insisted on escorting us into the ruined provincial capital. Our driver, a Georgian, would be killed, they said, and they'd decide what to do with us afterwards.

It had been a horrific misjudgment on our part to bring a Georgian anywhere near people who had just seen their city destroyed by Georgians.

When I first visited Tskhinvali two years ago, it was a sleepy, boring place with a population of only 10,000, but with a colourful separatist leadership and interesting geopolitical implications. Then, few editors were interested in a place they couldn't pronounce and had never heard of.

Now, by a combination of accident and idiocy, my colleague and I were the first Western journalists to get in after the Georgian bombardment and the Russian counter-attack. There was a scene of devastation ­ - the town was in ruins, the charred remains of Georgian tanks littered the streets and women wailed over the dead.

But the most disturbing thing was the faces of the Ossetian fighters. Our

captor, Alik, who told us he hadn't slept for six days, was a volatile youth, brimming with fury. He told us of the horrors the Georgians had visited on Tskhinvali and promised a devastating counter-offensive and massacre.

"Nobody wanted to help us," Alik yelled. "The UN and the US sat there while we got bombed. It was the Russians who saved us. One more day and this whole place would no longer exist, and nor would any of us."

It took a small miracle to get our Georgian driver out alive. On Tuesday, as the war came to a close, there were reports of massacres in Georgian villages inside the conflict zone ­ Ossetian militias checking the ethnicity of residents and treating all Georgians to a bullet in the head.

It's impossible to verify, but having looked into the dulled eyes of Alik, a man who lost all fear and all humanity during the conflict, the rumours are not hard to believe.