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GORI, Georgia-Russia said it had driven Georgian forces from the capital of South Ossetia on Saturday as part of an operation to force Georgia to accept peace in its breakaway region."Tactical groups have fully liberated Tskhinvali from the Georgian military and have started pushing Georgian units beyond the zone of peacekeepers responsibility," Tass quoted Ground Forces commander Vladimir Boldyrev as saying.Russian warplanes widened the offensive outside the immediate conflict zone to include strikes deep inside Georgia on the second day of fighting.Jets carried out up to five raids on mostly military targets around the Georgian town of Gori, close to the conflict zone in South Ossetia, a Reuters reporter at the scene said. But he saw at least one bomb hit an apartment, killing five people. Russia said the death toll in the two-day conflict had hit 1,500 and was rising, prompting warnings from President Dmitry Medvedev of a humanitarian catastrophe that Moscow was determined to halt by force."Our peacekeepers and reinforcement units are currently running an operation to force the Georgian side to (agree to) peace," Russian news agencies quoted Medvedev as saying at a meeting with Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov. "They are also responsible for protecting the population. That's what we are doing now," Medvedev added. Russian troops poured into South Ossetia on Friday, hours after Georgia launched a large-scale offensive aimed at restoring control over the province lost after a war in the early 1990s.To read more go to:
As in the days of Noah...
