GROZNY -- Russian jets and helicopter gunships bombed and strafed the burning Chechen capital Friday, while Grozny's remaining residents tried to flee the city. Some stopped to bury their dead.


Numerous casualties were reported in the second straight daylight raid on the capital of the separatist republic. Black smoke billowed over the city, and the roads were packed with cars leaving Grozny.


In Moscow, the Russian government claimed its ground forces had encircled Grozny, but the main road out of the city to the east was open Friday. Chechen fighters were seen along the rocket-battered highway for several kilometers.


With warplanes flying overhead and artillery booming in the distance, about 30 Chechen men stood in a snow-covered cemetery holding hands and praying as they buried 23-year-old Ruslan Pashayev.


"He was in his car in the center of town driving past a movie theater when a bomb fell -- he was killed by the shrapnel," said his cousin, Yusup Dalayev, 26.


Pashayev's body, wrapped in a white sheet and a carpet, lay on a stretcher before the men put him into the ground.


"We don't understand it, we just don't understand," said Beysultan Isayev, 75, a mourner with a long beard, kind blue eyes and a lambskin cap. "I fought for Russia against the Germans. I'm an invalid," he said, taking off his right glove to show three fingers missing. "And now they're taking away our lives."


At one point, a jet flew low overhead in the clouds, dropping a bomb that exploded with a crack and a flash just a few hundred meters away.


"It's terrible, it's so terrible," Isayev said.


While those civilians who could fled to the hills outside the city, volunteer fighters in green headbands stayed behind to fight. Many of those left in Grozny were ethnic Russians who had nowhere else to go.


A Chechen tank and forces pulling a large artillery piece headed out to stop the Russian advance. The main road out of Grozny to the east was pockmarked by Russian rockets. On the outskirts of the city, some Chechens continued to sell food and other goods.


Chechen President Dzhokhar Dudayev, who has led his republic's drive for independence from Moscow, went on Chechen television Thursday night to urge his people to wage an Islamic holy war. He denounced Moscow's "satanic" offensive against his southern republic.


Dudayev, reportedly directing his republic's military operations from a bomb shelter near the presidential palace in Grozny, said it was better to die with honor in a holy war than be enslaved.


Russia sharply escalated its bombing campaign Thursday, sending warplanes on their first daylight raids. At least two dozen people were killed.


Chechen officials say hundreds have died, but it has been impossible to obtain an accurate count because of the chaos in Grozny. In Moscow, authorities said Friday that 44 Russian soldiers have been killed, with 116 others wounded.


The corpses of several people who had rushed out to treat dead and wounded lay in a pile in Grozny on Thursday after a jet fired a rocket at them.


Russian warplanes continued to batter the city throughout the night and the day Friday.


Dudayev's presidential building, a main target for Russian planes, had shattered windows but was still standing. So were other buildings on the central Freedom Square.


Russian President Boris Yeltsin was working on a plan to end the bloody crisis peacefully, his press service said. But Moscow also clearly was pushing to reassert full control over Chechnya. Russian news reports said Yeltsin was unhappy with the operation, which has become a debacle due to strong resistance, turmoil in the Russian military and overwhelming public opposition.


In a poll released Friday, 75 percent of the respondents said the bomb attacks on Grozny were unnecessary. The survey by the Mneniye polling service interviewed 600 Muscovites from Dec. 18 to 20. It had a margin of error of 3 percent.