Karaleti, Georgia

The fighting had just ended as we drove into Karaleti, a Georgian village then deep inside Ossetian-held territory. We were being escorted on a makeshift press tour on the back of a Russian military truck, and one of the Italian journalists whistled. "You smell that - that's dead." They'd all smelt it - the stench of rotting human flesh.

Russian officials wanted to present Karaleti to the media as a town under control and to refute what the Georgians were saying about atrocities there. My mind was racing as I smelt the stench. Earlier, I had reached one resident of Karaleti, who asked not to be named, by phone: "There were mostly Ossetians in Karaleti just burning, pillaging and destroying houses. They took out almost 20 of them and burnt a small block of flats. An old woman guided them around as they did their terrible work. And we heard them do it all from the bunkers we were hiding in." As I drove in, I counted the houses she had described.

The truck pulled to a stop at the roadside in Karaleti. A group of Russian conscripts had dug into foxholes, under a grove 200 metres from us. It was days after the ceasefire had been signed and the facts on the ground went square against what President Nicolas Sarkozy of France had intended.

It was silent, the summer sun perfect as a film set. The journalists paired off into the wreckage. Destruction is in the details. It's the bits of torn clothing under slabs of collapsed ceiling, the broken plates under the shards of glass, the buried documents and the torched children's toys under sheets of fallen plaster and brickwork. It was if these homes had been through blenders. Only the press pack was making a noise. "Watch out for cluster bombs .?.?. Watch out."