It was Sept. 1st, the "Day of Knowledge", a national holiday, at School Number One in Beslan, Russia. It was a moderately cloudy day, with the darker parts hanging low over the town.
A town of just over 36,000, and there were nearly 900 students in the school, 1st through 11th grades.
Parents had gathered to accompany their children for the first day of school. The children carried elaborate bouquets of roses as they walked along in a procession. The festivity was charming, uplifting, joyful. The children were dressed in fanciful outfits. The girls wore red scarves and black-and-white dresses. The parents waved tiny flags and sang traditional songs.
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Meanwhile, 30 men and two women hid in the woods outside Beslan, 30 miles from Chechnya. Islamic militants, mostly Chechen. They had murder in them, and something darker, an unbridled malevolence.
At 9:20 AM, as the parents finished the celebratory songs and entered the building, the terrorists guided a large truck, full of guns and grenades and bombs, toward the school.
One group of terrorists herded shrieking children and parents into the front entrance, and killed two school security guards, the first victims of the attack. The first of many victims. A second group of terrorists flanked the backside of the school and rounded up parents and children, shoving them through the wooden plank doors and along a recently-cleaned hallway. The terrorist fired their guns in all directions, a red madness to their eyes, a deathly insanity, like drugged tyrants enamored of their power.
"We came here to die," they told the children, "and you will die with us."
Most of the older children had escaped when the terrorists arrived, so the hostages were mostly parents and young children, unable to run away. Imagine the children who had never been to school in their lives before that day. They must've wondered: Is this what school is? Why would we celebrate something as awful as this? And where are they taking us? And what will happen next? Are we going to die? Are we going to die?
The male terrorists wore green camouflage balaclavas, the women wore black hijabs, holes for their eyes, the searing black emptiness of their eyes, flared with something red, something deep and unhinged. Their faces were covered, but their cowardice was apparent.
Terrorist snipers took position in the school, and, as word spread through the town and armed citizens and police plotted storming the building, they fired at anyone who approached.
The terrorist swung their AK-47s at people to herd the parents and children into the gymnasium, where everyone crowded together, climbing over one another. It was unbearably hot, and within hours many of the children grew dizzy. The terrorists wired a grid of makeshift bombs around the gymnasium. Improvised explosives dangled above the huddled hostages, makeshift bombs slung together from basketball hoops like string lights. The explosives were rigged to a pedal on the floor, which one of the terrorists clamped down with his foot. The message was clear: If he lifted his foot, the bombs would explode, and people would die.
As a crowd formed outside, the terrorists began fortifying the school. They pulled all of the men from the gymnasium, and as one man tried to reassure everyone, the terrorists shot him in the back of the head. They yanked the man down along the hallway, and staged one man in front of every window, like decoys, like mannequins, like targets.
And each man was told to rip the doors from their hinges and shove them against the windows as barricades, shields. The terrorists warned that, if any of the barricades broke, the man who built it would be shot. The terrorists shot a few of the men anyway, after they'd built the barricades, of course.
The terrorists released a demand: "If anyone of us is killed, we'll shoot 50 people. If anyone of us is wounded, we'll kill 20 people. If 5 of us are killed, we'll blow up everything. If the light or communications are cut off for a minute, we'll shoot 10 people."
The two female terrorists were unaware that the target would be a school. They were uncomfortable with holding children as hostages. Both had suicide vests strapped to their waists. One day in, the belts exploded. It's unclear if the women had had enough and killed themselves, or if their male counterparts had grown sick of the women's dissent and murdered them. Parts of the women's bodies liquified throughout the gym. One of their heads rolled around next to a group of screaming children.
Starved and thirsty, cramped into the airless gym, the children ate the flowers they'd brought as part of the holiday, sharing so that everyone had something to eat. The terrorists wouldn't allow them to leave to use the bathroom.
Over the course of three days in September the 1,110 hostages remained cramped in the building.
Over the course of three days in September the 1,110 hostages remained cramped in the building.
At 1:06 PM on the third day, an explosion shook the ground. The townspeople gathered outside recoiled in fear, many broke into tears. An eerie pause hung over them. Some of the hostages had escaped, sobbing and blood-soaked and delirious.
Inside the gymnasium, the explosion had scattered the hostages against the walls, flung them onto bodies. Most of the survivors described the blast as subsuming them with enormous heat which overtook the air, an endlessly gasping heat. A gun battle erupted between the terrorists and the Russian special forces who were moving in on the building. Some of the townspeople had joined the military, firing their machine guns in shorts and flip-flops.
It was difficult for parents or family to tell who was who. In the smoke and ash, dehydrated and gaunt, stripped to their underwear because of the unbearable heat of the gymnasium, all the children looked the same.
The terrorists herded the survivors who hadn't escaped into the cafeteria, and used the women and children as human shields, firing at Russian troops from behind them, as the women and children screamed, "Don't shoot me, don't shoot me."
Another explosion in the gymnasium. A fire ravaged through the building. The firefight lasted 10 hours.
People drove wounded children in their cars because there weren't enough ambulances. Bodies lined the grass outside, only some covered by blankets. Tiny faces disfigured yet peaceful. In total, 330 people died. 18 Russian soldiers. 186 children. 200 had burns, 100 of them were burned alive.
Today, the building is a ghost of a building, derelict and gutted. A reminder that corrupted minds and poisonous ideas can lash into the real world in the worst imaginable ways.
