THE YOUNG Georgian soldier spat the words out like a bad taste. "Russian pigs," he said angrily, staring at the bloodstained uniforms of his comrades that lay on the ground in front of us.

Soiled with a blue-black stain, the fatigue jackets lay among a heap of other looted items, including bread, toiletries, bottles of beer, medicines, a toaster, boxes of crisps and confectionery.

"Can you believe it? They must have taken these uniforms from wounded or dead men." The Georgian shook his head in disgust, leading me to the Russian military truck that lay shot up by the side of the Gori-Tbilisi highway with more booty spilling out from the back.

The bullet marks peppering the truck's reinforced windscreen had created a crazy pattern like frost on a winter window, but the glass remained unbroken. Perhaps it was this that had kept the two Russian soldiers alive when, drunk and lost, they ran into a hail of gunfire from Georgian soldiers amazed to find them so far off course. Now prisoners of war, the only remaining traces of the Russians were a cigarette lighter and the stench of booze from the vodka glasses and beer bottles strewn across the cabin floor.

According to the Georgians who had ambushed the truck in the village of Igoeti, its two occupants were not regular Russian soldiers but a Cossack and a Chechen from an ethnic irregular militia unit fighting alongside the Russians.

In many ways the story of the truck, its ethnic militiamen crew and the Gori-Tbilisi highway serves as a microcosm of the war here. A story of attack and retreat, killing and looting, followed by the desire for revenge in the complex cauldron of Caucasian separatist politics and a tense military stand-off.

Driving out from the Georgian capital Tbilisi, with its street cafés, monolithic statues and picturesque craggy backdrop, it is at first hard to imagine that such horrors are taking place only a few miles up the road. But out on the highway, crossing the rivers and bridges that lie northwest of the city, the first signs of the latest conflict to wrack Europe begin to appear.

By the roadside, the way is lined with nose-to-tail white Georgian police pick-up trucks, armoured personnel carriers and other vehicles crammed with paramilitaries carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles. On the outskirts of Tbilisi, the Georgian army can be seen too, their trucks laden with ammunition and supplies and hauling large artillery pieces behind them.

Here and there, dazed, exhausted, traumatised, many of the civilians caught up in fighting further up the road have made their way this far on foot. In scenes eerily reminiscent of the wars in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya they sit in the shade by the side of the road, clutching all that remains of their belongings in flimsy carrier bags. As they watch the endless military vehicles roll past, they can only wonder when or if they will ever be able to return to their villages and homes again.

In Tbilisi, schools, nurseries and churches are already filling up with the displaced. In open spaces across the capital, tents are going up to house the stream of those seeking shelter, and queues of new arrivals can be seen outside government buildings in the heart of the city.

On the Gori-Tbilisi highway, I met a woman called Zaiza - she wanted to be identified only by her first name - who had walked with her sister for the best part of 20 kilometres after leaving their village near Shindissi, between Gori and South Ossetia.

"We are pretty much the last to leave," she said, before apologising for her English. "Only the old men and women stayed behind and many are hiding in their cellars, too afraid to move."

Zaiza said that the night before she left, gunfire and explosions could be heard in the surrounding villages, and units of ethnic irregulars were on the rampage.

"We had heard terrible stories from people coming through our village, saying they were slitting the throats of people, shooting young men and stealing all they could, so we had to leave."

Such tales of atrocity are as yet difficult to independently verify. But the consistency of the accounts given by civilians fleeing these areas, and the behaviour of irregular fighters inside Gori itself, witnessed by reporters including myself, suggest they are probably near to the truth.

Not surprisingly, the closer to Gori one gets, the more tense the atmosphere and the more visible build-up of Georgian security forces becomes.

At Igoeti, where the Russian truck full of looted goods had been intercepted, we came across some Georgian special forces units. Wearing Rambo-style headbands and laden with guns and ammunition clips, the soldiers stood by the quad bikes they used to move around off-road in the surrounding hills. Trained by US special forces, most of these Georgian counterparts were reluctant to be photographed.

Other soldiers, meanwhile, were busy unloading ammunition or digging in, using a bulldozer to construct earth embankments, around which they placed some ageing heavy artillery pieces. Most carried Kalashnikovs or rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Some were still wearing desert camouflage uniforms, clearly some of the 2000 Georgian troops hurriedly brought back from Iraq with the help of an American airlift to fight the Russians.

Until now, this road running northwest from Tbilisi has been one of the country's main development projects under President Mikhail Saakashvili, who has dubbed it the "Sukhumi Highway". The nickname is said to derive from the capital of the separatist enclave of Abkhazia, which Saakashvili hoped to bring out from under Russian influence and under Georgian control. Now, just a few miles outside Gori, Saakashvili's grand project is flanked by burned-out armoured personnel carriers and army trucks from the recent fighting, their tracks and tyres blown apart across the asphalt.

At the entrance to Gori there are ominous reminders of other troubled leaders from Georgia and Russia's past, long before Saakashvili was on the political scene. A sign outside the town welcomes visitors to "J Stalin's home county". What, one wonders, would Uncle Joe have made of the latest display of Russian military might, demonstrated by the numerous tanks sitting under camouflage in the woods running adjacent to the main road leading into Gori?

For Georgians this, for the moment at least, is as far as it is possible to go towards the town. Next to a large concrete tower with the word "Gori" in Georgian emblazoned down its side, I found Alexander Lomaia, Georgia's national security chief. He had driven from Tbilisi to assess conditions after a week of fighting.

"There are no Georgian policemen inside the town, I am the only one, and even for me it's difficult enough getting permission from the Russians to enter, why do you think I'm waiting here now?" complained Lomaia.

Waiting nearby were the drivers of three yellow buses, part of a humanitarian Georgian church convoy hoping to take the hundreds of loaves of bread on board to those hungry and afraid still living inside the lawless town.

Where once Gori had a population of 45,000, as few as 5000 of its citizens now remain, holed up and terrified. While most Georgians fled over the last few days, cramming into cars and horse-drawn carts to escape, many of the elderly and infirm, having nowhere else to go, had no choice but to stay behind Driving into central Gori is a nerve-wracking affair. "We cannot guarantee your safety," insisted one Russian sergeant at a checkpoint flanked by two tanks. His mouth full of gold teeth, he resembled a Bond villain.

Asked when he thought he might be going home, he flashed a luminous smile. "When we are ready. There's no rush."

Bond villains aside, inside the town there are more than enough real villains. Around the central plaza almost everything is closed, but this has not stopped roaming bands of irregular militias, who wear distinctive white armbands, from looting almost everything in sight.

While some buildings have been destroyed in the fighting, the damage is not as widespread as might be imagined. But those remaining Georgians who are brave enough to leave their homes talk of their houses being broken into, cars stolen, women kidnapped.

"There is no law here, only men who behave like animals, so what are we to do?" asked 63-year-old Eliso Kuelashvili with a shrug, outside the central administration building where she had gathered with other Georgians.

Like the remaining civilians in Gori, reporters are now subjected to intimidation, robbery and attack at the hands of irregular fighters. Most of these militiamen, it appears, would think nothing of shooting a photographer or cameraman if they dared point a lens in their direction.

In one instance, a Sky News team were robbed of their vehicle and equipment after their driver had a gun pointed at his head. A Norwegian team suffered the same fate.

One Azerbaijani journalist, Idrak Abbasov, told how as reporters talked to Russian soldiers, three Niva vans came along the street full of armed men with white armbands who shot into the air and directly at journalists. The militiamen then stole three of the news teams' cars, and Tamar Urushadze, a correspondent for Georgian public television who was in the middle of a live report, was wounded in the arm by a bullet.

Abbasov himself was at one time held by the militiamen before being released after a Russian commander intervened because the reporter, like him, was from the Azerbaijan capital, Baku.

According to Abbasov, the Russians told him they did not control the town, and that there were irregular fighters there from Abkhazia and Ossetia. One officer told him the militias were "taking revenge on the Georgians doing just what they the Georgians did in Tskhinvali."

One of the militiamen Abbasov encountered also told him: "The Georgians say we are raping women in Gori, but there aren't any here. If they had been here, we'd have done it with pleasure".

Back on the edges of Gori, the sound of desultory gunfire and occasional explosions and smoke in the surrounding hill villages suggested some militiamen might still be going about their gruesome business.

On Friday afternoon, as a trickle of displaced Georgians continued to leave the town, there were tense moments between Russian soldiers and reporters after Major-General Vyacheslav Borisov, the Russian commander in Gori, insisted that Georgian journalists were not welcome because their reports were "little more than propaganda".

Borisov, however, conceded that irregular forces inside Gori were out of control. "Ossetians are killing poor Georgians, this is a problem and we are trying to deal with it," he said.

As Georgian reporters argued with the general, the situation quickly threatened to flare out of control, and Russian soldiers began pushing at members of the media and pointed rifles at them. Some Russians sitting atop their T-72 tanks, watching the situation, seemed amused by the incident, and later tersely answered a few questions put to them.

One told me how he had been brought to Georgia, and Gori, from Russia's volatile Chechnya region.

Some wore American-style body armour marked in Georgian script with the names of their previous owners, but would offer no explanation as to how the flak jackets had come into their possession. As with so many issues concerning conduct on the ground during operations in and around Gori and elsewhere during this conflict, independently verified and corroborated information can be hard to come by.

However, on Friday in Tbilisi, Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch said his organisation had evidence of Russian atrocities.

"We have teams in South Ossetia, and during interviews they had Russian soldiers admit to them that they had killed prisoners," said Garlasco, adding that transcripts and video evidence of the interviews could not yet be made available in case human rights workers and civilians on the ground were put at risk.

Human Rights Watch also accused both Russia and Georgia of using indiscriminate weapons in the conflict.

"The Russians have been using cluster bombs on civilian areas here in Georgia and Gori, and one of our concerns is that the danger is going to remain and it's going to be here for quite a long time," he said.

Garlasco added that his organisation's analysts on the ground had examined craters and shrapnel and spoken to doctors and victims to gather the evidence. They found that RBK-250 cluster bombs, each containing 30 submunitions, had been dropped from Russian aircraft on Gori and the Georgian town of Ruisi, in the Kareli district.

"We have 11 confirmed deaths from cluster bombs and dozens injured by these weapons, that 107 nations agreed in a treaty in Dublin this year should be made illegal," Garlasco pointed out. Neither Russia nor Georgia, he said, had been present when the treaty was signed.

Garlasco warned that even if this conflict were to end in the coming days or weeks, the Georgian government would need to educate civilians in these areas about the threat from cluster munitions.

Yesterday, as military and political claim and counterclaim continued in the region, Russian armour was again on the move.

Only a few hours after I left Gori on Friday, a column of Russian tanks moved towards Tbilisi. The company-sized unit from the 71st Motorised Rifle Regiment drove unchallenged until it ground to a halt a mere 25 miles from the capital, at Igoeti, where only a few days earlier I had spoken with Georgian special forces and saw other soldiers digging in.

It is the closest yet the Russians have come to the heart of Georgia, where flags across the city fly at half-mast.

The US may have demanded a full Russian withdrawal from Georgia but on the ground, Moscow - for the time being at least - clearly has other ideas. Whether the Russians will continue to defy Washington's demand for a pull-out is anyone's guess.

Yesterday, my Georgian driver Zora, who a few days earlier had been optimistic that the truce would lead to a rapid Russian departure, was no longer so sure.

"Twenty-five miles from Tbilisi - who would have believed it?" he asked.

Who indeed?