To Russia, With Love

First-hand reports begin to emerge from a school a few miles to my east:

The Washington Post

BESLAN, Russia, Sept. 2 -- Teenager Sado Nazriyv was excited about the first day of school. He put on his pressed white shirt and his fancy black suit and joined his lifelong friend, Kazbek Dzaragasov, in front of the red-brick School No. 1 for opening-day ceremonies.

A pop song from the 1980s played on the speakers, a musty oldie, something about childhood, a song about innocence.

"As soon as the song ended," Sado recalled, "the terrorists showed up."

Just like that, the elation of a day of flowers and family in this little town in southern Russia dissolved into a nightmare that would be broadcast across the world. A small army of guerrillas, some in black, some in camouflage, some with masks, some without, stormed through the schoolyard with rifles and explosives Wednesday morning, barking orders at hundreds of students and parents.

"Lie on the ground!" they shouted.

Most of the students complied. Sado and Kazbek did not.

"They started shooting," said Sado, 16, still reeling from the experience a day later. "At first we thought it was a joke. Where I was, there were 10th-grade students and 11th-grade students. We saw them running, and so we started running, too."

Sado and Kazbek raced as fast as they could, bullets whizzing overhead. Sado cut down a side lane, he recalled, but Kazbek did not follow.

Suddenly Kazbek, 15, realized that his younger sister, Agunda, was still back at the school in her third-grade class, a captive of the mysterious attackers. So he turned and rushed back into the school, giving up his escape to become a hostage alongside his terrified sister.

"They're very close kids," said their grandmother, Rosa Dzaragasova, 76. "They're great friends. He just couldn't leave her, so he went back for her."

The last word anyone has had of the teenage boy came Thursday afternoon when one of the women released by the Islamic guerrillas told Sado that she saw Kazbek and his sister huddled together on the floor of the school gymnasium along with hundreds of other hostages.

The Los Angeles Times

Zalina Dzandarova cradles her son Alan as he sleeps with his small face buried against her stomach. He is the child Dzandarova was able to save. The child she chose to save, really.

It is the other one, little Alana, her 6-year-old daughter, whose image torments her: Alana clutching her hand, Alana crying and calling after her. Alana's sobs disappearing into the distance as Dzandarova walked out of Middle School No. 1 here Thursday, clutching 2-year-old Alan in her arms.

Guerrillas armed with automatic rifles and explosive belts who are holding hundreds of hostages at the small provincial school in southern Russia allowed 26 women and children to leave. About a dozen mothers, like Dzandarova, were allowed to take only one child, forced to leave another behind.

"I didn't want to make this choice," a stunned-looking Dzandarova, 27, said in the reception room of her father-in-law's house a few miles from the school. "People say they are happy that my son and I are saved. But how can I be happy if my daughter's still inside there?"

And the Moscow Times

BESLAN, North Ossetia -- When the armed attackers seized School No. 1, they separated the men from the women and children and marched them up to the second floor.

The men, most of them teachers, were lined up against the wall.

This is when Yury Ailarov, a father who had accompanied his daughter to school on Wednesday morning with his wife, decided not to stick around.

He jumped out of the second-floor window, according to his friend Pyotr Sidarov, who said he visited Ailarov in the hospital where he was being treated for two broken arms and a concussion.

Ailarov started crawling toward the road. The hostage-takers, apparently not wanting to shoot at him from the windows because it would expose them to sniper fire, tossed grenades out the window at him. Seeing what was happening, troops outside the school threw smoke grenades to provide cover and pulled him to safety, Sidarov told a reporter Thursday.

Ailarov feared that the attackers were planning to kill all of the men, according to his friend.

Troops stationed closest to the school said another man who escaped told them that 12 to 13 men were killed, which jibes roughly with information from the command center that 12 people were killed inside the school.

The troops said seven bodies, of men and women, were dumped out of a second-floor window. The bodies were not visible from behind the cordon.

The bodies of two men who were killed during the initial siege were seen lying on the road, still too close to the school to be safely retrieved. One of the men had leaped out of his car without turning off the engine, and it continued to run the rest of the morning and afternoon. His body lay nearby, propped up against a lamppost.

Late Wednesday night, one of the troops called his commanding officer on the radio with a grim request.

"Can we shoot the dogs? They are chewing on the bodies," said the man, who gave only his first name, Oleg. The officer turned down the request, saying that any shooting could alarm the hostage-takers, and they did not want to risk setting off a firefight or put the hostages' lives in danger. The attackers have threatened to kill 50 children for every one of their own killed.

The War on Terror is real.

Update: Near real-time updates here.

More here, translated from Russian sources (caution, graphic images.) Via Laughing Wolf