It Was Christians Targeted In Beslan Russia

RUSSIAN CHRISTIAN CHILDREN HELD HOSTAGE
By Michael Ireland Chief Correspondent, ASSIST News Service September 1, 2004

BESLAN, RUSSIA (ANS) -- Russian Ministries of Wheaton, Illinois, has issued an urgent call to prayer regarding the siege of School #1 today in Beslan, Russia, by Chechen rebels. Approximately 20 rebels are holding 400 people hostage including teachers, children, and some parents.

Hostage children include those of two evangelical workers trained by Russian Ministries and many other children who recently returned from a Russian Ministries' summer camp.

All of the hostages are being held in the gymnasium, with children placed in the windows as human shields. At least eight people have already been killed including a parent of one of the schoolchildren, a girl, and two policeman. Attackers are threatening to blow up the building if police attempt to storm the school.

Russian Ministries sponsors three Evangelism and Church-Planting Centers in this volatile region. At least two local evangelical pastors, brothers Taymuraz Totiev, with five children in the school, and Sergey Totiev, with three children in the school, are urging all Christians of the world to pray with them for the hostage children and their families at this time.

Russian Ministries' director, Genady Terkun, reporting from outside the school grounds, said that many of the children were very excited about the beginning of school and happy because they had just returned from summer camps supported by Russian Ministies where they learned about Jesus.

The seizure of the school took place shortly after celebratory activities launching the beginning of a new schoolyear. Terkun joins the Totiev family in urging all Christians of the world to pray for the physical safety and spiritual strength of all the hostages and the families of 50 other Christian children trapped in the school.

This siege on School #1 in Beslan marks the latest in a series of violent attacks this year in Russia attributed to Chechen terrorists.

On February 6, an explosion ripped through a subway car in Moscow killing 41 people. On May 9, a bomb exploded in a stadium in the Chechen capital of Grozny during a Victory Day ceremony, killing Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov and 24 other people. On August 24, two airplanes crashed within minutes of each other after taking off from the same airport. Ninety people were killed. On August 31, a car bomb went off outside of a Moscow subway stop killing at least 10 people.

************************************************************************************************************ Christian children held hostage in Russia, ministry abounds
Posted on September 3rd: 2004 | GospelCom.com

Russia (MNN) -- Christians are on the ground in Beslan, Russia consoling families involved in the hostage situation. Sergey Rakhuba is with Russian Ministries which has outreach in this region bordering Chechnya.

Rakhuba's been talking with Petr Lumichkin, a pastor who's ministering to the families. "Petr says that all Christians (came) to that area to encourage those ones who need encouragement. They're providing comfort and talking to people."

Sergey and Taymuraz Totiev are brothers who are leading Russian Ministries program in Beslan. Their eight children and 50 other children who were part of the local church were taken hostage together. Rakhuba says while the Totiev's are extremely emotional, God is using them. "The Totiev family, they have all their children, seven to 14 years old, they're all in that school. And, Sergey himself, very much devastated of course, he says 'I don't know why God allowed it to happen', but then he's talking to people that are around him, like him, fathers and mothers. He is sharing his faith."

Rakhuba says many of the families involved have many questions. "Some people blame even God, saying 'why couldn't God protect the little ones?' This is an opportunity to tell them about God and the hope in Him and to communicate the Gospel to them."

Explosions Rock Besieged Russian School; Christian Children and Missionaries Among Hostages

New York Post
WHEN THE KILLERS COME FOR THE KIDS
BY RALPH PETERS

September 4, 2004 -- THE mass murder of children revolts the human psyche. Herod sending his henchmen to massacre the infants of Bethlehem haunts the Gospels. Nothing in our time was crueler than what the Germans did to children during the Holocaust. Slaughtering the innocents violates a universal human taboo. Or a nearly universal one. Those Muslims who preach Jihad against the West decided years ago that killing Jewish or Christian children is not only acceptable, but pleasing to their god when done by "martyrs."

It isn't politically correct to say this, of course. We're supposed to pretend that Islam is a "religion of peace." All right, then: It's time for Muslims to stand up for the once-noble, nearly lost traditions of their faith and condemn what Arab and Chechen terrorists and blasphemers did in the Russian town of Beslan.

If Muslim religious leaders around the world will not publicly condemn the taking of children as hostages and their subsequent slaughter — if those "men of faith" will not issue a condemnation without reservations or caveats — then no one need pretend any longer that all religions are equally sound and moral.

Islam has been a great and humane faith in the past. Now far too many of its adherents condone, actively or passively, the mass murder of school kids. Instead of condemnations of the Muslim "Jihadis" responsible for butchering more than 200 women and children in cold blood, we will hear spiteful counter-accusations about imaginary atrocities supposedly committed by Western militaries.

Well, the cold fact is that Western soldiers, whether Americans, Brits, Russians or Israelis, do not take hundreds of children hostage, then shoot them in cold blood while detonating bombs in their midst. The Muslim world can lie to itself, but we need lie no longer.

The tragedy in southern Russia occurred thousands of miles from the United States, but, in essence, that massacre happened next door. The parents, teachers and students kept for days without water or food in a sweltering school building before being butchered were our children, our sisters, our wives, our parents.

The mass hostage situation wasn't about Chechen rebels (and at least 10 Arabs) opposing the Russian government. It was a continuation of the universal struggle between good and evil. And there is no doubt which side is evil, scorned though the word may be by our own elite.

How can any human being with a shred of conscience dismiss what occurred in that school as anything less than evil?

The attack in Beslan wasn't about Russia's brutal incompetence in Chechnya — as counter-productive as Moscow's grim heavy-handedness may have been. It was about religious bigotry so profound that the believer can hold a gun to a child's head, pull the trigger and term the act "divine justice."

We will hear complaints that the Russian special forces should have waited — even after the terrorists began shooting children. Negotiations are the heroin of Westerners addicted to self-delusion. Who among us would have waited when he or she saw fleeing children cut down by automatic weapons? The urge to protect children is as primal as any impulse we ever feel.

Make no mistake: No blame attaches to the Russians for the massacre at that school. The guilt is entirely upon the Islamic extremists who have led the religion they claim to cherish into the realms of nightmare.

There will be repercussions. Having suffered the hijacking and destruction of two passenger jets, a deadly bombing at a Moscow subway station and a massacre in a primary school all in less than two weeks, the Kremlin will have learned to rue the day it imagined that there was anything to gain by opposing American efforts against terrorists, whether Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein.

As they inevitably do, the terrorists reminded the world of their heartless barbarism. Even if France manages to beg the release of its kidnapped journalists in Iraq, it has begun to sense its vulnerability. And all Europeans with a vestige of sense will recognize that the school seizure in Russia could easily repeat itself in Languedoc or Umbria, Bavaria or Kent.

An attack on children is an attack on all of humanity.

No matter what differences Western states discover to divide them, the terrorists will bring us together in the end. Their atrocities expose all wishful thinking for what it is.

A final thought: Did any of those protesters who came to Manhattan to denounce our liberation of 50 million Muslims stay an extra day to protest the massacre in Russia? Of course not.

The protesters no more care for dead Russian children than they care for dead Kurds or for the hundreds of thousands of Arabs that Saddam Hussein executed. Or for the ongoing Arab-Muslim slaughter of blacks in Sudan. Nothing's a crime to those protesters unless the deed was committed by America.

The butchery in Russia was a crime against humanity. In every respect. Was any war ever more necessary or just than the War on Terror?

And what will terror's apologists say when the killers come for their own children?

Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World."

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1207290/posts?q=1&&page=101

Boy who begged for water was bayoneted
The Sunday Times (UK) ^ | 9/5/04 | Peter Conradi

Posted on 09/04/2004 10:20:50 PM EDT by saquin

AFTER more than 24 hours in the sweltering heat of the school gymnasium in Beslan, one of the boys trapped inside could not take it any longer, writes Peter Conradi.

Summoning up his courage, he approached a hostage taker with a bayonet fixed to his assault rifle and asked him for a drink. It was probably the worst error that he could have made.

“Instead of giving him water, he drove his bayonet through the boy’s body,” said Stanislav Tsarakhov, 10, another captive standing nearby. “I don’t know if he died.”

Details of the incident emerged as children who escaped the siege described how their captors had deliberately deprived them of food and water, repeatedly firing guns into the ceiling to try to silence them. “The hostage takers would hold their machineguns to your temple and said that if there was a lot of noise, they would shoot everyone,” said a girl, who gave her name only as Zalina.

Diana Gadzhinova, 14, who also survived the siege, said that one of the greatest hardships had been the lack of food and drink.

“When we were let out to go to the lavatory, some children would run into a room where there were plants in pots and they would eat them,” she said.

“Others would hide the plants in their underwear and share them with their friends. But the hunger was not as bad as the thirst. Some children couldn’t take it and would urinate into their hand and drink.”

At another point, Gadzhinova said, they were all ordered to lie down. There were so many people packed into the gym that they had to lie on top of each other. “The gunmen warned that if there was an arm or a leg in their way, they would shoot at it without warning,” she said.

For Arsen Khasigov, 11, trapped with his mother, the worst thing was the sleep deprivation. “They kept us awake all the time,” he said. “They would pour our urine on our heads.”

Also horrific was the role played by two “black widows” — Chechen women who turned to terrorism to avenge husbands and brothers killed during the Kremlin’s military clampdown on the breakaway republic.

According to accounts from some captives, the women blew themselves up in the first hours of the siege, killing several men near them. Last night no trace of their bodies had been found.

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