration minister who was until a few months ago an NGO guy
and who believes in soft power things, tried to go there and meet the
separatist leadership. The meeting doesn't happen for farcical reasons.
The shelling intensifies during the night and there is, again, tit for
tat, but this time with weapons coming from the South Ossetian side
which are not allowed under the agreement. By that time, the Georgians
were seriously worried. All their armor that was near Abkhazia starts
moving, but they are tanks, they don't have tank transporters, so they
move slowly. They don't make it back in time. On the 7th, this
continues. That afternoon, the president announces a unilateral
ceasefire, a different one from the previous ones. It means I stop firing first, and if you fire, I still won't fire back. That holds until the next part of the story.

Peace vigil, Tbilisi, Georgia

“On the evening of the 7th, the Ossetians launch an all-out barrage focused on Georgian villages,
not on Georgian positions. Remember, these Georgian villages inside
South Ossetia – the Georgians have mostly evacuated those villages, and
three of them are completely pulverized. That evening, the 7th, the
president gets information that a large Russian column is on the move.
Later that evening, somebody sees those vehicles emerging from the Roki
tunnel [into Georgia from Russia]. Then a little bit later, somebody
else sees them. That's three confirmations. It was time to act.

“What they had in the area was peacekeeping stuff, not stuff for
fighting a war. They had to stop that column, and they had to stop it
for two reasons. It's a pretty steep valley. If they could stop the
Russians there, they would be stuck in the tunnel and they couldn't
send the rest of their army through. So they did two things. The first
thing they did, and it happened at roughly the same time, they tried to
get through [South Ossetian capital] Tskhinvali, and that's when
everybody says Saakashvili started the war. It wasn't about taking
Ossetia back, it was about fighting their way through that town to get
onto that road to slow the Russian advance. The second thing they did,
they dropped a team of paratroopers to destroy a bridge. They got wiped
out, but first they managed to destroy the bridge and about 15 Russian
vehicles.

“The Georgians will tell you that they estimate that these two
actions together slowed the Russian advance by 24 to 48 hours. That is
what the world considered to be Misha's game. And you know why the
world considers it that? Because here in South Ossetia was the head of
the peacekeeping troops. He hasn't been in Iraq, he's a peace keeper.
What have they been told for the last four years? They lived in a
failed state, then there was the Rose Revolution – it wasn't perfect
but, damn, now there's electricity, there's jobs, roads have been fixed
– and what the Georgians have had drummed into them is that Georgia is
now a constitutional state, a state of law and order. And everybody
here knows that Ossetia is a gangster's smuggler's paradise. The whole
world knows it, but here they know it particularly well. The
peacekeepers had a military objective, and the first rule of warfare
when you're talking to the media is not to reveal to your enemy what
you're going to do. So they weren't going to blather into a microphone
and say well, actually, I'm trying to go through Tskhinvali in order to stop the Russians. So what did he say instead? I'm here to restore constitutional order in South Ossetia.
And that's it. With that, Georgia lost the propaganda war and the world
believes Saakashvili started it. And the rest of the story...you know.”

Tbilisi, Georgia

“Let me make a couple of comments,” Goltz said.

“That,” Worms said, “to the best of my knowledge, is all true.”

“Let's just start at the ass end,” Goltz said to me. “This is your first time to the lands of the former Soviet Union?”

“Yes,” I said.

“The restoration of constitutional order,” he said, “may
sound just like a rhetorical flourish with no echo in the American
mindset. What it means in the post-Soviet mindset is what Boris Yeltsin
was doing in Chechnya. This was the stupidest phrase this guy possibly
could have used. That's why people want to lynch him.”

Goltz was referring to the head of the Georgian peacekeeping forces
in South Ossetia. He turned then to Patrick Worms. “Your presentation
was deliciously comprehensive. Perhaps it was...we'll ask our new
friend Michael...too much information out of the gate to absorb.”

“I absorbed it,” I said.

“Okay,” Goltz said.

“Am I making any mistakes?” Worms said to Goltz. “Am I forgetting anything?”

“Well,” Goltz said, “there are some details that I would chip in.
Who are the Ossetians and where do they live? This is the question that
has been lost in all of the static from this story. This autonomy
[South Ossetia] is an autonomous district, as opposed to an autonomous republic,
with about 60,000 people max. So, where are the rest of the Ossetians?
Guess where they live? Tbilisi. Here. There. Everywhere. There are more
Ossetians – take a look around this lobby. You will find Ossetians
here. Of those Ossetians who are theoretically citizens of the Republic
of Georgia, 60,000 live there and around 40,000 live here.”

A roadside cross outside Tbilisi, Georgia

“What do they think about all this?” I said.

“They're scared as shit,” Goltz said.

“Are they on the side of those who live in South Ossetia?” I said.

“No,” he said. “One of them is Georgia's Minister of Defense.
Georgia is a multi-ethnic republic. And the whole point of the Ossetian
ethnic question is this: South Ossetia is part of Georgia.”

“Are reporters receptive to what you're saying?” I said to Worms.

“Everyone is receptive,” he said. “Everyone, regardless of
nationality, even those who love Georgia, genuinely thought Saakashvili
started it.”

“That's what I thought,” I said. “That's what everyone has been writing.”

Vladimir Putin's face used for hopscotch, Tbilisi, Georgia

“Yes,” he said. “Absolutely. We've been trying to tell the world
about this for months. If you go back and look at the archives you'll
see plenty of calls from the Georgian government saying they're really
worried. Even some Russian commentators agree that this is exactly what
happened. Don't forget, they sent in a lot of irregulars, Chechens,
Cossacks, Ossetians, Ingush – basically thugs. Not normal Chechens or
Ingush – thugs. Thugs out for a holiday. Many Western camera crews were
robbed at gunpoint ten meters from Russian tanks while Russian
commanders just stood there smoking their cigarettes while the
irregulars...that happened to a Turkish TV crew. They're lucky to still
be alive. Some of the Georgians were picked up by the irregulars. If
they happened to be female, they got raped. If they happened to be
male, they got shot immediately, sometimes tortured. Injured people we
have in hospitals who managed to get out have had arms chopped off,
eyes gouged out, and their tongues ripped out.”

Vladimir Putin

Russian rules of engagement, so to speak, go down harder than
communism. And the Soviet era habits of disinformation are alive and
well.

“You also have to remember the propaganda campaign that came out,”
he said. “Human Rights Watch is accusing the Russian authorities of
being indirectly responsible for the massive ethnic cleansing of
Georgians that happened in South Ossetia. The Ossetians are claiming
that the Georgians killed 2,000 people in Tskhinvali, but when Human
Rights Watch got in there a few days ago and talked to the hospital
director, he had received 44 bodies. There was nobody left in that
town. Plus it's the oldest law of warfare: have your guns in populated
areas, and when the enemy responds, show the world your dead women and
children.

“Right,” I said. “That goes on a lot where I usually work, in the Middle East.”

“Yes,” he said. “That's exactly what the Russians were doing.”