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If i was Putin, so help me if even ONE of those school kids were killed i'd nuke Chechnya from end to end.

God damned terrorist bastards.

"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum...and i'm all out of bubblegum".

But this proves Bush's point to fight them over there than on our soil. the Chechnyans and Al Qada have long standing ties this is a global war. Russia is calling for UN security Council meeting for this evening, you can bet Bush aint gonna tell them to play nice this time.

Here's the full story

Hundreds Held in Russian School; 8 Killed

By MUSA SADULAYEV, Associated Press Writer

BELSAN, Russia - More than a dozen militants wearing suicide-bomb belts seized a southern Russian school in a region bordering Chechnya (news - web sites) on Wednesday, taking hostage about 400 people — half of them children — and threatening to blow up the building if police storm it. As many as eight people have been reported killed, one of them a school parent.


Hours into the desperate standoff, security officials said they had made brief contact with the hostage-takers. Russian special forces wearing camouflage and carrying heavy-caliber machine guns surrounded Middle School No. 1. About 1,000 people, mostly parents, were massed the three-story building in the town of Belsen, demanding information and accusing the government of failing to protect their children.


Kazbek Dzantiyev, head of the North Ossetia region's Interior Ministry, said that the hostages have threatened "for every destroyed fighter, they will kill 50 children and for every injured fighter — 20 (children)," the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.


At one point, a girl wearing a floral print dress and a red bow in her hair fled the school, her hand held by a flak-jacketed soldier. An older woman followed them. Ruslan Ayamov, spokesman for North Ossetia's Interior Ministry told The Associated Press that 12 children and one adult managed to escape after hiding in the building's boiler room.


The attack was the latest blamed on secessionist Chechen rebels, coming a day after a suicide bomber killed nine people in Moscow and a week after near-simultaneous explosions blamed on terrorists caused two Russian planes to crash, killing all 90 people on board. The surge in violence was apparently timed around last Sunday's Chechen presidential election.


"In essence, war has been declared on us, where the enemy is unseen and there is no front," Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said.


President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites) interrupted his working holiday Wednesday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi for a second time and returned to the capital. On arrival at the airport, he held an immediate meeting with the heads of Russia's Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service, the Interfax news agency said.


The standoff began after a ceremony marking the first day of the Russian school year, when it was likely that many parents had accompanied their children. About 17 militants, men and women, stormed the three-story building and herded captives into the gymnasium. They forced children to stand at the windows and warned they would blow up the school if police intervened, said Alexei Polyansky, a police spokesman for southern Russia.


"I was standing near the gates, music was playing, when I saw three armed people running with guns. At first I though it was a joke when they fired in the air and we fled," a teenager, Zarubek Tsumartov, said on Russian television.


Hours after the seizure, Regional Federal Security Service chief Valery Andreyev said on NTV television that negotiations with the hostage-takers "are just, just beginning" and that brief contact had not allowed authorities to evaluate the situation in Belsen, located 10 miles north of the regional capital of Vladikavkaz


The ITAR-Tass news agency, citing local hospitals, reported that seven people died of injuries in the hospital and one was killed at the site during the seizure.


But Regional Emergency Situations Minister Boris Dzgoyev told The Associated Press that two civilians were killed and nine hospitalized, and that two bodies were visible near the school. Interfax cited a health official as saying four people were killed, but the emergencies ministry later said the toll was two.


Dzgoyev said a girl was also lying near the building, presumably wounded, but officials said the area could not be approached because it was coming under fire.


Fatima Khabalova, spokeswoman for the regional parliament, earlier said one of the dead was a father who brought his child to the school and was shot when he tried to resist the raiders. She also said at least nine people had been injured in gunfire, including three teachers and two police officers.


Suspicion in both the school attack and the Moscow bombing fell on Chechen rebels or their sympathizers, but there was no evidence of any direct link. The attacks came around Chechnya's presidential elections, a Kremlin-backed vote aimed at undermining support for the insurgents by establishing a modicum of civil order in the war-shattered republic. The previous president, Akhmad Kadyrov, was killed with more than 20 others in a bombing May 9.


The militants inside the school released one hostage with a list of their demands, including the freedom of fighters detained over a series of attacks on police facilities in neighboring Ingushetia in June, ITAR-Tass reported.


They also seek talks with regional officials and a well-known pediatrician, Leonid Roshal, who aided hostages during the deadly seizure of a Moscow theater in 2002, news reports said.





Parents of the seized children recorded a videocassette appeal to Putin to fulfill the terrorists' demands, Khabalova said. The text of the appeal was not immediately available.

The violence was the latest to plague the government of Putin, who came to power vowing to crush the Chechen rebellion. Terrorism fears in Russia have risen markedly following the plane crashes and the suicide bombing outside a Moscow subway station Tuesday night. The blast by a female attacker tore through a busy area between the station and a department store, killing nine people and wounded more than 50.

Authorities said Tuesday that 10 people were killed, but Interfax reported Wednesday that Moscow health officials revised that, saying one man who died in a hospital was not a victim of the blast.

A militant Muslim web site published a statement claiming responsibility for the bombing on behalf of the "Islambouli Brigades," a group that also claimed responsibility for the airliner crashes. The statements could not immediately be verified.

The statement said Tuesday's bombing was a blow against Putin, "who slaughtered Muslims time and again." Putin has refused to negotiate with rebels in predominantly Muslim Chechnya who have fought Russian forces for most of the past decade, saying they must be wiped out.


"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum...and i'm all out of bubblegum".

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=1 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>
If i was Putin, so help me if even ONE of those school kids were killed i'd nuke Chechnya from end to end.

God damned terrorist bastards.

"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum...and i'm all out of bubblegum".
<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>

Whoa let me switch the tracks on that train of thought. Well, there's been enough oppression and suffering of the average joes just trying to live there. Compliments of an inability, or even not wanting to take the fight to the people camping in the woods and doing the hostage taking, case in point the school. And Russia's bullshit is likely the inspiration for that. But 'tis no reason to go on an ethnic cleansing spree. I'd certainly hate to have C4 wired to the toilet, and it goes off when I flush over something like this.



"Is that a Ninos sub? Right on...those are some good subs. Not as good as ours of course, but still good." -Subway employee.

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Dude, you need to stop defending the Chechen scum. At this point, they deserve EVERYTHING that's going to come thier way. We fought a couple revolutions here, you didn't see us murdering school kids.

F the Chechens, i could care less if Putin kills every last one of 'em. They're all tied into Al Qaeda anyway.

IOW, they're our direct sworn enemies.

"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum...and i'm all out of bubblegum".

Ohhhhhh I'm not denying that there are some true peices of shit lurking there, I'm just sans painting them all with one brushstroke. At least the ones that chose to relocate rather than stay & fight the Russians. Met too many of the latter before the 1994 invasion, and especially the current shit thats going down.

And check this out. Putin might go before a UN General Assembly...but won't want international help there. Despite that strategy possibly sinking Russia like it sunk Palestine.

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=1 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>Analysis: Putin's permanent problem
By Thomas de Waal


For more than four years now the word President Vladimir Putin has used about the situation in Chechnya is "normalisation".

He has reassured the Russian public that the conflict is virtually over, that his uncompromising tactic of no negotiations with pro-independence Chechen leaders has worked and that he needs no international presence in the troubled republic.


Although the Russian president maintains that this is an international problem - that Chechnya has become a front in the worldwide "war on terror" - he constantly rejects calls for a greater role for the United Nations or the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe there.

That claim was badly damaged by the seizure of the theatre by Chechen gunmen in Moscow in October 2002, when more than 129 theatregoers who had come to watch the Nord-Ost musical died.

It was further hurt by the assassination earlier this year of pro-Moscow Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov.

Now "normalisation" lies in pieces as Mr Putin is facing the worst week of terrorism in his entire presidency. It looks increasingly likely that the destruction of two passenger planes over southern Russia last week was the work of Chechen suicide bombers.

Another bomber outside a Moscow metro station killed more than 10 people on Tuesday night. And on Wednesday, Russia again faced a mass hostage seizure as bad as the 2002 Nord-Ost siege, with the sickening complication that now the victims are mainly children.

New breed

The scale of the problem Russia faces is truly vast. The whole of Russia is a potential target and the hostage-takers appear to be a new breed of Islamist Chechens, who have literally nothing to lose.

These young men and women fighting a Jihad have now eclipsed the more moderate pro-independence fighters who formed the core of the Chechen rebel movement in the 1990s.


Although Mr Putin has manifestly failed in his promise to solve the problem of Chechnya, he keeps his public support


One thing has not changed since then: corruption in Russia is so rife that Chechen fighters can make their way through any number of heavily armed checkpoints simply by paying bribes.
One Chechen driver recently estimated that the price of ferrying a bomb through a Russian army checkpoint was 500 roubles (£9 or $17).

That means that to defeat this problem the Russian president needs completely to overhaul his security services.

But he also needs to mobilise the support of the mass of the ordinary Chechen population, who reject extreme Islam and are fed up with a decade's worth of violence.

Popular opinion

The trouble is that Moscow has done everything to exclude and alienate these Chechens.

In last Sunday's election in Chechnya the Kremlin virtually appointed its candidate Alu Alkhanov to lead the republic and barred more popular candidates from the poll.

The paradox of the situation is that, although Mr Putin has manifestly failed in his promise to solve the problem of Chechnya, he keeps his public support.

The Russian media rarely broadcasts an alternative point of view and anti-Chechen feelings are running higher than ever. This has now become Mr Putin's permanent problem and he will be the one who has to deal with it.

Thomas de Waal is Caucasus Editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>

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