We were in the car at seven and drove as quickly as we could across the monotonous flats of central Azerbaijan. Brown cotton fields belonging to collective farms stretched to the horizon in all directions, and men stood along the roadside waving dead ducks at us as we roared by. We stopped for gas at a town named Terter and asked the local mayor what was happening in Agdam. He said he didn't know anything. We stopped again in another town called Barda, and again took a moment to inquire about events and rumors. Clueless looks greeted us. We were starting to think that the whole thing was an exaggerated bum-steer when we arrived in Agdam and drove into the middle of town, looking for a bite to eat. It was there that we ran into the refugees. There were ten, then twenty then hundreds of screaming, wailing residents of Xodjali. Many recognized me because of my previous visits to the town. They clutched at my clothes, babbling out the names of their dead relatives and friends and dragged me to the morgue attached to the main mosque in town to show me bodies of their relatives.

At first we found it hard to believe what the survivors were saying: the Armenians had surrounded Xodjali and delivered an ultimatum: get out or die. Then came a babble of details of the last days, many concerning Commander Alef Khadjiev.

Sensing doom, Alef had begged the government to bring in choppers to save at least some of the non-combatants, but Baku had done nothing. Then, on the night of February 25th, Armenian fedayeen hit the town from three sides. The fourth had been left open, creating a funnel through which refugees might flee. Alef gave the order to evacuate: the fighting men would run interference along the hillside of the Gorgor River valley, while the women and children and gray-beards escaped below. Groping their way through the night under fire, by the morning of February 26th, the refugees made it to the outskirts of a village called Nakhjivanli, on the cusp of Karabakh. They crossed a road and began working their way downhill toward the forward Azeri lines and the city Agdam, now only some six miles away via the Azeri outpost at Shelli.

It was there, in the hillocks and within sight of safety, that something horrible awaited them: a gauntlet of lead and fire. "They just shot and shot and shot," wailed a woman named Raisha Aslanova. She said her husband and a son-in-law were killed in front of her and that her daughter was missing.

Scores, hundreds, possibly a thousand were slaughtered in a turkey-shoot of civilians and their handful of defenders. Aside from counting every body there was no way to tell-and most of the bodies remained out of reach, in the no-man's land between the lines that had become a killing zone and a picnic site for crows.

One thousand dead in one night? It seemed impossible. But when we began cross-referencing, the wild claims about the extent of the killing began to look all too true. The local religious leader in Agdam, Imam Sadik Sadikov, broke down in tears as he tallied the names of the registered dead on an abacus. There were 477 that day, a number that did not include those missing and presumed dead, nor those victims whose entire families had been wiped out and thus had no one to register them as dead before God. The number 477 represented only the number of confirmed dead by survivors who had made it to Agdam and were physically able to fulfill, however imperfectly, the Muslim practice of burying the dead within 24 hours.

Elif Kaban of Reuters was stunned into silliness. My wife Hicran was paralyzed. Photographer Oleg Litvin fell into a catatonic state and would only shoot pictures when I threw him at the subject: corpses, graves, and wailing women who were gouging their cheeks with their nails. Yes, it required stomach-but it was time to work, to report: a massacre had occurred, and the world had to know. We scoured the town, making repeated stops at the hospital, morgue and growing graveyards, out to the ends of the defensive perimeter to make horrible spot-interviews with straggling survivors as the stumbled in, and then went back to the hospital to check on new wounded and then back to the morgue to watch truck-loads of bodies be brought in for identification and ritual washing before burial. I looked for familiar faces, and thought I saw some but could not be sure: one corpse was identified as that belonging to a young veterinarian, who had been shot through the eye at point-blank range; I tried to remember if I had known or been introduced to such a man in Xodjali, but could not be sure. Other bodies, stiffened by rigormortis, seemed to speak of execution: arms were thrown up as if in permanent surrender. A number of heads lacked hair, as if the corpses had been scalped. It was not a pretty day.

Toward late afternoon, someone mentioned that a military helicopter on loan from the Russian garrison at Ganje would be making a flight over the killing fields, and so we traveled out to the airport. There was no flight, but there I found old friends.

"Tomas," a man in military uniform gasped, and grabbed me in an embrace, and wept. "Nash Nachalnik..."

I recognized him as one of Alef Khadjiev's boys, a pimply-faced boy from Baku who had described himself as a banker before he had volunteered for duty in Karabakh. He was speaking in Russian, babbling-but one word got through the tears: the commander...

A few other survivors from the Xodjali garrison stumbled over and seized me. Of the forty odd men under Alef Khadjiev's command, only ten were left alive. Dirty, exhausted and exuding what can only be described as survivor's guilt, they pieced together the awful night and next day-and the death of their commander, Alef Khadjiev. He was killed by a bullet to the brain while defending the women and children; most of the women and children died anyway.

***

Toward evening, we returned to the government guest house in the middle of town to look for a telephone, and there we met a drained and exhausted Tamerlan Garayev. A native of Agdam, the deputy speaker of parliament was one of the few government officials of any sort I saw there. He was interrogating two Turkmen deserters from the Stepanakert-based 366th Motorized Infantry Brigade of the Russian Interior Ministry forces. They had taken refuge in Xodjali a week before. The last element of the tragedy suddenly clicked into place: it was not only the Armenians who had assaulted the doomed town, but the Russians.

"Talk, talk!" said Tamerlan, as the two men stared at us.

"We ran away because the Armenian and Russian officers beat us because we were Muslims," one of the pair, a man named Agamuhammad Mutif related. "We just wanted to go home to Turkmenistan."

"Then what happened?" Tamerlan demanded.

"Then they attacked the town," said the other. "We recognized vehicles from our unit."

I thought of Commander Sergei Shukrin, and wondered if he had been involved. The two fled along with everyone else in the town, and were helping a group of women and children escape through the mountains when they were discovered by the Armenians and 366th.

"They opened fire and at least twelve were killed in our group alone," Mutif related. "After that, we just ran and ran."

A Russian-backed assault by Armenians on an Azeri town, resulting in up to one thousand dead?

This was news. But it was at this point that things started becoming very strange. No-one seemed very interested in the story we had stumbled on. Apparently, the idea that the roles of the good-guys and bad guys had been reversed was too much: Armenians slaughtering Azeris?

"You are suggesting that more people have died in one attack in Karabakh than the total number we have reported killed over the past four years?" said the BBC's Moscow correspondent when I tipped him on the slaughter.

"That's impossible."

"Take a look at Reuters!"

"There's nothing on the wire."

Indeed. While Elif Kaban was churning out copy on her portable telex, nothing was appearing on the wires. Either someone was spiking copy, or was rolling it into larger, anodyne regional reports of 'conflicting allegations'. To be fair, the governm ent and press in Baku didn't exactly assist in supporting our reporting. While we were off in Agdam trying to get out the news, the presidential spokesman was claiming that Xodjali's scrappy defenders had beaten back an Armenian attack and suffered only two dead. Just a regular night in Mountainous Karabakh. We knew differently, but it was the three of us against the Azerbaijani state lie machine. Finally, I got a line through to the Moscow bureau of the Washington Post and said I wanted to file a story. The staffers there were to busy to take a dictation, but reluctantly patched me through to the foreign desk in Washington when I insisted. I used 477 as the number of dead, as religiously reported to Imam Sadikov, and was dragged over the coals by editors: where did I get this number from when Baku was still reporting that only two had died? Had I seen all the bodies? What about a little balance? The Armenian press was reporting a 'massive Azeri offensive.' Why wasn't that in my report?

I was about to answer that this bit of information was not in my report for the very good reason that it had not happened when the first Kristal missile crashed into Agdam, about a mile a away from the government guest house I was calling from. Then came others and when one crashed into the building next door and blew out all the windows in our downtown dacha we thought it best to get off the phone and into the basement before we were blown to smithereens. After about an hour of huddling under mattresses we came up for air and decided it was probably a good idea to leave Agdam. So did about 50,000 other people, and we discovered ourselves in the middle of a mass exodus of trucks, cars, horses and people on bicycles, all trying to flee East.

***

(Continue..)