Pat Dollard | Young Americans

His tiny, terrified face covered with blood from a head wound, a baby boy is passed to medics hours after Russia declared a ‘ceasefire’ in Georgia.

Related: Civilians Were The Only Target Left

Daily Mail:

He is still strapped in the child seat he was using when gunmen targeted his family’s car as they tried to escape the fighting.

The boy’s three-year-old sister was also carried into a makeshift operating theatre, clasping a furry white lamb toy and crying.

This was the grim scene at Gori’s town hospital last night, four hours after Russian president Dmitry Medvedev raised hopes the war was over by boasting: ‘I have taken the decision to end the operation. The aggressor has been punished and suffered very significant losses.’

But in Gori it seemed the ‘punishment’ was far from over, and many of the victims could hardly be described as aggressors.

Shortly after 5pm, a succession of men, women and screaming children arrived at the hospital in ambulances and police cars. None were soldiers. Many were dead.

Earlier, the Russians had targeted the few remaining civilians in Gori - Stalin’s birthplace. They blitzed apartment blocks, the post office, the theatre and the university, according to Georgian officials.

They even bombed the military hospital, killing a young doctor. Five others died nearby, including a Dutch cameraman.

Gori has been a ghost town since the first reports that the Russians were on their way.

But there was no sign of them when photographer Mark Richards and I arrived at 5pm yesterday, and it was eerily quiet.

Within five minutes, the silence was shattered by a car screeching through the gates, one of its tyres shredded and sparks flying from the wheel.

There were bullet holes in the windscreen and the back window and the driver staggered out dripping with blood.

His passenger, a portly middle-aged man, had a wound in his back. Medics helped him onto a bare aluminium stretcher and took him inside.

The driver, Gela, 40, whose own back was bleeding, shouted: ‘Look, look what they did. They had rifles and they tried to stop me. I tried to pass.

‘I pressed down hard on the gas pedal, but they started shooting. They shot me. They shot my friend Givi.’

He was unable to say who ‘they’ were.

The hospital’s main corridor rapidly became an operating theatre.

There was no time for anaesthetic - or none left - so Givi curled into a foetal position, whimpering, as doctors stitched his wounds.

Five minutes later two wounded children arrived, terror and bewilderment etched on their faces.

They were brought in by two badly-shaken policemen who said they had found them in a car just a few minutes earlier.

Their mother arrived a few minutes later, blood still trickling from a bullet wound just below her right shoulder. She shrieked in pain as she was manhandled onto a stretcher.

One of Russia’s last acts before the ‘ceasefire’ was to kill Dr Goga Abramishvili.The trauma specialist was standing in the grounds of Gori’s military hospital wearing his blue doctor’s smock.

A helicopter gunship, hovering somewhere over the enormous Red Cross flag draped across the hospital’s roof, took aim deliberately, according to fellow doctor Zauri Akhrakhadze who was on a bench yards away.

He told us: ‘They knew it was a hospital and they knew we were there. They did not aim for the building, they aimed for us. Half of Goga’s head was blown away.

‘He has a wife and three children and had dedicated himself to saving lives.’

Merab Merabishvili, 48, was luckier when his third-floor apartment was bombed at 10am while he was helping his elderly mother pack her things for the evacuation.

The explosion tore the place apart, but they somehow walked out unscathed. Mr Merabishvili spent the rest of the day outside his blazing home sucking on a string of cigarette.

It was hard to see how even the Russian president could count any of them as an ‘aggressor’ to be destroyed.

But innocents were suffering on the other side of the conflict, too.

In the town of Dzava a wounded, traumatised nine-year-old boy has become a symbol of the brutality.

The child, so shocked he cannot even remember his name, walked and crawled 16 miles from the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali after it was attacked by Georgian troops last Friday.

Overcoming terrible pain, he dragged himself into a military hospital, where staff heard crying and found him cowering under a bin liner.

One doctor said: ‘The boy had serious shrapnel wounds to the chest and arm - he had lost lots of blood and was highly confused.

‘He was delirious. He constantly called out for his mum. It’s beyond my comprehension how he came here alone. We found him just in time.’

Before being taken to surgery, the boy told doctors he had lost his parents in the onslaught.

Bedraggled Ossetian refugees gave accounts of death and survival as they crossed the border into Russia.

They told of a grim five-day trek to escape the bombs and rockets of both Russian and Georgian forces.

Widow Zaira Kiseeva said: ‘I saw a woman and her child shot in their backs right before my eyes. I spent more than four days sitting in a basement together with my daughter and her three-month-old infant.’

Zarina Ivanov, now living in a tented refugee camp, said: ‘We made our way from Tskhinvali to the sound of Georgian bullets.

‘We walked six kilometres at night to a village. I saw people falling, cut down by snipers’ bullets. Lots of bodies lie along the roads’.

A woman called Izolda said: ‘We have been living in basements since the start of the war. Food has become luxury for us.

‘There are bodies everywhere. There is a terrible stink. The Georgians are worse than the Nazis.’

Back in Georgia, tens of thousands gathered in the capital, Tbilisi, to hear president Mikhail Saakashvili claim that Russia is waging ‘ruthless, heartless destruction’.

There is a growing anger, however, that the once charismatic Mr Saakashvili has been talking himself up as a great friend of the West, yet failed to garner any material support for his doomed military adventure in South Ossetia.

His chances of political survival are slim. But for the moment, all the hatred is directed at Russia.

Abul Lomidze, a 31-year-old security guard and father of three, begged us: ‘Please tell the world. Russia is a monster.

‘England and America are the only ones who can help us. Not even Hitler bombed hospitals, but that is what Russia is doing to us.’