There is no telephone service, no help line. It is like sitting in a cage. In the Leninsky District, Roza Khasanova is 60 and alone. People live here. For the 7,000 Russian soldiers who garrison the city, standing behind concrete barriers in heavy flak jackets and helmets, there is the terror of holding a hostile civilian population prisoner while the Russian Army tries in vain to capture or defeat the last rebel commanders and their guerrilla forces.
Snipers strafe the checkpoints at night and lay mines on the roads used by military convoys.
Last week, at least five Russian Interior Ministry police officers were killed, three of them when rebels fired a grenade into their car as it escorted a military convoy in the Oktyabrsky District of the city. And the rebels have stepped up a campaign of assassination against Chechens working with Russian authorities to restore order, or who support Akhmad Kadyrov, the Chechen cleric appointed by Moscow last spring to build a postwar government without secessionist aspirations. The pro-Russian police chief of Kargalinskaya was killed, along with his son, in a road ambush. Even Western relief organizations have not been spared. On Jan. 9, the American coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, Kenneth Gluck, was abducted by unidentified armed men as he traveled in convoy with other aid workers and security guards a dozen miles south of the capital near the village of Stariye Atagi.