This week PBS is running one of the most chilling documentaries I have ever seen -- "Wide Angle: Beslan, Siege of School #1." You remember the situation. Chechyn terrorists took hostage more than a thousand children and adults at a school in Ossetia. A quote from one of the terrorists: "We came here to die, because that is how our children are dying."
After a three day standoff during which the terrorists killed many of the hostages, Russian troops attacked and most of the rest died. All but one of the terrorists died too.
The show uses footage taken by local residents, Russian authorities, and the terrorists themselves as well as interviews with survivors. The results are devastating.
A local official who tried to negotiate with the terrorists remarked, “What struck me at once [upon entering the school] were the babies.”
The terrorists had offered to allow one woman's children to go free if she would become a suicide bomber. She refused and the children died. She said afterward, "I never knew blood could be so heavy."
The images..., the words..., the broken bodies of children.... the horrible evil of what was done there is unforgettable. See this film if you want to understand just how depraved humans can be.
Link to the PBS website for this show here.
This is pertinent to today's struggle in Iraq. Note the tendency for Islamist terrorists operating there to target children. Read, for instance, this posting "Building Small Coffins" from Greyhawk over at the Mudville Gazette [here] quoting a Reuters source.
A Reuters news agency television cameraman at the scene shortly after the bombing said the vehicle blew up in between houses, reducing parts of three houses to rubble. Women in the street screamed in anger and sorrow near pools of bloodWitness Mohammed Ali Hamza said U.S. forces had gone to the southeastern district of Al-Jedidah to warn residents to stay indoors because of reports of a car bomb in the area.
At the nearby Kindi hospital, hundreds of distraught parents mingled in blood-soaked hallways shouting and screaming as they looked for their children, many of whom were badly mutilated.
"Most of them are children. The Americans were handing out sweets at the time of the attack," a duty policeman at the Kindi Hospital said.
"We have received the bodies of 24 children aged between 10 and 13," said an official in charge of the morgue.
Abu Hamed whose 12-year-old son Mohammed was killed, said: "I was at home. I heard the explosion. I rushed outside to find my son. I only found his bicycle."
He found his son in the hospital morgue.
"I recognized him from his head. The rest of the body was completely burnt."
Among the young bodies at the morgue, some headless or missing limbs, two children still clutched blue chocolate wrappers.
The bastards..., the bastards!
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